False alarm on beef

Renewed fears that beef causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease have been allayed by French government researchers. Alarm bells rang earlier this month after Stanley Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco showed that mouse muscles could harbour rogue prions, the abnormal proteins that cause BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and vCJD in people. Concerned that disease prions might also be present in meat, researchers at AFSSA, France’s food safety watchdog, examined muscle tissue from several animals infected with prion diseases, including a cow with BSE. The results were negative.