Letter: Letter

From Derek Bradbury

Your coverage of BSE and vCJD
(4 November, p 3 to
p 9) did not assess the
crucial scientific question for human health: is eating BSE-infected meat the
cause of vCJD? Instead you make bald statements that it does.

The Phillips report contains good coverage of the question, so far as it can
be answered at present. Although the current consensus favours a causal link
this is still an unquantified probabilistic judgement. The linking mechanism is
unknown and we are still in the realm of indirect inference.

It would also have been helpful to have included an assessment of the related
question about openness on matters of risk. It is no good saying, as you do in
your Editorial
(p 3), that everyone should “become comfortable with the notions
of uncertainty and risk”. As a statistician I am only too aware of how hard this
is even for those with training.

There is plenty of scientific evidence that, in general, people handle such
notions badly and are pretty uncomfortable with them. This does not excuse
secrecy but it suggests that debate is much needed on when and how to publicise
information on risky practices, not least with regard to how the news media
exaggerate risks because it helps sell their product.

Andy Coghlan writes: The intention was to say that infected meat is possibly
the cause of vCJD, but the word “possibly” was lost.

Budleigh Salterton, Devon