From Steve Gerrish
Your editorial “Uranium-burgers”
(20 January, p 3)
hits the nail on the head.
I can still hear John Gummer when he was Britain’s minister of agriculture
saying “there is no evidence that…” This was in the 1980s when BSE struck. I
was astonished when today’s government began to spout the same reassurances
about depleted uranium (DU).
So I started thinking about why the BSE lesson has not been learned. If it
were the same firm facing depleted DU that faced BSE, I’m sure we would get a
precautionary approach and honest statements from ministers (for example, “there
is no evidence because it looks like no one has been asked to research the
precise effects of low-level inhalation or ingestion of tiny DU dust particles
and we’ll get onto it right away…”). But it’s a different firm now, and I
don’t mean a Labour government instead of a Conservative one. The firm that
mishandled BSE was the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The firm
handling DU is the Ministry of Defence, and the senior civil servants there will
not have had their fingers burnt, so they’re making the same mistakes when
advising ministers as their MAFF colleagues did.
Of course, scientists provide advice, and I suspect that one of the things
that allows this kind of poor thinking in government is that most senior civil
servants still have no science education to speak of.
Kidlington, Oxfordshire
