From Graham Houghton
The news that there may be no connection between BSE and vCJD is hugely
welcome, and if confirmed would be an enormous relief to those of us who spent
time in Britain during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But I’m particularly interested in Venters’s opinion that sheep scrapie never
jumped the species barrier into us humans. Why, then, did my
mother—brought up in the 1920s in an agricultural community—warn me
in the 1950s never to drink the sparklingly clean Pennine water from the streams
around our home lest I get “sheep staggers”?
Adelaide, South Australia
