BSE report was 'most exacting'

Valuable lessons in assessing scientific evidence have emerged from a major report on mad cow disease, retired British senior judge Lord Nicholas Phillips says.

Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers (75) is a former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, who retired late last year as president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

Lord Phillips, of London, has been visiting the University of Otago Law School recently as the New Zealand Law Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2013.

And this week he gave the school's annual F.W. Guest Memorial Lecture in Dunedin, focusing on human rights-related legal matters.

He has previously conducted a major inquiry into the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease, in the UK, resulting in a report issued in 2000.

The inquiry reviewed the emergence of BSE and new variant CJD, the related disease in humans, and the official response, until March 1996.

The inquiry had ''almost killed me'', he said in an interview.

''It was the most exacting thing I've ever done.''

This highly demanding and complex but also interesting task had included examining Government performance over a considerable period, including the actions of about 200 politicians and officials.

''I felt a sense of enormous relief [after completing the report],'' he said.

He found the British Government had taken the ''wrong approach'' but had not lied about BSE.

Lord Phillips understood the report was still used by civil servants in Britain, and still contributed to public policy.

BSE had caused a ''harrowing fatal disease'' for humans, with more than 80 people thought to be dead or dying from it by the year 2000, the report found.

The UK Government had believed the risks posed by BSE to humans were ''remote'' and had sought to prevent ''an alarmist overreaction''.

But the public felt ''betrayed'' when the Government had announced in 1996 that BSE had probably been transmitted to humans. Lord Phillips said there was now much greater acceptance in official circles that the absence of evidence was not evidence of absence, and that sweeping safety reassurances could prove ill-founded.

He acknowledged there were several medical conditions - including mesothelioma, a form of cancer usually caused by asbestos exposure - in which few signs of ill health were evident during an onset of many years.

But this was followed by a devastating and often fatal illness. Lord Phillips is president of the Qatar International Court in Doha.

- john.gibb@odt.co.nz