Veterinary, Medical and Political Expertise in an Emerging Zoonosis: The Dynamics of Decision Making during the BSE/vCJD Episode, 1981-2004

This thesis explores the forms, sources, and functions of expertise, and how these both shaped and were shaped by the British government’s responses to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) between 1984 and 2004. Through examination of evidence of the previously unstudied papers of the office of the Chief Veterinary Officer, archival materials associated with the Phillips Inquiry, original oral histories, national and local press coverage and policy papers, it demonstrates that BSE was significant in determining the nature of expertise in deciding and implementing policy, and that the conditions of the episode allowed the construction of novel forms of expertise. It also extends the current scholarship on expertise to consider its impact on variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). This thesis explores the complex dynamic between the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, its veterinary research offshoot, the Central Veterinary Laboratory, in informing the initial response to BSE between 1981 and 1987. It examines the definition and nature of scientific expertise in the consultation of expert independent groups formed to advise on BSE policy after it became a notifiable disease in 1988. It then moves to consider the performance of expertise by Official Veterinary Supervisors in implementing BSE policy in the slaughterhouse, and how the nature of this expertise was informed by the particularities of the BSE epidemic in the late 1990s. Moreover, BSE was influential in renewing political and scientific interest in the study of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs), invigorating TSE research in the UK in the form of the introduction of the ‘prion disease’ concept at the turn of the twenty-first century. This thesis therefore examines the impact of changing conceptualisation on the official treatment of certain forms of expertise in CJD research institutions, the CJD Surveillance Unit and Prion Disease Group. In doing so, the thesis invites historians of science to reconsider their conceptions of established causative agents of disease, contributing to a more expansive understanding of infectious pathways and proofs.