BSE: Risk, Science and Governance

A highly sophisticated analysis of the BSE crisis that argues for a crisis in science and governance. Policy decisions are perceived to derive from scientific considerations, but the scientific basis is frequently much less certain and complete than the policy statements imply. The book's three main questions relate to how BSE policy was decided, how to understand policy-making institutions and procedures, and how to avoid the failures of the BSE saga. The authors conclude that the ways in which science-based policy decisions were takes were inadequate, inappropriate and unsustainable. One can only hope that the book is compulsory reading in the upper echelons of the agricultural civil service since very similar charges have been levelled against the handling of FMD - where lessons from fifty years ago were ignored and mistakes simply repeated.