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Keir Waddington, The bovine scourge: meat, tuberculosis and public health, 1850-1914, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2006, pp. ix, 226, £50.00, $85.00 (hardback 1-18483-193-7).
The discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its link to human brain diseases in the 1980s dramatically highlighted issues relating to the safety of meat and the relationship between animal and human disease. Yet these issues were not new. As Keir Waddington points out, concerns about the effects of this disease on humans were a major public health issue a hundred years before.
Waddington uses medical and veterinary texts to examine the scientific understanding of the transmission of bovine tuberculosis to humans. He investigates the role of the German bacteriologist Robert Koch, whose identification of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 confirmed the previously suspected danger of consuming products of diseased livestock, and discusses the impact of Koch's pronouncement at the British Congress on Tuberculosis in 1901 that bovine tuberculosis was different from the human variety and did not threaten human health. The main effect of this pronouncement appeared to have been a heightened determination in Britain to prove such a link, leading to what Waddington calls the "British model" of the disease. However, the danger of eating tuberculous meat was...