But his children are young adults so the question doesn't really apply." (Press Secretary) Stephen Dorrell, Secretary of State for Health: "I eat beef and my young children are eating beef."Michael Portillo, Secretary of State for Defence: "My family will continue to eat beef as part of a balanced diet."Virginia Bottomley, Heritage Secretary: Said she had visited her local McDonald's in Old Kent Road yesterday with her husband and had eaten a beefburger.John Gummer, Secretary of State for the Environment: "Beef will still be served. The thing to remember is, we don't recycle human remains," said one scientist yesterday, weighing up the potential for an epidemic. That would imply that the new, BSE-induced CJD required a high dose and only affected certain susceptible individuals - meaning that the number of cases will remain comparatively low.Significantly, Rob Will, head of the CJD Surveillance Unit, which spotted the new trend in CJD cases in February, told the Independent yesterday: "We do not have a large number of suspect CJD cases in the pipeline."It could be that BSE is not easily passed on to humans. But though it must have had an incubation period, and the number of cases of BSE did not peak for another three years, the number of cats diagnosed as having FSE has not increased radically, but has remained fairly steady."It could be that the reason for that is that we don't recycle cat offal to feed to cats That was done with cows - and the BSE epidemic followed. That first appeared in cats in 1989, almost certainly from eating infected cattle remains in food. If these 10 people represent the typical proportion of the population who will contract CJD, many thousands of people could succumb in the next five years, having eaten infected material between 1983 and 1989.However, the case of FSE may be a better guide.

This, say the scientists, implies that the victims were exposed to the disease agent in about 1983-84, when the BSE epidemic was just beginning. They want to see what the chances are that the 10 CJD cases which alerted them to a possible link with BSE were the tip of a slowly surfacing iceberg - or a statistical blip. "We are on tenterhooks about the scenario that might emerge," said one member of SEAC, the independent expert committee, yesterday. The nation may know by the end of this year whether it faces an epidemic of people suffering from Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD) triggered by eating BSE-infected beef in the 1980s. Government scientists are urgently re-examining their original risk assessments of the dangers posed by eating BSE-infected beef products. It was another three months before the measure was introduced in Scotland.Offals were thought to be the most likely route for infection. But even this measure was incomplete as cattle up to six months old were exempted because it was thought that they represented less of a hazard.Research has shown that BSE is transmissible to mice from the intestines of young cattle, but it was not until July 1994 that the ban was extended to cattle under six months old..

It was hardly an inducement to report cases of BSE and it was not until February 1990 that full compensation was introduced.It took until December 1988 for the Government to implement Southwood's recommendation that milk from infected animals should be destroyed, and it was not until April 1989 that they acted on the suggestion that a research committee be set up to discover the full extent of the threat to animals and humans.On 13 November 1989 - almost 18 months after concern was first expressed about the possible inclusion of cattle brains in foods such as meat pies - bovine offals such as brains, spinal cords, gut, tonsils, thymus and spleen were banned for human consumption. There has been a lot of circumstantial evidence of the benefit of vitamin E, but this is the first time anyone has come up with a clear-cut answer."Although it is early days, I will be recommending that patients with angina and those who are at risk of heart disease should be given supplementary vitamin E at a high dose."Vitamin E is found in vegetable and fish oils. Olives, olive oil, nuts, avocados and oily fish, like tuna and mackerel, all contain large amounts of the vitamin.The British Medical Journal also carries further evidence for the benefits of alcohol against heart disease, and claims that a range of drinks, not just wine, has a protective effect.Previous research has suggested that substances found in wine - particularly red wine - known as bioflavenoids, made it more effective than beer or spirits at reducing the risk of death from heart disease.But American scientists who have reviewed major studies, say that all alcoholic drinks are linked with a lower risk.Dr Eric Rimm and colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, reviewed a series of previous heart disease studies. It is believed that BSE resulted from cattle eating feed containing offal from sheep infected with scrapie.The third measure resulting from the Southwood recommendations showed the Government's half-hearted commit- ment to tackling the problem - on 8 August, it announced that infected cattle should be slaughtered but that farmers would only get 50 per cent compensation. In June that year, the committee recommended that infected animals be destroyed, that milk from such animals be disposed of, and that BSE be made a notifiable disease, which meant farmers were required by law to report cases to Maff.On 21 June 1988, BSE became a notifiable disease and on 18 July the feeding of cattle or sheep protein to other cattle or sheep was banned.

The first case of BSE was discovered in 1985 but it was more than four years before the cattle products thought most likely to act as pathways for the disease were banned for human consumption. That crucial period provided a crucial window for infection to pass from cattle to humans. Meanwhile, the number of cattle with BSE increased, one independent estimate putting the total in Britain between 1981 and 1988 at 675,000. BSE was first officially diagnosed by the Central Veterinary Laboratory, a government agency which comes under the umbrella of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Maff) in November 1986. But it was not made public until the following year when tests began to see whether BSE could be transmitted to infected cattle's offspring and to other species.In April 1988, the Government appointed a committee under Sir Richard Southwood to assess the significance of BSE. A 30-year-old single man with children, for example, is 16 per cent more likely to buy meat than if he is childless.The ESRC researchers warn the meat industry that it is not factors such as price or level of income but consumer attitude that is increasingly affecting meat-eating habits.Dr Trevor Young, one of the authors of the report, also undertook a survey on whether the bovine spongiform enceph-alopathy scares of 1989/90 had had a significant effect on beef consumption."There now seems to be a popular perception that the consumption of beef has declined significantly and permanently as a result of BSE," he concluded.The researchers found that the market share of beef was "relatively constant" until the end of the Eighties, but there was "a substantial fall and an accelerating downward trend thereafter".In order to work out whether public perception of BSE had any connection with the fall in sales, the researchers looked at the amount of media coverage.National newspapers in the United Kingdom published 1,565 articles on BSE between 1989 and 1993, of which 9 per cent were published by the end of 1989 and 79 per cent by the end of 1990."We estimate that media concern about BSE caused a "transitory" loss of 5.7 percentage points in the market share of beef [ie from approximately 30.7 per cent to 25 per cent of the expenditure on meat] in the second quarter of 1990, the quarter in which most articles referring to BSE were printed," Dr Young said."We further estimate that the long-run effect is less but still substantial, with a sustained decline of some 4.5 percentage points in the share of beef by the end of 1993.". Those who continue to buy red meat include the unemployed, the retired and those who live in cities.However, there are indications that people tire of a vegetarian diet as they get older - a 40-year-old man is more likely to choose a steak or a chicken wing than a 30-year-old man is Parenthood also boosts the probability of buying meat. Sales of meat substitutes - for example, tofu, TVP and Quorn - increased by 279 per cent over the period 1988 to 1991, reaching a value of pounds 25m a year.The more educated the household, the less likely it is to eat meat.