We had an epidemic in Britain.

There were disinfectant pits to drive through whenever you went pretty much anywhere out of a city. You feared to eat pretty much any meat through that period - we ate almost nothing but New Zealand lamb and (expensive) French poultry through that period.

In the end, almost the entire stock across the whole of Britain was destroyed. I remember reading the death toll in a newspaper, broken down by farm - the north of England was decimated, Wales decimated, lowland Scotland decimated, Cornwall, decimated.

New stocks came in and we have much better meat, generally, today.

It was a sad and harrowing time. My parents live in rural Northumberland (north of England, bordering Scotland) and we used to travel up via Carlisle to visit. Carlisle had a thriving cattle market which dominated the town physically. For years that lay empty and unused, finally to be demolished. Less grand in stature, but equally important to the town where my parents live, the cattle market lay empty for years. There is a new hospital on the grounds now.

British farming never really recovered.

It's a difficult one to put a figure on, given that the human form of BSE (vCJD) came afterwards.

From memory, around 1996 the first links were made between vCJD and BSE. I think the first human death as a direct result of eating BSE infected beef was around that year. By 2000, the bovine epidemic was all but cleared up - by almost total extermination of the bovine population in the country. That was a harrowing time, especially when the farms close and visible to where I lived had to have giant bonfires.

I seem to recall that it jumped to sheep shortly afterwards - maybe 2003?

Anyway, back to vCJD - the difficulty is linking it and putting a timeframe around it. BSE had been present in Britain's bovine population for many years prior to the first case of vCJD that could be directly linked. Back to the late 1980s when BSE first started to affect cattle. I think they put 1989 as the start of the epidemic and 2000 as the end. vCJD was first noticed and linked to the BSE epidemic in 1996 and cases continued there after.

Once BSE had been removed and new clean stocks brought in and bred up, I guess cases of vCJD declined and tailed off thereafter.

Human casualties were small, but a significant figure.

I can find newspaper articles citing 48, 55, 74 and so on through the year 2000 - small, but significant numbers.

One amusing tale was back in 1990 where one of our Ministers was so keen to show that British beef was NOT a problem fed his children burgers in front of the watching cameras: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/369625.stm

We also had a health scare in the late 1980s when the Ministry for Health dropped the ball and managed to get salmonella into the food chain through eggs. This did had one very positive effect, though - organic egg production flourished, the outdoor reared wave followed.

I read something on one of the many forums I frequent ... to paraphrase ...

We've done something seriously wrong when we feed animals which are used to eating rubbish (pigs) real food and animals which like nothing more than just grass (cows), rubbish.

... or a hand whisk. You get a workout, too! Good core, holding the bowl in a headlock and go like the clappers, swapping hands to even up the activity.