Whoever said that capitalism is rational? The German government put its beef industry in the doldrums for two years by introducing safety measures that simply scared the public off of beef - but there was no BSE in German herds (and in any event, there is no proven relationship between BSE and CJD).
Here are some other irrational policies pursued by capitalist governments:
Jailing more than a million American Promoting the ethnic disintegration of Yugoslavia The Holocaust Concorde
If the BSE-CJD connection wasn't the 38th example of food/health panics in the UK then like you, I would have assumed that the connection was a rational one. But coming after the imaginary Salmonella in the eggs scare, the necrotising fasciitis scare, and all the others (right back to the tumour in the Whale meat and the head of the milk marketing board bathing in the milk), it bears looking at critically.
With his usual rapier-like wit, Doug challenges
>Is the Journal of the American Medical Association part of the conspiracy?
><http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v281n24/abs/jcn90000.html>:
quoting
>"In the
>United Kingdom, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease probably
>resulted from the ingestion of BSE-contaminated processed beef."
Try reading the quote again. Does it occur to you that of the three sources that you have cited against my proposition that there is no proven link between BSE and CJD, not one says that there is? I wonder why? Could it be because there is no proven link between CJD and BSE?
If your broker had said to you that IT stock would probably rise, he wouldn't have been lying, would he? It doesn't follow that IT stock always rises. Similarly the belief expressed by the author of the JAMA piece that BSE was probably the source is not the same thing as a demonstration that it is the source, any more than belief in God is the same thing as proof of God.
-- James Heartfield