Faced with a rapidly growing health crisis, the British authorities – equipped with little scientific understanding of the disease, and under pressure from a powerful industrial lobby – made a fatal mistake. Because scrapie had never been definitively linked to human disease, they assumed that infected cows were also innocuous.
面对迅速发酵的健康危机，英国当局——对该病几无科学理解并处于强大的行业游说压力下——犯下了致命的错误。由于痒病从未在人身上发现，他们认为被传染的牛也不会有什么威胁。