No scare of recent times became briefly more famous than 'Y2K': the great panic in the late 1990s over the 'Millennium Bug'. Reinforced by growing speculation in the media, predictions as to what might happen could scarcely have been more apocalyptic. There would be massblackouts as power stations failed. There would be widespread economic breakdown as millions of computer systems seized up. Trains and vehicles would become involved en masse in fatal collisions. Airliners would crash out of the sky. It was even suggested that nuclear rockets might inadvertently be unleashed. Governments and businesses devoted colossal resources to preparations for the 'Millennium moment'. Computer consultants had never known such a bonanza, as business corporations queued up for their services, nowhere more than in the financial hubs of London and New York.

In December 1997 more than 60 business leaders and academics, including the chairmen of some of Britain's biggest multinational companies, such as Unilever, British Aerospace, GEC, Lloyds Bank, and Marks and Spencer, wrote to the governments of Britain, the USA and Canada, to express their 'acute concern'. They warned that, unless urgent action was taken, there would be 'financial chaos and disruption to health and education'. They claimed that 'malfunctions in critical areas such as air traffic control and defence may put safety at risk'.

While we were staying in London at the time, an internal report for Britain's National Health Service predicted that the failure of 10 per cent of the electronic equipment in Britain's hospitals could cause the deaths of between 600 and 1,500 people. Tony Blair, still enjoying the hubris of his first year in office as Britain's prime minister, on 22 January 1998, sounded what was called a '100-week Millennium Bug alarm'. We have 'just one hundred working weeks', he said, to tackle 'one of the most serious problems facing British business and the global economy today. Its impact cannot be overestimated'. Under his government's 'Action 2000' campaign, 370 million pound would be set aside to tackle problems with computer equipment in Britain's public sector. He wanted every branch of the British government to be put on red alert to prepare for the fateful moment.

In March Lord Renwick, chairman of a parliamentary pressure group on the problem, estimated that the cost of remedying the Millennium Bug to the NHS alone might now be as high as 600 million pound. One of Blair's advisers, Robin Guenier, said 'we are facing an emergency the same magnitude as a war'. In a further speech, Blair quoted a letter he had received from the chairman of Unilever warning that the bug 'could cause a worldwide recession. (Published on 10 Downing Street website, 30 March 1998.)

A similar widely quoted prediction was made by one of Wall Street's most respected economists. Edward Yardeni of Deutsche Bank gave odds of 60 per cent that the bug would cause a year-long recession to match that which had followed the fourfold rise in oil prices in 1973-4.In April, at a seminar at Stanford University, a member of the economics faculty, Michael Boskin, estimated 'the costs of fixing the millennium bug' at 'between $600 billion and $1.6 trillion globally, spread over several years'.Emeritus professor William Miller, a founder of Stanford's computer science department, told the conference that the total cost of solving the problem in the USA alone might be greater than the entire cost of the Vietnam War. (Reported on Stanford News website, 30 April 1998. )

It had certainly by now become widely accepted that the total worldwide cost of Y2K would be between $300 billion and $600 billion. Putting 'Millennium Bug' and '$300 billion' into Google, which produces numerous pages of references.

By June, excitably informing his audience that there were now 'less than 56 million seconds before the year 2000 date change', the BBC's science correspondent warned that it was 'already too late' to fix all the computers that would be affected. (BBC News website, 16 June 1989).

So the predictions of doom were to continue, for 18 months. Yet when the great moment came, virtually nothing happened.In Japan an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant two minutes after midnight. In Australia a number of bus ticket machines failed to operate. In the USA 150 slot machines ceased to work at Delaware race tracks. Otherwise, those companies and countries that had done nothing fared no worse than those which had spent an alleged $300,000,000,000 on preparing for the end of civilization.Y2K had turned out to be little more than a  very expensive scare. But at least it enabled thousands of computer engineers to payoff their mortgages.

But what are the characteristics of scares like the above or the Dioxin scare in Belgium to be coverred in P.2, we can come upwith at least seven examples.

1. A problem becomes exaggerated, often by extrapolating from it to include something else. What magnifies it into a scare may well come when this becomes erroneously linked to something with which it has little or no connection. On salmonella poisoning, that drew media attention among others in 1989, there was a real problem over its unexplained rise in the 1980s. The scare developed when this was wrongly attributed to eggs. Equally genuine was the problem of BSE (mad cow dissease) in cattle. The scare only took off when eating beef was linked to CJD.

2. The scare ussually is centred on somethingto which anyone might be exposed (e.g. eggs, beef, the mass-malfunctioning of position to have commissioned such a study were probably too embarrassed by the anti-climax to have wanted to do so.

3. There ussually is a strong element of uncertainty. Its new and mysterious, providing an opportunity for almost unlimited speculation as to its disastrous consequences (e.g. avian flu, BSE, the Millennium Bug).

4. The threat must seem plausible, however ill-founded it later turns out to have been. For this it is necessary that some scientists or 'experts' are seen to endorse it, and to produce seemingly convincing evidence as to why it should be believed. The most significant of these may well be scientists advising the government, as in the cases of 'salmonella in eggs' and BSE. But it is also important that the scare should be endorsed by outsiders who can be portrayed as 'independent experts', even if their scientific background in no way qualifies them to pronounce on the subject matter of the scare (e.g. Professor Lacey, whose expertise was resistance to antibiotics).

5. Crucial to the promotion of any full-blown scare is the role of the media, as they try to raise its profile as 'pushers' in their own right. This provides journalists with an intoxicating sense of self-importance, as they imagine they are exposing some fearful hidden threat to the public good. But the media also need to be able to quote and project those scientific 'experts' to give their reports 'authority'. As 'pushers' the journalists and the 'experts' thus develop a symbiotic relationship, each needing the other in their efforts to 'imagine the worst' in inflating the scare's potentially disastrous consequences.None of this on its own, however, is enough to bring the scare to the tipping point. Up to now by far the most effective 'blocker' of any scare is the government. So long as official spokesmen continue to deny a scare, it is virtually impossible for the 'pushers' to carry the day.

6.  The tipping point ussually comes when the government f admits that there is a problem. For having previously been a 'blocker', the government is thus likely to be accused of a cover-up. But this means that the scare is now out of its control. Ministers and officials therefore wish to be seen to be acting firmly in response to the chaos they have unleashed. This is where the real damage begins, because invariably they overreact. Their regulatory response creates social and economic havoc, at enormous cost. Having misdiagnosed the problem in the first place, they have now been panicked into producing 'remedies' which are irrelevant.

7. Sooner or later the scare reaches its final stage, when evidence emerges to show how the threat had been wildly exaggerated. But the regulatory response has now become so enshrined in the system that it usually proves very difficult to remove. And by now the media's interest has usually shifted elsewhere.
It is also centred however on what we may call a 'nyktomorph' or 'night shape' (from the Greek words nyktos, night, and morph-, form or shape).Similar to world-wide conspiracy theories ,some shape glimpsed indistinctly in the darkness might be a bear (or a burglar, a ghost or whatever), is that our brain is not being given enough information to resolve the image correctly. The very fact that we cannot see it clearly teases our imagination into seeing it as something much more significant than it is. Because initially not enough is known about the true nature of the supposed threat, it plays on people's fears, becoming inflated out of all proportion to its reality. Only as more information becomes available does it become possible to see that it was only a harmless bush all along.

As we have seen, for any fully-fledged scare to take off, it requires the participation of particular groups of 'pushers'. These include scientists, the media, politicians and officials. Also influential in egging on the scare may be non-governmental organizations and lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, cancer charities or anti-asbestos campaigners.

The precise part played by each of these groups in creating the momentum that can bring a scare to its tipping point may vary. But one contribution that is invariably crucial is that of the scientists. One factor any scare needs to be successful is plausibility something which in our modern world only scientists have the authority to provide.

At the heart of every scare we have looked at has been a group of scientists or technical experts making a wrong or exaggerated guess on the basis of what eventually turned out to be inadequate data. Usually they have put two things together, and then guessed wrongly that one was the cause of the other.

When in 1984 Bernard Rowe and his colleagues at the PHLS in the UK were confronted with a rise in salmonella poisoning in humans and a rise in salmonella contamination in poultry, they jumped to the conclusion that the two must be linked and that hens must be laying eggs that were already internally contaminated. When John Pattison and his colleagues at SEAC, charged with investigating BSE,  were confronted with what they imagined to be a new form of human brain disease, they guessed that the first might be the cause of the second.

When scientists such as Irving Selikoff discovered in the early 1960's that the amphibole forms of asbestos were responsible for a large number of deaths, they concluded that a mineral with quite different properties, just because it also happened to pass under the same general name, must be equally dangerous. When various scientists discovered that COz and global temperatures had both been rising, they became convinced that one must have been the cause of the other, despite the fact that earlier, while COzlevels had for several decades been rising, temperatures had fallen.
Once this initial false step has been made comes the second stage, when those persuaded by the thesis develop such an obsessive interest in pursuing it that this blinkers their vision, leading them to overlook any evidence that might contradict it.

So convinced became the PHLS  in the UK that contaminated eggs must be the origin of the rise in salmonella poisoning that its investigators failed to look for any other cause. Researchers looking for evidence that non-smokers were being harmed by 'environmental tobacco smoke' became so possessed by the idea that adult smoking must have been responsible for the rise in cot deaths that they quite overlooked the fact that, during the very years when cot death figures had been hurtling upwards, the incidence of smoking had been rapidly falling.

This is how, within the scientific community, a scare develops a powerful momentum of its own. Researchers not only become fixated on one particular thesis to the exclusion of anything else; but this in itself gives them a heady sense that they are on the track of something extremely important to society.

This leads on to a third stage in the scientific evolution of a scare when those promoting it become so carried away by the rightness of their cause that they are prepared actively to suppress any evidence which contradicts it. When Dr Needleman was studying the effect of lead on children's brains, as Emhart and Scarrs pointed  out, he repeatedly reduced the size of the group he was studying to exclude any data which failed to support his thesis. When the WHO and the American Cancer Society found that the major inquiries they had commissioned into passive smoking were not coming up with the results they wanted, they attempted to prevent the results from being published.

An example was when the International Panel on Climate Change's promotion of the Michael Mann' graph  as proof of its chosen 'scenario' on global warming. Only by using one very unrepresentative set of data, out of context, and excluding all the overwhelming weight of data from other sources, was the IPCC provided with the re-written version of history that it wanted. (See Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth.)

By the time a scare has reached such a  stage we may see how the science behind it is being further manipulated by its 'politicization'. So great by now is the momentum behind the scare that, in the academic, corporate and official bureaucracies it has become the established orthodoxy. The most obvious way we see this at work is in how the funding vital to most scientific research is directed by governments, university departments and big business only towards projects designed to corroborate the new orthodoxy.

When British government officials took it into their heads that sheep could be infected with BSE, millions of pounds were spent trying vainly to prove the point. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into research trying to prove that passive smoking was harmful to non-smokers. When it came to the greatest scare of them all, global warming, it was estimated that by 2007 more than $100 billion had already been devoted to thousands of different projects based on the official orthodoxy that climate change was due to human activity and that human action could halt it.

In 2007, Dr Michael Griffin, the head of NASA, provoked an international furore by saying in a US radio interview that he was not sure global warming was a problem mankind was right to try to 'wrestle with'. Among those who publicly attacked him was Michael Rowan-Robinson, president of the Royal Astronomical Society, who called on Griffin to withdraw his views on the grounds that they were 'counter to the strong advice of the world's climate scientists, expressed through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change' ('Nasa chief attacked over climate stance', LabnewsOnline, 6 July 2007).

Indeed, once such an orthodoxy has taken hold and become part of what may be called the ruling consciousness, it becomes very difficult to win financial support for any research project likely to challenge it. This was again conspicuous in the field of climate change, as when Henrik Svensmark and his Danish colleagues found it impossible to get funding for their researches until they were saved by a generous contribution from a private foundation set up by Carlsberg. Other examples of censorship through denial of funding have abounded, such as the various attempts made to stifle independent researches into the damage inflicted on human health by OPs. But most such cases, by definition, go unreported.

 As in this case, the only organizations prepared to fund independent researchers may be those industries that see their interests being threatened. This in itself, of course, plays further into the hands of the lobbyists for the scare, b.ecause it provides them with an immediate propaganda weapon in arguing why such research can be dismissed.Rather than honestly debate the science, examples abounded of how the upholders of any scare orthodoxy would routinely use similar ad hominem tactics to discredit any expert who disagreed with them. When various independent scientists tried to challenge the travesty of science that was being used to demonize white asbestos, almost the only people willing to fund them were the chrysotile industries of Canada and Russia. This was at once used to discredit their findings by the anti-asbestos lobby, even though this was itself funded by law firms, trade unions and other commercial interests for whom the scare was providing such a lucrative source of income.

For the scientific profession as a whole, our modern age of scares has scarcely shown it in a very creditable light. Rarely since Trofim Lysenko became Stalin's favourite scientist for promising to double the Soviet Union's grain harvests has the energy of so many scientists been harnessed to such dubious political ends. But, again and again, in fields ranging from global warming to OPs, from lead to asbestos, there were shining exceptions: those still principled, independent-minded scientists who could not accept the officially approved line and battled on to establish a more objective understanding of the evidence .

A second group of people who make an essential contribution to promoting any successful scare are the journalists. As we have seen, the only instance in this book of a scare in which the media were willing to act predominantly as 'blockers' was when they almost unanimously poured scorn on the government's ban on T-bone steaks. In a sense this was ironic because the scare over BSE, from which this ban arose, was the one more than any which the media themselves had helped to create. If it had not been for the hysteria worked up over BSE by the media, the government would not have been panicked into unleashing the scare in the disastrously incompetent way it did in March 1996.

 In journalistic terms, bad news will almost always make better copy than good. Few things are more likely to set editors' pulses racing than the chance to chill the blood of their readers and viewers by warning of the approach of some terrifying and mysterious new threat to their health and wellbeing. It has all the psychological appeal of a real-life disaster movie: from the way the arrival of avian flu in Europe was tracked night after night by television in the autumn of 2005, to the hidden menace of lead in petrol, which made daily headlines in the late 1980s; from the threat of 'killer' asbestos cement in our garage roofs to the hidden bug that in 2000 was going to immobilize half the world's computers and bring airliners crashing from the sky; from the BSE that by 2016 we were promised would have killed millions, to the drowning of half the world's cities and the death of billions in the ultimate global catastrophe, to be brought about by climate change.

In the food scares of the late 1980s and 1990s as in the case of Belgium , a particularly active part was played by the new breed of 'consumer affairs' and 'environmental' correspondents, for whom filing headline-worthy 'scare stories' was the easiest way to raise their own profile and win themselves more space.

Equally revealing was the media's reluctance to give critical coverage to the practical consequences of any scare, even though these often created such financial, social and moral havoc. They showed no interest in the bizarre scheme to send eight million healthy cattle up in smoke in the wake of the BSE/CJD scare, even though this had no scientific justification.

At least in America, as we saw, one or two diligent journalists were prepared to carry out detailed investigations into the costly and corrupt scandals unleashed by the asbestos scare. But in Euroepe the media simply accepted at face value the claims made by those who had similarly exploited the scare to create a series of massive scams.

The part played by politicians in any scare is obviously crucial, because no scare can properly take off until the politicians in power accept the evidence for it and decide to act. This has marked the tipping point of every scare we have looked at, from the time when Currie and Dorrell unleashed the scares over salmonella and BSE, to the day in 1997 when, by agreeing the Kyoto Protocol, the governments of the world put global warming firmly onto the international agenda.

In this respect, however, the politicians are not so much acting as 'pushers' of the scare as giving way to pressure put on them by others. There are, of course, times when politicians do act as 'pushers', the most obvious example being the role played by Al Gore. As most scares develop, politicians will join the bandwagon. But, in the initial stages of a scare, the most conspicuous role we are likely to see them playing is that of 'blockers'.

A real problem politicians have with scares is one they share with journalists. Much of the business of modern government has become so technical that it is often very difficult for politicians (or journalists) to get their heads round its complexities. They cannot develop an informed view of their own. Ministers under all the pressure of a scare are thus very much in the hands of their officials and advisers. If the advisers themselves have fallen under the scare's spell, it would take a minister of unusual intelligence and strength of character to be able to identify the flaws in their advice and overrule it.

The Belgian dioxins crisis as we will see in P.2, was essentially manufactured out of nothing by the incompetence of two groups of officials who gave their respective ministers conflicting advice. This triggered off the panic which, by the time it hit the prime minister Dehaene in the middle of his election campaign, was so intense that the crisis was way beyond his control.

When transport ministers were presented by their officials with the idea that the focus of road safety policy should be switched to the enforcing of speed limits with the aid of speed cameras, they did not seek enough alternative advice to establish whether the policy proposed by the officials might in fact have serious flaws. This left them for years afterwards helplessly trying to defend the policy, continuing to fall back on the same bogus arguments and statistics supplied by the officials who had proposed it, long after the evidence suggested that it had failed.

The decisions to ban lead in petrol and electrical products evolved so completely within the recesses of various US and European bureaucracies that by the time the politicians were called on to approve and defend them there was little they could do but parrot the justifications with which their officials had provided them.

The legislation generated by the asbestos scare in both America and Britain was supposedly so technical that, by the time it emerged from the various technical and advisory committees to be passed into law, there was probably not a single politician on either side of the Atlantic who could have given an informed or coherent account of the science behind the new laws. The few politicians who took any interest in the subject were almost entirely propagandists for the anti-asbestos lobby.

In America on the other hand there was at least the Appeal Court judgement that in 1991 threw out the EPA's asbestos ban, based on a meticulously argued appraisal of its costs and benefits. In 2005 there was the trenchant ruling whereby a Texas judge exposed the racket being operated by various law firms in bringing bogus compensation claims.

Total havoc. This is a human and economic catastrophe. Our reputation abroad is ruined, the agri-industry threatened, thousands of jobs in danger.
Het Laatste Nieuws, June 1999

The problem was the discovery that unknown quantities of poultry feed had been contaminated with potentially carcinogenic dioxins, at levels hundreds of times above the officially recognized 'safe limit'. Dioxins. Few words could have been calculated to trigger off a more emotive response, because these organic particles were associated with by far the most serious chemical disaster the world had ever known. This was the explosion at a Union Carbide plant making pesticides at Bhopal in India in 1984, causing up to 7,500 people to die instantly and another 16,000 later, with up to half a million said to have suffered long-term health damage.

Bhopal had fixed itself in many people's minds as totemic of all that had become most threatening in modern technological civilization. It was a disaster created by the reckless use of deadly chemicals, inflicted by a vast multi-national corporation on the impoverished people of the Third World. Whenever environmentalist lobby groups wanted to warn against the risks of some large-scale technological process involving chemicals, such as a giant incinerator or a new chemical plant, it might not be long before there was mention of the need to 'avoid a new Bhopal'.

But part of the reason why dioxins provided such an ideal focus for a scare was that, like the bacteria we looked at earlier, these halogenated hydrocarbon particles are so small and mysterious. Most people would be hard put to it to define them at all. In fact dioxins comprise a whole family of chemically related compounds, of which some 419 have been identified but only around 30 of which are considered to be significantly toxic; the most dangerous of all being 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, known as TCDD.

Dioxins can be found everywhere in the environment, in air, soil, and water, and in the bodies of animals and humans. They are produced naturally by the burning of organic materials, as in forest fires or volcanic eruptions. They are given off by garden bonfires and by a whole range of industrial processes. Their danger to people, deriving mainly from food, is that that they accumulate in fat, persisting for a long time. The more toxic of them can induce skin problems known as chI oro acne, damage the immune and nervous system and cause cancer.

Apart from Bhopal, the environmental risk dioxins can pose was never better exemplified than by their association with Agent Orange, the defoliant used by US forces in the Vietnam war, which caused enormous damage to forests, farmland, animals and human beings. But this horror story in itself helped to build up something of a legend about dioxins, and a tendency to magnify the dangers they can pose. Huge alarm, for instance, was caused in 1976 by the accident at a chemical plant in Seveso, Italy, when several kilograms of dioxins were released into the air. Initially it was feared that thousands might die. In the end, although 3,000 animals were found dead around the plant, and some 80,000 farm animals were destroyed to prevent them entering the food chain, there were no human deaths at all. The only obvious human damage was a rash of severe but temporary skin disorders.

A similarly alarming incident made headlines across the United States in December 1982 when, after a serious flood, the small town of Times Beach, near St Louis, Missouri, was found to be contaminated with dioxins from oil sprayed to keep down dust on its dirt roads. The contractor, it was discovered, had bought the waste oil from a chemical plant manufacturing Agent Orange. In reporting on the disaster it was claimed, based on their effect on guinea pigs, that dioxins were 'the most toxic chemical synthesised by man'. At the town's Christmas party, the 2,400 inhabitants were told that, on a recommendation from Dr Vernon Houk, head of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), Times Beach was to be evacuated.

President Reagan set up a 'Dioxin Task Force', including the US Corps of Engineers. The entire town was bought by the Environmental Protection Agency and razed to the ground, to be turned into a park. In 1985 Time magazine marked the destruction of Times Beach with a famous cover story headed 'The Poisoning of America'. The whole operation cost $138 million.(Corie Lok and Douglas Powell, 'The Belgian dioxin crisis of the summer of 1999: A case study', Department of Food Health, Guelph University, Ontario, 2000)

Four years later Dr Houk told a scientific seminar in Texas that, thanks to more recent researches into dioxins, the CDC now recognized that they probably led to no adverse health effect other than skin rash. 'To put it bluntly,' he said, 'we found that human beings were not nearly as susceptible to dioxins as guinea pigs.' In 1991 he told the New York Times that 'given what we now know about the chemical's toxicity, it looks as though the evacuation was unnecessary' .(A. Bernard, et al., 'Food contamination by PCBs and dioxins: an isolated incident in Belgium is unlikely to have affected public health', Nature, 401, September 1999.)

These admissions, however, attracted very much less publicity than the original scare had done when Times Beach was abandoned and demolished. They were certainly not enough to prevent the crisis which was to engulf Belgium eight years later, which was rapidly to escalate into the biggest 'dioxins scare' of them all.

The Belgian dioxins crisis of 1999 unfolded through three stages. We were able to reconstruct the inside story of the all-important first stage - how the problem first came to light - when in 2000 Dr North was invited to a conference at Louvain University to give a paper on 'the dynamics of food scares.(N. van Larebeke, et al., 'The Belgian PCB and dioxin incident of January-June 1999 - exposure data and potential impact on health', Environmental Health Perspective, Vol. 109 , March 2001)

As chance had it, among his audience and listening with particular interest, was Jan van Ginderachter, a nutritionist working for NY De Brabander, an  animal feed company, which a year earlier had been at the centre of the crisis. After the lecture, van Ginderachter explained how it was he who had originally uncovered the Belgian dioxins problem. In February 1999 he had been asked by his company to investigate why some of the poultry firms which bought feed from De Brabander were reporting difficulties with their birds. These were large-scale poultry breeders, producing eggs from which chickens were bred for human consumption. Soon after the feed was delivered, they had noticed reduced laying in their hens. Then hens began to die. Eggs were not hatching. Newborn chicks displayed signs of neural disorder.

Van Ginderachter carried out tests, all of which proved negative, but arranged for the destruction of all chicks at the premises affected. It was not until mid-March that he recalled reading a scientific paper which linked similar ailments with dioxins. Talking next day with a nutritionist employed by another firm which had experienced the same problems, the two men worked out that the one element their products had in common was animal fat supplied by a company called Verkest. This was sufficiently important, thought van Ginderachter, to pass it on to the head of the animal feed section at Belgium's agriculture ministry. He added that, since Belgium did not have a laboratory specializing in dioxin analysis, he was sending samples of the suspect feed from Verkest to one in Holland, Rikilt. The ministry's response was that this was merely 'a commercial matter'.

If it had not been for the diligence of van Ginderachter, as a conscientious food scientist, the dioxins might never have been identified at all, certainly nothing like so soon. Until now, the only official who had shown any interest in his researches was Dr Andre Distickere, the local head of the agency responsible, under the Department of Public Health, for enforcing meat hygiene rules. But the reason for Distickere's interest was that, under another hat, he also worked for De Brabander's insurance company, which had asked him to investigate.

On April 23 Rikilt finally confirmed that van Ginderachter's suspicions were correct. Unbelievably, the poultry feed contained dioxins at 1,500 times the legal limit. There had clearly been a serious system failure, even though van Ginderachter calculated that the dioxins would be so diluted when they passed through  breeding birds to chickens in the human food chain that it was extremely unlikely that there could be any risk to human health.

The nutritionist immediately relayed the news of the dioxins find to Distickere, in his role as adviser to the insurance company. But the vet then, in his role as a public official, passed it on to the agriculture ministry, where officials finally began to take notice. They decided to send off their own samples to Rikilt and to trace all Verkest customers who might have received contaminated feed - although they did not start work until 30 April, six weeks after van Ginderachter had first contacted the ministry.

By this time Distickere had also, on 28 April, sent a detailed memo to the public health ministry. This was much more alarmist in tone. He indicated that contaminated fats had not only ended up in laying hens but also in chicks which had been sent to slaughterhouses to be recycled into pig food. These might therefore have introduced dioxins into the human food chain. Although this note was confidential, it was soon to become very public. The 'Note Distickere' was to playa key part in inflating the scare.

Through May the agriculture ministry traced the feed producers supplied by Verkest, ten in all, including one in France and another in Holland. It investigated 417 poultry farms which might have bought the contaminated feed. On 21 and 26 May, when the ministry got back the results of its own samples from Rikilt, these showed alarmingly high levels of dioxins in breeder hens and eggs on several of the farms. It immediately closed down all the farms Verkest had supplied and called a crisis meeting with officials of the health ministry.

It was agreed that the two ministries should share responsibility for tracing contaminated products. But then came a fateful error. A joint press release, already drafted, only mentioned a problem with contaminated chicken feed, and it was this low-key statement which on 27 May was issued to the press. Unsurprisingly, it attracted little attention.

Next day, however, the public health minister Marcel Colla, off his own bat, gave the order for all poultry products to be removed from sale, along with a warning to the public to avoid eating any which had originated in Belgium. The sight of millions of chickens and eggs being cleared from the shelves of shops and supermarkets throughout the country immediately aroused intense suspicion that there might be more to this dioxin story than had been officially admitted.

To make matters worse, the two ministries then put out separate press releases. The health ministry's version assured consumers that banning the sale of poultry products was just a temporary measure and that there was no serious health risk. But that from the agriculture ministry admitted that 'contaminated chicken and eggs have for some months been entering the food chain'. It was a sentence as explosive as those recklessly phrased statements uttered earlier in Britain by Currie and Dorrell.

The timing of these events over the last days of May could not have been more damaging. Belgium was now in the midst of an already fraught general election campaign. Jean-Luc Dehaene, in office for eight years at the head of a centre-left coalition, was his country's longest serving prime minister. According to the polls he might well win, but the outcome looked close. His main challenger was Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the centre-right Vlaamse Liberalen en Democratien (VLD) Party.

The last thing Dehaene wanted was the kind of embarrassment by which he was now threatened: a major crisis which laid his government open to charges of a cover-up. He immediately went into full damage limitation mode, cancelling a scheduled ED meeting in Luxembourg and instructing his two ministers to submit a full report to him as soon as possible. As the media were already drawing parallels with BSE in Britain, Dehaene went on television, fighting to defuse the crisis.

The response from abroad was similarly dramatic. By 31 May six countries, including Britain, had imposed an emergency ban on all imports of poultry products from Belgium. One German radio commentator even advised motorists only to travel through Belgium with closed windows. Then, the same day, came an intervention which was to swamp the election campaign. Dr Distickere, the vet who had been following the affair from the inside since February, was also, it turned out, a member of Verhofstadt's VLD party. He had been indignant  at the official press releases which seemed to downplay the dioxin threat and had therefore faxed to Verhofstadt a copy of the 'Note Distickere' he sent to the health ministry more than a month earlier, warning that dioxins could already have got into the human food chain. If ever a politician was given a chance to accuse his rival of a cover-up at the height of an election campaign, this was it.

Verhofstadt planned his ambush carefully. He arranged a meeting with Dehaene and presented him with the note, ensuring that at the same time its text was released to the press. The Prime Minister was stunned. The media could scarcely find headlines big enough to cover the news. The evidence for an official cover-up going right to the top seemed conclusive. The following day, 1 June, the two ministers resigned. But this only made the situation worse. As the subsequent parliamentary inquiry reported: The resignation of the two ministers had a manifest effect on the later management of the crisis. Their resignation clearly confirmed that there was a serious problem, which had been underestimated in previous months. (A. Bernard and S. Fierens, 'The Belgian PCBlDioxin Incident: A Critical Review of Health Risks Evaluations', International Journal of Toxicology ,1 September 2002)

The same day, Socialist members of the European Parliament were demanding an EU-wide ban on a whole range of Belgian foods, including chocolate. The day following, 2 June, the EU's acting agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler castigated the Belgian government for not having notified the Commission about the problem much earlier, while the Commission itself extended Belgium's own ban on poultry products to the whole of the EU.

Countries right round the world were now queuing up to join the ban, and would eventually number more than 30, including Australia, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Egypt, Poland, Switzerland and many more. Some added a range of other products to their bans, from chocolates to pasta. Some banned imports from France, Germany and the Netherlands as well. The USA and Singapore went even further, banning imports of poultry and pork from anywhere in the EU.

From now on the scare seemed to be multiplying in all directions. In Belgium and across Europe newspapers competed with each other to see who could run the most lurid accounts of the dangers  dioxins posed to human health. * Brussels' main French-language daily Le Soir, observing that the crisis had plunged Belgium 'into a fog', published a long list of foods that were banned or should be treated with caution, including not just chicken, pork, beef but anything containing more than 2 per cent of egg, such as mayonnaise, soups, bakery products, cakes, biscuits and desserts. Het Laatste Nieuws, in the words quoted at the head of this chapter, described the country's plight as 'total havoc. This is a human and economic catastrophe'. (Richard North, The Death of Agriculture, Duckworth, 2001)

On 4 June the European Commission, which was drawing much of its information about the crisis from the Brussels media, extended its restrictions to a whole range of other foodstuffs, including pork, beef and dairy products, on the grounds that the Belgian authorities could not rule out the possibility that contaminated feed had been sold to cattle and pig farmers. On 8 June the Belgian government produced its final list of farms that might have been supplied with Verkest's feed in January. These included 445 poultry producers, 393 cattle farms and 746 pig breeding farms (40 per cent of all those in the country). But Dehaene was then forced to announce that, although the Belgian authorities had hitherto only regarded as suspect farms supplied by Verkest between 19 and 31 January, the European Commission was now insisting that they must now investigate all farms supplied up to 1 June, a period of nearly five months. This immediately extended the list of 'suspect' poultry farms from 445 to 811.   A widely quoted preliminary study· by Martin van den Berg of the University of Utrecht concluded, based on analysis of two chickens and two eggs taken from hatcheries in April, that people in the areas affected could have consumed 40 times the WHO recommended dioxin limit, which could affect 'neural and cognitive development, the immune system and thyroid and steroid hormones, especially in unborn and young children', although van den Berg conceded that the doses were 'probably too low to cause cancer' (New Scientist, 12 June 1999).

On 9 June the Commission was able to announce that 426 farms in the Netherlands and 181 in France had also been put under 'quarantine', prohibited from selling any of their products, because of the possibility that they might also have been supplied with suspect feed. On 10 June Belgium's frontier crossings with Germany and the Netherlands were blocked by angry Belgian

Until this moment, with exceptions, such as the various 'meat hygiene directives', food safety policy had remained a 'competence' of national governments. But in the late summer of 1999 the Commission was in desperate need of some popular initiative which might help to restore its public image, after the embarrassment of the corruption scandals which in March had forced the resignation of the entire team of commissioners, described at the time as the EU's 'biggest crisis in its 42-year history'.

By September, when Romano Prodi, the Commission's new president, appeared for the first time in front of 700 MEPs in the vast, futuristic new European Parliament building in Strasbourg, the Belgian dioxins crisis had for months been a major talking point all over Europe. At the very start of his speech, Prodi was keen to emphasize how vital it was for the EU to win back public confidence by showing how it was looking after the interests of the 'people of Europe' in their everyday lives. Nothing was more important in this respect, argued Prodi, than 'safety of the food we eat'. That was why he was proposing that the Commission should take over from national governments the power to regulate all issues relating to food safety.

No sooner were Prodi and his new team of commissioners settled into Brussels than the planning of this takeover went ahead as a matter of urgency. By 12 January 2000, only four months later, the commissioner appointed to take charge of food safety, an Irishman named David Byrne, was ready to announce his proposals. There was to be a new European Food Safety Authority, in charge of monitoring and regulating food safety throughout the ED. Furthermore, Byrne was already proposing no fewer than 84 new directives, regulations and other legislative measures, to show just how comprehensively the Commission now intended to exercise control over every aspect of food safety law.

To no one was this a more carefully timed snub than the British Labour Party which, at the height of the 1989 salmonella crisis, had adopted as one of its flagship policies the proposal that supreme responsibility for food safety in Britain should be handed over to a new, independent Food Standards Agency. Formal proposals had been published in 1998 and legislation setting up the new agency had been debated and approved by Parliament in 1999.

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