The Politics of Prions-BSE and World Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the end of 2004, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) had spread far beyond the United Kingdom, invading 20 European countries, Canada, the United States, and Japan. The first report of BSE in 1986 did not cause much of a stir outside Great Britain. But that began to change in December 1987, when it became clear that the disease had been transmitted in animal feed supplemented with ruminant meat and bone meal. The European Union (EU) also barred United Kingdom export of cattle born to cows that were either suspected or confirmed to be BSE positive. The two countries (United States and Canada) worked to coordinate their response to the threat of BSE from imported live cattle, beef, and animal feeds. It was not until May 16 that the regional lab completed its testing and reported finding evidence of BSE in the sample. On May 20, the international BSE reference laboratory in the United Kingdom confirmed the Canadian lab's initial finding. Canada had identified its first homegrown BSE-positive cow. Much has been made of the need to control the spread of BSE and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). The worldwide cost of surveillance and control of BSE internationally is in the billions of dollars. However, it has become increasingly evident that the risk of an individual contracting vCJD through having eaten BSE-affected beef is extremely low. Science-based policies, to be effective, must be based on the rational application of sound science.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".