Category: Retired

It’s the mid 1980s and farm vet Colin Whitaker has the ominous realisation that a new disease is emerging in Kent’s cow herds. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food knows about it - and is determined to keep a lid on this potentially devastating news. But by 1987 officials know they have to act.

Government epidemiologist John Wilesmith is given a secret mission to find out how to stop the spread of what’s become known as BSE. He dons his wellies and works out one of the few things anyone can say for certain about the cause of the epidemic.

Written, presented and produced by Lucy Proctor.

Hidden deep in the heart of the Kent countryside is an abandoned factory with a dark past. In the 1980s and 1990s it processed tens of thousands of dead cows - some of which are thought to have been infected with a disease that would devastate British farming.

Then, when early human cases of BSE began to emerge in people living close to the rendering plant, paranoia also infected Kent’s countryside communities. People wanted answers - but there were none.

Today, science has failed to definitively answer two major questions about mad cow disease - where did it originally come from and how did humans get it?

Written, presented and produced by Lucy Proctor.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the weirdest things any of us has lived through. But there was another sickness that once stalked the nation and turned things very strange for a while.