Memorial day - 21

The subjects of the last two Memorial Day blogs have been the most recent public art installations in London, today's is one of the most recently unveiled memorials.

The plaque located on the wall of St Thomas Hospital can be seen when walking along the Embankment - opposite the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

It was erected by the Human BSE Foundation in memory of the victims of Human BSE (vCJD)

What is Human BSE - In the late 1970s early 1980s scientists were working on protein supplements to feed to cows. With the cost of soya bean being uneconomical they turned to alternatives - they chose meat and bone meal, produced from the ground and cooked left-overs of the slaughtering process as well as from the cadavers of sick and injured animals such as cattle, sheep, or chickens. Think about it, they fed meat and bone meal to herbivores!

Irrespective of the consequential medical catastrophe, surely someone should have asked whether the action was a "manipulation of nature too far"?

BSE is Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad-cow disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. The infectious agent in BSE is believed to be a specific type of misfolded protein called prion. Misfolded prion proteins carry the disease between individuals and cause deterioration of the brain.

The risks associated with BSE was known in the 1980s, but it was thought that it was not transferable across species. A similar human form of the disease was known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), this was an extremely rare disorder with only one case per million persons. BSC entered the human food chain in the 1980s'. Tragically the scientists were wrong, cross-specie transfer did occur, with humans contracting vCJD, a variant form of CJD.

How many people were infected? No one knows. There is no known test whether a person has been affected by the prion, which could have an incubation period of over fifty years before the symptoms of vCJD appear. Up to 2007, 165 people have acquired and died of vCJD in the UK.

I hope the memorial will forever remain an affective reminder to both scientists and politicians of the potential devastating consequences that can occur when nature is inappropriately tampered with.