Major Refuses to OK Slaughter of Cattle

Farmers demanded Tuesday that Britain order the destruction of its oldest cattle to calm public fears of “mad cow disease,” but Prime Minister John Major refused and blamed the crisis on his political opponents.

Major struggled to calm frightened consumers, but his political enemies added to the sense of crisis, accusing him of “mind-boggling” incompetence and jeering him in a raucous House of Commons session.

The controversy began last week when the British government publicized scientific evidence suggesting that 10 Britons may have contracted a degenerative brain illness by eating beef from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. The public has dubbed it “mad cow disease.”

Since the evidence was published, there have been calls to ban British beef.

Britain suffered another blow Tuesday when specialists it dispatched to Belgium failed to persuade the European Union’s veterinary experts to drop proposals for a worldwide ban on British beef exports.

The ban will go into effect immediately if the 20-member European Union executive commission backs the panel’s recommendation in its weekly meeting today. Of the EU nations, only Denmark and Ireland now allow imports of British beef.

U.S. military officials in Germany, meanwhile, ordered commissaries in the Mediterranean region and Scotland to pull British beef products from their shelves.

The order affects U.S. commissaries in Italy, Spain, Turkey, Greece and Scotland, the only ones in the region selling British beef.

And in Geneva, the World Health Organization announced that it will host a two-day meeting next week of experts to study the suspected link between “mad cow disease” and human illness.