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Hello and welcome to this edition of the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service

with me Rebecca Keesby and today we go back 25 years to 1996 when the British government admitted that there was a probable

connection between a disease affecting cattle and a devastating brain

illness affecting humans. In 2012 I spoke to two people whose loved ones had

died a variant C.J. D. which experts believed had come from eating beef infected

with BSE or mad cow disease as it became known.

But the story had all started in the 1980s

when farmers began noticing strange behavior in their cows.

A mysterious brain disease is threatening the country's cows.

Scientists don't know what's causing it or where it came from, but they are worried.

When I visited the farm initially, the cows were showing signs of extreme nervousness on concrete.

They were very unsteady on their legs, had abnormal reactions to what we would deem to be normal approaches to a dairy cow.

The emergence in Britain of BSE affecting cows in the early 80s baffled scientists

and raised concerns that the disease could be spread through the food chain to humans.

For several years the government refuted suggestions of a link.

There is currently no scientific evidence that BSC can be transmitted to humans or that eating beef causes

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