In article ,
Jeff Layman wrote:

To twist the original thread name, your reply is bullshit. "Horribly
plausible"? To consider what might occur there is Definite, Probable,
Possible, and Plausible. It was plausible that the earth was flat until
proved otherwise. I suppose it was plausible that the moon was made of
green cheese before the facts were examined carefully.

I am afraid that it is YOU who are bullshitting! Let me remind you
of the facts when the news first broke:

1) There was a scrapie-like disease that was MUCH more aggressive,
was widespread in cattle and had been seen in humans.

2) This was believed to be a variant of scrapie that had crossed
the species boundary and mutated, due to the practice of feeding
processed sheep offal to cattle.

3) The agent was known to be unaffected by cooking.

4) It was known to be mainly in the central nervous system, but
there was good evidence that it also occurred in musculature and in
milk.

5) We didn't have a clue what proportion of the UK cattle herd
was infected, and educated guesses ranged from 0.1% to 99%.

6) We didn't have a clue of how infectious it was, or how soon
after infection it could be transmitted, either in cattle or humans.

7) We didn't have a clue about how long its symptoms took to
develop, except that it was not a matter of months.

8) We had no test except an autopsy, and even that was very
unreliable except in advanced cases.

The nightmare scenario was that it was highly infectious, but very
slow developing. If that were the case, 99% of the UK cattle herd
could have been infected, possibly 70% of the UK human population,
but the symptoms wouldn't peak in the latter for 2-3 decades.

The optimal scenario was that it wasn't very infectious at all, and a
large proportion of infected subjects showed symptoms within a couple
of years. There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to distinguish this one in
plausibility from the nightmare scenario.

The government was attempting to ignore the problem, and to carry
on, but the experts used the the press-induced hysteria to force it
to (a) stop feeding ruminant protein to ruminants and (b) investigate
vCJD as a matter of urgency. They were right to do so.

What evidence do YOU have that the optimal scenario (which seems to
be the case) could have been determined to be more plausible than
the nightmare one USING ONLY INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THE TIME.

I suggest you go back and read some of the "scientific" comments made at the
time. I had access to all the main medical and general (such as "Nature")
journals at the time (1996) and could not believe what I was reading in
them. I was ashamed to be called a scientist. ...

I did. I also extracted the information from them and did my own
analysis. Nature's statistical quality is traditionally awful, so
I obviously didn't rely on any conclusions published there.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.