[jajag]

It already has with the BSE crisis, and I'm not sure if we 100% understand how close to a much greater crises we came. I remember there was period in the UK back in the nineties where there was the grim prospect of hundreds of thousands of cases - thankfully it never came close to that. And there are European countries where I still can't donate blood, because I lived in the UK during the outbreak.

[giantg2]

"I'm not sure if we 100% understand how close to a much greater crises we came."

That's basically my point. It doesn't seem like we changed our practices that much. I would have thought we'd test the animals, process them separately, etc.

[sigmoid10]

There were lots of changes that permeated far beyond Britain. There was a time when every cow was tested in Germany if it was merely alive during the time when contaminated animal-based feed was going around, even if it wasn't fed anything like that. The EU only lifted general testing like 10 years ago - 20 years after the original outbreak. People have also completely stopped using the kind of feed ingredients that allow transmission of the disease to livestock intended for human consumption in most parts of the world. It was a shitty situation, especially in Britain, and many people there probably still carry the disease without knowing it because it can take up to 50 years to show symptoms. That's also the reason why many countries still won't allow you to donate blood if you lived in Britain at the time as the other comment mentioned. So saying that we didn't learn from it or changed nothing is just wrong. Another outbreak like the original one is basically impossible in the western world.

[gustavus]

My understanding is that one of the changes we made is we stopped feeding cow brains to other cows, which was the root cause of the problem.