My Cousins Death :: Disease Health Personal narrative Essays

My Cousin's Death The year was 1996, and I had traveled to England to spend the summer with my cousin at his farm in northern Lincolnshire. I arrived in late May, and was warmly greeted by my host. He suggested we travel in to the town and go for a pint at the local pub. I agreed and we traveled the few miles from his somewhat isolated residence to the nearby village of Barton upon Humber, a quaint historical village with a population of only a few hundred people. However when we arrived at the Red Lion, as the local public house was called, there was an eerie air of sobriety. Everyone was watching the television behind the bar, which was tuned to the evening news. The story was that there had been an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as "Mad Cow Disease" at a farm in another region of Lincolnshire. This was obviously disastrous news, since virtually all of those present were, like my cousin, livestock farmers and such an outbreak had the potential to destroy whole herds of animals. Even those not yet infected might be destroyed or at least quarantined in order to eliminate the risk of spread of the disease. I was given to understand, from my cousin on the return trip to his farm, that the disease originated from use of cow and sheep meat in animal feed, or offal, but that it had not been identified until 10 years before and the regulations banning protein supplements containing sheep and cattle offal had not been rigidly enforced until 1992. Little more was known about the disease, except that it did have a variant which could potentially kill humans who ate infected meat. However such cases were extremely rare relative to the huge numbers of infected animals.1 Over the following weeks the scale of the epidemic increased. Government officials from the Department of Health came round to everyone's farms to perform tests and in some cases the animals were ordered to be slaughtered and their remains burned. The whole thing seemed to me wholly medieval, in the sense both of the lack of any cure and the destructive solutions. My cousin these days was acting somewhat strangely. He would forget to lock up the animals and perform other tasks around the farm.