THE government may call it toughing it out. But in doing virtually no more than it has done for years now in the face of the Mad Cow disease scare - that is, once more declaring beef is safe - it is, we think, putting its head back in the sand.

For while it prefers to heed what may well be sound scientific advice - though there is plenty to the contrary - and determine that people are in the grip of unwarranted panic, it hides from the reality that something has to be done to restore public confidence in British beef.

And, as events have unravelled, that something needs to be dramatic.

Instead, the government has opted to do nothing.

Yet, in preferring this misguided stance, it falls into the trap which it has already set itself on BSE - of provoking yet again the suspicion which has long shadowed the Mad Cow saga: that it has financial motives in putting the nation's health at risk.

In short, it was already lacking in public trust over BSE; had lost it almost completely when all its past reassurances were ripped up with the disclosure of a probable link between BSE-infected beef and the dreadful human form of Mad Cow disease; and now does nothing to win back confidence.

Ministers must, we think, understand that the relationship the government has with the farm lobby and the meat industry was regarded as too cosy - and is seen as being behind the failure to act decisively and swiftly at the outset.

If it had taken strong action years ago when this plague first reared its head - with the kind of firm high-profile response with which, for instance, the 1968 epidemic of foot and mouth disease in cattle was met - then, we think, the official reassurances on beef-eating would have been underlined by widespread confidence that everything possible was being done in the public's interest to beat the disease and keep food safe.

But, instead, there was delay in making BSE a notifiable disease, in banning the animal-protein feedstuffs believed responsible for the outbreaks, in ordering compulsory slaughter of infected cattle and in banning consumption of suspect offal. All of that is perceived to have been in the financial interest of the farm and meat industry and the government itself.

More will have to be done - such as implementing the plan to slaughter and destroy all the older cattle considered to be a higher BSE risk - then electoral outrage may yet pull its head out of the sand.

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