Hugh Pennington

Many infections kill slowly. Hardly any are lethal within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms. Bubonic plague takes days to kill and haemorrhagic smallpox takes a week. Cholera and inhalation anthrax are about the only diseases whose victims can wake up feeling fit but be dead by nightfall.

The revelation that meat from the bulls Dundee Paratrooper and Parable has been eaten by people created a media storm this week. It happened because the animals were the offspring of the cloned product Vandyk-K Integ Paradise 2, a Holstein cow in Wisconsin. Particular outrage has been expressed by Compassion in World Farming, the RSPCA and the Soil Association. They have said that the cloning process causes animals to suffer, and have raised food safety concerns. The Food Standards Agency is the main regulator; it has pointed out that milk and meat from clones and their progeny is a 'novel food' and requires authorisation from them before it can be marketed. They say that this was never sought. I have no doubt that the milk and meat from these animals was safe to consume.

Deirdre Hine’s ‘independent review of the UK response to the 2009 influenza pandemic’ was published yesterday. Her team was based in the Cabinet Office, which played a central role in the implementation of the pandemic plan. That’s one reason the word independent had to be in the title of her review. But there’s no doubting Hine’s independence. As the chief medical officer for Wales, she got into trouble during the BSE crisis for criticising the work of officials above her pay grade at the Department of Health in London. She was right then, and she has got it just about right this time too.

Good to hear that the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health has stopped its operations with immediate effect. Disappointing, though, that the reason is not because its founder has taken on board Oliver Wendell Holmes's views on homeopathy – 'a mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameful imposition' – but because of a more mundane alleged deceit: two people have been arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering. When Holmes wrote his essay in 1842 he believed that homeopathy would soon go the way of touching for the scrofula – another Royal Cure – and Bishop Berkeley's Tar Water ('good for so many things').

In recent times the usual response to scientific uncertainties about risk has been to apply the precautionary principle. Action is taken to prevent potentially dangerous events when there is no robust evidence about their likely magnitude, or sometimes even about the likelihood of their occurrence. With both Eyjafjallajökull's eruption and swine flu, pessimism and a heavy reliance on a very small number of historical events drove the policy response. It is on record that major damage has occurred on the few occasions when planes have flown through thick volcanic eruptions. In the century before swine flu there were only three flu pandemics, in 1918, 1957 and 1968. So when the precautionary principle led to the roll out of planned policies – zero tolerance for ash and very vigorous controls for the newish flu virus – the science was very imperfect.