The BSE crisis is a classic case of why it is not wise to fool with mother nature. Feed manufacturers hoping to turn a waste product into a profit converted discarded meat by-products into a protein concentrate and fed it back to livestock, and so began BSE.
More than a decade of vigorous eradication programmes have failed to stop the disease's spread. Germany and Spain, formerly claiming to be free of BSE, now have cases of their own.
The US still insists it has no BSE, but no one in Europe believes it and it is probably only a matter of time before it, too, joins the infamous BSE club.
The disease would be no more than an inconvenience and a headache for farmers were it not for the frightening discovery in the UK that the disease could be transferred to humans.
Its human form is called variant Creutzfeld Jacob Disease (vCJD), but it delivers the same result - rapidly progressive dementia followed by certain death.
The UK has had at least 80 vCJD cases and the count is certain to rise. Official UK estimates of the death tally from the disease range from tens of thousands up to about 250,000 over the next 20 years.
Ireland has some of the toughest control measures in the world in place, yet despite this our annual tally has already passed last year's total. Scientists acknowledge they only partially understand how the disease moves.
In the early days of the disease, the assumption was that improperly processed animal protein feeds pushed the disease out so removal of this would block BSE. The disease continues to spread, however, even though the feed has been banned. Researchers are much less clear about how the disease continues to persist and are searching for other possible methods of transmission.
The Irish "slaughter-out" policy involves killing the entire herd if a BSE animal is discovered, and also its siblings, even if they no longer live on the original farm, yet, new cases continue to arise.
The latest EU move is to test animals older than 30 months, given that most BSE animals are older than this. The hope is that animals that have no symptoms but have the disease will be picked up early before there is any chance of it spreading.
Current scientific assumptions hold that the new cases, both here and in other countries, have arisen because of the long latency period of the disease. The belief is that with proper controls BSE will eventually be rooted out.
It is therefore troubling that despite the ratcheting up of the measures introduced by both Community governments and the EU, BSE cases continue to occur.