Scientists who inflame public anxieties must share responsibility for resulting panic

EDITOR,—Recent editorials on the danger of bovine spongiform encephalopathy causing Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans confirm that academic scientists are as much in the grip of the irrationality of the mad cow panic as is the public.1 2 Paul Brown recalls his judgment of last November that the available evidence suggested “a negligible risk to humans,”3 only to confess that “it now appears that I was wrong.”1 However, he adduces no new evidence to justify …