When Food Kills : BSE, E.coli and disaster science

Ever since Edwina Currie's salmonella, Britain has seemed cursed by major food safety scares, with E.coli and BSE particularly prominent. Amidst tabloid frenzy and recrimination, the public is dependent upon sober scientific risk assessment and rational evaluation of what went wrong. Hugh Pennington has been at the forefront of this as a scientist, expert witness and commentator, and this book is his accessible but rigorous account of these diseases and the events surrounding them. This is a disaster book for the general reader giving authoritative but non-technical accounts of BSE/variant CJD and E.coli O157 - what happened, what went wrong, the human interest, and the science - all in the context of disasters (like Piper Alpha, Aberfan, and rail crashes), history and politics.