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The long-awaited report lifts the lid on the delays and confusion which preceded the announcement in 1996 that human beings had developed the cow disease, BSE.

British agriculture minister Nick Brown today branded the affair a "national tragedy".

So far 80 people in the UK have died from the new brain disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

But the report by Lord Phillips was not as damning about the actions of government ministers and civil servants as had been expected.

As public alarm grew in the mid 1990s, an agriculture minister, John Gummer, had himself pictured feeding a beef-burger to his daughter.

The report says that Mr Gummer was acting on the advice of the chief veterinary scientist - who had not taken account of news that cats had become infected by the mad cow disease.

Asked whether Mr Gummer had been wise to go ahead with the stunt, Lord Phillips said: "That is a question you ought to ask him."

The report says the affair has dealt a damaging blow to public confidence in science.

It says: "The government did not lie to the public about BSE. It believed that the risks posed by BSE to humans were remote.

"The government was preoccupied with preventing an alarmist over-reaction to BSE because it believed that the risk was remote. It is now clear that this campaign of reassurance was a mistake.

"When on 20 March 1996 the Government announced that BSE had probably been transmitted to humans, the public felt that they had been betrayed. Confidence in government pronouncements about risk was a further casualty of BSE."

Lord Phillips said the only cover-up took place when the disease was first diagnosed in cattle in 1987. Staff in the government veterinary service were ordered not to discuss the new disease.

This had delayed the implementation of preventative measures, he said.

The report says that government scientists correctly suspected that recycled meat in cattle feed was the cause of the spread of the disease.

But the disease had not come from scrapie, a similar brain disease in sheep. It had originated from a "novel source".

And it was not changes in the preparation of cattle food that had led to its spread.

"BSE developed into an epidemic as a consequence of an intensive farming practice - the recycling of animal protein in ruminant feed. This practice, unchallenged over decades, proved a recipe for disaster," the report says.

"BSE has caused a harrowing fatal disease for humans. As we sign this Report the number of people dead and thought to be dying stands at over 80, most of them young. They and their families have suffered terribly.

"Families all over the UK have been left wondering whether the same fate awaits them."

Mr Brown told members of the British parliament: "At times officials showed lack of rigour. At times bureaucratic processes created unacceptable delay.

"The possibility of risk to humans was not communicated to public or to those whose job it was to enforce precuationary measures."

He said the British government would now be setting up a special fund to pay for the care of victims of the disease and their families.

"We will be commissioning an independent assessment of current scientific knowledge including emerging findings," he said.

"This is not an epidemic that is going to come and go"-Englemed Exclusive - May

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Researchers could find no link between the development of blood clots in the veins - venous thromboembolism - and the taking of long journeys, according to a report in The Lancet.

Alarm was caused this week after a young British woman died following a 20-hour non-stop flight to Australia.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam questioned 788 patients sent to them with suspected thromboembolism. The average age of the patients was 62.

The condition was confirmed in 176 cases.

The researchers compared the stories of patients who developed clots with those who did not.

They could find no link between the development of clots and any kind of travel, including journeys of longer than five hours and air travel.

Just four of the patients with confirmed plots had recently been on planes. 13 of the others had flown recently.

Researcher Dr Roderik Kraaijenhagen said: "These results do not lend support to the widely accepted dogma that long travelling time is a risk factor for venous thrombosis. Even for air travel and journeys lasting more than 5 hours, no association was apparent."

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The findings are a set-back to hopes that genetic screening might be used to identify women at risk of developing cancer.

Researchers at Cambridge University, UK, studied 1,500 women under the age of 55 diagnosed with the disease, searching for women carrying the two gene variants, BRCA1 and BRCA2.

They found the genes were not even common among women who came from families with a history of developing breast cancer. Just 17 per cent of these carried the two genes, they report in the British Journal of Cancer.

The research confirmed that women who carry the genes have a high risk of developing breast cancer. Ten per cent developed the disease by the age of 40 and 70 per cent by the age of 80.

Fewer than 0.22 per cent of women have defective BRCA2 gene and few than 0.1 per cent have a defective BRCA1 gene, they said.

Researcher Dr Paul Pharoah said: "These results suggest that screening women for faults in these genes, even those who have a strong family history of the disease, would not identify many women who are likely to develop breast cancer."

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Traces of the germ, helicobacter pylori, were found in as many as 88 per cent of babies who died from sudden infant death syndrome, researchers from Manchester, UK, reported.

Doctors used new genetic techniques to search for traces of the bacterium. They searched for two genes from the germ, ureC and cagA.

Writing in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, they report finding the genes in 28 out of 32 cot death babies.

Eight other babies who died from other causes were studied and traces of the germ found in just one case.

They report that the level of infection by the germ is thought to be just two per cent in developed countries.

The H pylori germ has created a revolution in medicine in the last decade. Most cases of peptic ulcer are now treated by eradicating infection while it is also suspected of causing stomach cancer and heart disease.

Researcher Dr Jonathan Kerr, of the infectious diseases research group at Manchester Royal Infirmary, said it would be difficult to find out how the germ caused cot death. One possibility was that it led to the generation of ammonia.

A second study in the same journal reveals that male babies born prematurely may be more vulnerable to death and disease than female babies.

Researchers led by Dr David Stevenson, of Stanford University, California, USA, studied the fate of 6,500 premature babies treated in 12 US centres over a two year period.

He found that about 25 per cent of boys died compared with 15 per cent of girls. Boy babies also had a greater rate of complications.

The researchers write: "The biological mechanisms contributing to the male disadvantage or female advantage have not been elucidated.

"Until science can rationalise the male and female circumstances, nature's intent will remain obscure."

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The study of veterans of the Second World War of 1939-45 shows that soldiers who suffered severe head injuries were four times as likely as others to have developed the brain disease 50 or more years later. These included soldiers who were unconscious for 24 hours or became amnesiac.

And soldiers who suffered any kind of head injury faced a doubled risk.

Nearly 1,800 war veterans took part in the research conducted by the US National Institute on Aging and published in the journal Neurology.

Researchers began by identifying injured servicemen through military medical records.

Researcher Dr Richard Havlik said: "While we may not fully understand what’s going on, as a practical matter, it may be one more reason to wear that bike helmet instead of keeping it in a closet.

"We now need to hone in on what’s behind these findings, especially what may be happening biologically."

The researchers eliminated a number of factors that could have been a common link between head injury and Alzheimer's disease including smoking, alcoholism and educational background.

They also studied incidence of the Alzheimer's genetic variant APOE e4 but could find no evidence that a high proportion of head injured veterans carried the gene.

Researcher Dr Brenda Plassman, of Duke University, North Carolina, USA, said: "Understanding how head injury and other Alzheimer's disease risk factors begin their destructive work early in life may ultimately lead to finding ways to interrupt the disease process early on."

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Doctors said the children could be the victims of events that happen in the spring before their birth - at the time when the unborn baby's brain is developing.

The finding is perplexing since, apart from hay fever, there are few infections or diseases that are common in the spring.

The findings, from an analysis of 15 years of records at Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina, USA, were reported to the annual conference of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

The study included details of 122 young patients with the disease medulloblastoma. Researchers said similar findings had been found in Japan and Norway.

Researcher Dr Edward Halperin said: "Children born in the fall would have been conceived the previous winter, and their brains would develop during the spring.

"What is happening during the spring more than at other times of the year that could explain this difference?

"Given other researchers' similar results, it's worth doing more research."

The research also showed that boys took longer to diagnose than girls. The doctors said this could mean that the clumsiness that characterised the disease was regarded as more natural for boys than girls.

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Doctors have begun a scientific study of the benefits of a myrrh extract from India in reducing cholesterol levels.

The extract called gugulipid comes from the mukul myrrh bush and has been used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine for 2,000 years.

90 volunteers are taking part in the study at the University of Pennsyvlania, USA. The research will compare the effects of the supplement with dummy pills administered to some of the patients.

So far, according to researcher Dr Philippe Szapary, volunteers have suffered few side effects from taking the herb.

He said: "This is something that’s been around for thousands of years, and when some scientists looked into it, they actually found a scientific basis for its effectiveness.

"But there’s still not enough documentation. We’re trying, in a methodical way, to establish that basis."

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The conclusion seems to contradict the findings of a major study, reported two weeks ago, which could find no evidence that people with high levels of iron in their diet suffered high levels of heart disease.

The new research, from Japan, tested the effect of high doses of injected iron on healthy volunteers.

The research at Kurume Medical School involved ten healthy volunteers and showed that iron damaged the inner lining of the blood vessels, the endothelium.

Reporting to an American Heart Association conference, the researchers told how they also tested the effect of reducing iron levels in smokers using a chemical called deferoxamine. This seemed to improve the health of the blood vessels.

Researcher Dr Hidehiro Matsuoka said: "I don't think it's a good idea for people to take in more iron than is normally contained in a healthful diet but compared to the heavy intravenous doses of iron used in our study, oral iron supplements are relatively safe."

The earlier research, reported in the Annals of Epidemiology, came from a study of 1,600 people over a period of 16 years and found that low iron levels seemed to be more dangerous than high iron levels.

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Emma Christoffersen, from Britain, died of deep vein thrombosis at Heathrow Airport shortly after disembarking from a 20-hour Qantas flight from Australia.

Since the news of her death surfaced this week, similar deaths following long flights have been reported. The condition - known as economy class syndrome - is said to claims dozens of lives each year.

Doctors say lack of stimulation in the lower legs over such long periods could cause deep vein thrombosis - the formation of potentially fatal blood clots.

Australian venous disease researcher and surgeon, Gabrielle McMullin, said she received at least one report a month of flight-related blood clots.

McMullin, of Sutherland Hospital in Sydney, said airlines should warn passengers about the risk of clots on long journeys but they refused to take responsibility for the problem.

Qantas said fatal blood clots were extremely rare and they only knew of one or two such cases.

A spokesman said they were developing an in-flight video to be shown soon after take-off on flights more than three or four hours long advising people to exercise every hour.

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The prosthetic limbs will include feet that adjust themselves as they touch the ground and a leg socket that automatically fits itself to an amputee's stump.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories say they intend to develop a leg that will simulate the human gait uphill, downhill and on rough territory.

Researchers say the leg could be on the market in two years.

Materials work and testing is to be done by the Russian nuclear weapons laboratory, Chelyabinsk 70, and will involve about 120 Russian scientists.

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