As the year comes to a close, most of you who have read our publications have a good idea of what lies ahead. Items like the one below on BSE are appearing daily. The rate of fragmentation is staggering. Each day I could write an entry ending with the words "I told you so!", and each day each of you could send me many reports stating "You told us so!"

Conditions will become worse world wide, hence take extreme care in everything you do, especially during the so-called drunken festive times when the demons and robots go even crazier.

Here is the article on Mad Cow Disease:

A DRAMATIC warning over the possible death toll from the human form of mad cow disease was issued last night. Scientists involved in new tests into BSE and its human form Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) said that "a large section" of the British population could be "at considerable risk". The warning came as families of early victims began to present harrowing written testimony to the inquiry set up to discover the truth about the incurable brain disease.

It also coincided with a Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food announcement yesterday that Richard Packer, the civil service head of MAFF during some of the critical years of the BSE outbreak, would be quitting Govern-ment service.

It was only last Friday that the BSE inquiry chairman, Lord Phillips, warned the 48 confirmed deaths so far could be "just the tip of an iceberg of an infection that is still concealed from sight". Now comes the verdict of scientists who claim to have established a firm link between the cattle disease and its human form. Using genetically-engineered mice a team, led by Michael Scott of the University of California, and Dr Robert Will, at the National CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, found that injections with BSE from mad cows and with variant CJD taken from the brains of human victims had the same effect.

Variant CJD had the same incubation period in the mice as BSE and produced an identical pattern of brain damage. The results, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that BSE and variant CJD are interchangeable.

The scientists concluded that although earlier suspicion of a BSE and variant CJD link were "disquieting", the latest findings "raise greater concern that a large section of the United Kingdom population may be at considerable risk". The words underline the warnings of a human epidemic, repeatedly suggested in official public documents and private briefings this year.

In January, Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson said in his beef-on-the-bone report: "At this time, the estimates, compatible with the present number of confirmed cases, range from under a hundred to several million." No one knows the period of incubation of the disease, but it is known that infected beef was still going into the human food chain as late as the summer of 1996 - and possibly later - 10 years after the first case of mad cow disease was first diagnosed.

On his last appearance before the BSE inquiry, earlier this month, civil service head Mr Packer was questioned closely about the inactivity of MAFF early in 1996, when it was believed that a probable link between BSE and variant CJD could be imminent.

That suspected link was confirmed in March 1996, though the findings revealed last night have hardened the connection. Meanwhile, Mr Packer, who never got the knighthood most Whitehall mandarins consider one of the perks of the job, said he had been proud to have served six ministers "through what is probably the most turbulent period in MAFF's history." As for the families of victims, their grief and anger is currently being exposed in witness statements at Lord Phillips's inquiry.

Richard Thorpe, whose wife, Alison, died of variant CJD at the age of 25 last year, tells the agonising story of her death and asks: "Why did officials allow such a disaster to occur, given the knowledge available at the time?" Alison's mother, Susan Hodge, says: "I believe that until the general public are aware of the true horror of this illness, we will remain a minority group within the BSE inquiry and we will not be given enough air time to state our case."

But The Express has obtained a number of documents and files describing the full nightmare of the disease. One report from Dr Will's unit in Edinburgh says: "It is a devastating, ultimately fatal, neurological condition, but initial features are subtle and clinical diagnosis is difficult in the early stages." Some cases showed psychiatric and sensory symptoms, some had delusions and hallucinations. "Most had depression, personality change or withdrawal." But after a period of some months, "the disease progressed rapidly, with cognitive impairment, involuntary movements, immobility, dependency, mutism and eventually death."

There is no cure and once contracted, variant CJD kills. Some scientists believe that it can take up to 50 years to incubate in certain victims. The other, marked feature of the disease is that parents can bring up a baby, feeding it, teaching it to walk and talk and see it through to maturity. The young person, often with a family of his or her own, then contracts variant CJD and reverts - slowly but inexorably losing the ability to talk, walk and eat, before dying.

One of the lawyers acting for the victims' families commented: "Parents resume a care role for their child which increases over time rather than diminishes."

Please note, the Journal will now stop for an indeterminate period.