View article

After the British government announced in March 1996 that a novel fatal human disease (now called variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) had emerged and was almost certainly caused by consuming BSE–contaminated food, national and international authorities have been struggling to deal with the consequences of a serious loss of public confidence in the safety of foods and in food safety policy–making institutions. One of the main ways in which governments and officials have responded to those challenges has been by initiating a broad range of structural and procedural reforms to the ways in which public policies are decided, legitimated and communicated. This paper outlines some of the more important respects in which national and international authorities have changed the ways in which they assess and manage the risks to human consumers of food–borne hazards. The focus is on developments in the …