The parents of North Yorkshire CJD victim Adrian Hodgkinson called today for senior civil servants to lose their pensions as a damning report on the BSE crisis was published.

Barry and Betty Hodgkinson, of Harrogate, also said that prosecutions should be considered for civil servants or senior politicians if the report exposed evidence of criminal negligence.

"If people in any other job, such as a policeman or a fireman, are negligent, they get the sack and get their pension taken away from them. Why not these people?" said Mrs Hodgkinson, whose son died aged 25 in 1997.

Meanwhile, former York microbiologist Dr Stephen Dealler, who warned in the Evening Press in 1994 that BSE posed a threat to the health of millions of people, said he felt fully vindicated by the report.

He spoke of the intense pressure he came under as he refused to stay silent over the risks to humans of a new form of CJD, or Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, and of his hopes that he may have saved lives by speaking out. "I would like an apology," he said.

But he knew that many other scientists had been silenced, and concluded: "You cannot rely on whistle-blowing scientists to keep us safe."

York MP Hugh Bayley said the Evening Press had been one of the first newspapers in the country to voice the fear that BSE could jump between species, after being alerted by him.

"At the time the Evening Press reported it, long before most people realised the science of it, everybody threw up their hands and said it was ridiculous scaremongering.

"I welcome this publication. Governments in this country and abroad need to learn the lessons of this episode to protect public health in the future."

The 16-volume report by BSE inquiry chairman Lord Justice Phillips, which follows a £27 million inquiry which has spanned the past two-and- a-half years, was expected to strongly criticise senior politicians including Tory Agriculture Minister John Gummer, who famously tried to feed his daughter a burger to quell public fears at the height of the scare.

The report says scientists' warnings about the threat of BSE were not heeded, and the Conservative Government did not act quickly enough to alert consumers when evidence started to emerge that humans were being infected.

It also focuses on government failures to enforce abattoir controls which were designed to ensure that any potentially BSE-infected beef was removed from the food chain.

The publication came as the Consumers' Association warned that there were still "uncertainties" over controls aimed at preventing transmission of the infection to humans, and the crisis was still not over.

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