Letter: Beef: `meat products' may be infected, but only a few people wi ll ever get CJD

Sir: Following reports in the Lancet of CJD in British teenagers (October 1995) I wrote to my son's headmaster suggesting that a non-beef alternative be always available. It is to the credit of Clifton College that they adopted this proposal at once. I now discover, to my horror, that pork sausages can legally contain up to 20 per cent beef, and that ingredient labelling is not required by law, so those parents who have been enlightened enough to ignore government reassurances on BSE now find that they have been misled by inadequate controls on the labelling of food products.

Dr Robin Russell Jones, FRCP

Stoke Poges,

Buckinghamshire