ALMOST 60,000 cases of BSE could have been avoided had action to tackle the outbreak of mad-cow disease been taken earlier, a scientist is claiming.

And the amount of contaminated meat entering the food chain could have been reduced as soon as the cattle disease was spotted, says Professor Roy Anderson, one of the scientists advising the Government on BSE.

The mother of North Yorkshire CJD victim Adrian Hodgkinson, believed to have died through eating BSE-infected beef, said today she was not surprised by the revelation, and expected more as the judicial inquiry into the handling of the BSE crisis gets under way.

"It doesn't surprise me at all. Once somebody takes the lid off, it will keep squeaking," said Betty Hodgkinson, of Harrogate. "I just smile to myself and say "I told you so."

The professor's conclusions leave her wondering if her son might have avoided eating contaminated beef, and ultimately contracting new variant CJD, had the BSE problem in cattle been identified and tackled more quickly.

Speaking on a BBC2 programme, Mad Cows and Englishmen, to be broadcast next Sunday, Prof Anderson says BSE was discovered in 1985, but the connection leading to its identification was not made for another 14 months.

The programme claims that a junior pathologist at the central veterinary laboratory identified a spongy brain disease in a fresian cow from a farm near Midhurst, West Sussex, similar to scrapie in sheep in September, 1985.

But the connection was missed by senior officials until early 1987 when BSE was identified, delaying the introduction of a ban in the use of animal protein in cattle feed.

Prof Anderson says cases of BSE fell sharply after the beef ban was introduced and that had it been introduced earlier up to a third of the 170,000 cases of BSE diagnosed so far could have been prevented.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.