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"Hopefully by the end of the century we will be down to a very low level indeed, maybe we'll have no cases at all"

That's Keith Meldrum, Chief Veterinary Officer speaking on Countryfile in February 1990. In the same interview he insists it would be "a very brave man" who makes such predictions.

In fact he was right. In the Midlands at least BSE reached it's highpoint in 1992 with 2902 cases. This year there will be none at all. Across the country cases peaked at 36,682 falling to just nine this year.

In fact the methods used to detect BSE have changed over the years, it's likely we'd find a lot more cases in 1992 if we used today's standards.

So clearly the measures put in place to control the disease and to protect cattle, sheep and of course people have worked. Much of the work done on the disease and the controls needed was done here in the Midlands at a Ministry farm near Drayton in Warwickshire.

It was here researchers established that transmission from mother to calf was low risk as was milk and contact with cattle. But that if the conditions were right then you'd need little more than a fingernail sized piece of infectious agent to give1000 cattle with BSE. The work became even more important after 1996 when the link between BSE and another disease in humans, CJD, was confirmed.

Today the measures created because of the Drayton research are still in place and indeed it costs millions worldwide to make sure meat is safe. It may be that one day they will be relaxed. In the meantime the work at Drayton came to an end this year, but there are 1.4 million samples from the farm stored in giant freezers at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Surrey.

As BSE disappears, these samples will be hugely important to train future generations of vets and researchers in what to look for and to help understand more about this terrible disease.

More than 20 years later Keith Meldrum's prediction was pretty much right, the expensive measures taken seem to have worked. Too often when reporting science we don't look back to give credit where it's due. Tackling BSE wasn't easy and the measures introduced still have an impact and a cost today. But thanks to the research done at Drayton we were spared something that could have been so much worse.

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