Neither disease affects fish, chicken, vegetables, fruit, eggs, alcoholic beverages, confectionery or soda. If you avoid burgers or pies or any other meat product whose provenance cannot be identified by the naked eye, you cannot catch CJD. The whole point of eating identifiable cuts of meat, like steaks or roasting joints is that you can know for certain that they contain no brain or spinal tissue; it is in the area of mechanically reclaimed meat that there is a very slight danger.

Failure to understand these simple facts has had some astonishing effects. The part of Britain affected by Foot and Mouth is small and it affects 1% of our farms and the whole of our agricultural industry is only some 3% of the economy which, by my calculation, shows that 0.3% of the economy is affected.

The industry that has been most hurt is tourism. Now I have never, ever seen an American tourist rambling on one of our rural paths but I daresay there is one such now and again; and these people will be disappointed by the fact that all of our footpaths in the countryside are closed. Perhaps that was a propaganda mistake but it was thought at the outbreak of the disease to be a reasonable precaution.

So it may have been but the hysterical knock-on could not have been foreseen: bookings from the USA are heavily down at the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford; hardly any Americans are visiting the great country town of Bath; takings are down in London's casinos.

I live in a Sussex village of some 4,000 people, surrounded by farm land and because I hardly ever go for country walks my life has not been affected in the slightest by the disease except that the price of meat has been somewhat unscrupulously raised; I say unscrupulously because almost all of it is imported from the European Union and is produced at a fixed subsidy which I help pay for already through taxation.

Of course, it isn't solely the fault of the American-based media.

On the Saturday after the first case was notified The Independent printed a banner headline "Britain closed" which was clearly nonsense but the pyres of slaughtered animals has affected our judgment badly. Now the British Prime Minister has delayed elections, suspended the democratic process not because of the damage being done to the economy but because of sentiment. Not because of agriculture but because of tourism.

I have often in this column advocated a stronger, global force in public broadcasting to try to handle public affairs responsibly but the BBC's domestic service has been as bad as any. It is time for those badly affected by the hysteria to stop expecting compensation from the tax payer, they should file civil actions against media which blatantly fail to report truthfully and fairly.

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