In one of the greatest blunders in the history of UK government science, researchers at the world-famous Institute of Animal Health laboratories in Edinburgh spent the entire duration of the £217,000 ( $311,000 ) test programme wrongly analysing cow’s brains, leaving consumers no nearer to knowing whether they should have any concerns about eating lamb.

The mix-up is doubly embarrassing for the UK government as interim results from the test programme, released during the summer, appeared to show that the ‘sheep’ brains contained BSE. The Agriculture Minister, Elliot Morley, also caused widespread consternation in the farming community by suggesting that all Britain’s 40 million sheep might have to slaughtered if interim findings were borne out by the final test results.

How the mix up came to happen will now be the subject of two enquiries, one by the Institute of Animal Health and one by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – the former Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). Early indications are however that the samples somehow became mislabelled between the collection of an original sample of 2,867 sheep’s brains in the early 1990s, and the instigation of the test programme in 1997.

The mistake came to light after the Director of the government laboratory responsible for the collection of the sheep brains – the Laboratory of the Government Chemist – expressed his concerned that the samples used by the Edinburgh laboratory were ‘probably’ contaminated with bovine matter, as the brains had been collected in abattoirs where cattle were also slaughtered. In fact, when the results were double-checked by the Laboratory of the Government Scientist, it was found that the sheep’s brains had never been present in the first place. ‘They were bovine, not ovine’, the laboratory said.

Postscript: The government’s handling of the announcement of the mix-up itself came in for heavy criticism last week. Most unusually, the laboratory’s findings were posted on the website of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at 10.30pm in the evening – too late for MPs to table questions during a Commons select committee on the environment, food and rural affairs, earlier in the day - even though they were then known by the Environment Minister, Margaret Beckett.  The posted findings also failed to mention the fact that cow's brains had been used instead of those of sheep.