For a short time, before anyone could even guess at the scale of the catastrophe about to unfold, it was called simply Pitsham Farm Syndrome.

Hidden by trees in the sleek South Downs landscape just south of Midhurst, Pitsham Farm is an unlikely candidate for any kind of notoriety.

But it was there vet David Bee arrived on December 22, 1984, to treat a cow with a set of symptoms neither he or anyone else had seen before.

A general practice vet based on the Sussex-Hampshire border, he was used to treating cattle on the farms dotted about his patch.

What confronted him that winter day, however, was peculiar and for want of any other description he called it Pitsham Farm Syndrome. Later, much later, Mr Bee's syndrome would become infamous as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, popularly BSE or Mad Cow Disease.

The crisis that followed his encounter with the unknown 16 years ago was to become Britain's costliest peacetime disaster.

Eighty-four people have so far died of the human form of BSE. It has cost British and EU taxpayers £3.5 billion.

A once proud industry came close to ruin. The country was turned into an international laughing stock.

The animal Mr Bee was called to examine was to become known, in typically unemotional officialise, as Cow 133. It remains the first recorded case of BSE in Britain.

By the end of April six cows were dead, some of the bodies fed to the dogs of the Petworth Hunt.

Mr Bee began to think the deaths might have been caused by some kind of poison, although it was unlikely on a farm that kept its cattle fit and looking good.

He said: "There was one day I thought I had cracked it. I had been reading in a book about mercury poisoning and I thought that has got to be it."

Tests for mercury, and for lead, were negative. He also checked whether the strange illness he had on his hands could have been caused by organophosphates, still believed by some as a possible cause of BSE.

By August that year, another two cows were dead but the disease had run its course at Pitsham Farm, never to reappear.

Mr Bee said: "Even at that stage it was not thought to be something new. It was just something I had not seen before and no one else too. From my point of view it was a one-herd condition, so not something in any way that would affect any number of cows."

The events at Pitsham Farm rankled until the eureka moment two years later at a veterinary conference in Nottingham.

He was listening as fellow vet Colin Whitaker described a mystery illness that had struck a herd of cattle near Ashford, Kent.

Mr Bee said: "He said to the conference 'I have got this new disease' and described it, and I said to him I have seen that, and told him what my cases had been."

The official buck-passing and doublespeak that was to characterise the whole BSE disaster was quick to follow. Colin Whitaker began lecturing on the new disease, describing the symptoms as "scrapie-like".

A senior, never named, official at the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF) requested he drop the reference to scrapie, a brain disease of sheep known about for 250 years.

Mr Bee said: "I think there was an element in the ministry that was manic not to cause alarm and I think the balance between safeguarding our industry and safeguarding the health of the nation has perhaps not been quite right."

Cows need extra protein to produce the volumes of milk demanded by modern agriculture. Soya and fishmeal are the preferred supplement, but in their absence the industry uses bone and meat products.

In the Seventies rendering plants in Britain changed the way they processed carcasses into feed for animals.

Urged on by MAFF to cut costs and use every scrap of offal in feed, they stopped processing at high temperatures, allowing the agent that caused scrapie into feed.

The rendering theory is still disputed but, nevertheless, letting scrapie into feed is almost certainly what allowed the disease to make its first leap across the species barrier.

By 1993, there were 100,000 infected cattle in Britain. The same year, the Government's Chief Medical Officer gave his second assurance BSE was unlikely to have any implications for human health.

In November 1995, the human form of BSE - new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) - claimed its first known casualty, 19-year-old Stephen Churchill.

Ten months later, the crisis reached its high point as ministers introduced new controls to stop the spread of BSE, quickly followed by the EU ban on exporting British beef products.

Today Mr Bee, a cheerful 50-year-old, and a reader at his local church in West Liss, near Petersfield, is still practising as a country vet, still visiting the farms around Midhurst where he first saw the disease.

His own view, shared by many vets, is that BSE has been with us, unrecorded, for a long time and will continue to infect cattle now and again.

The blame for the human form of the disease lies with mechanically-recovered meat in food, something "any decent society" would not tolerate.

Waiting to give evidence at the inquiry, he listened as the father of one victim of new variant CJD described how his daughter was dying, pricking the conscience of the vet who first encountered BSE.

He said: "I was just horrified that could have happened and probably it came from BSE in cows. I don't think I could have done anything more but I felt guilty I did not do anything more because it is just awful."

John Major and Margaret Thatcher's governments were today cleared of failing the public in their handling of the BSE crisis.

The long awaited report on the £27 million BSE public inquiry by Lord Phillips concluded that most ministers and civil servants who dealt with the crisis "emerged with credit".

But it highlighted a number of shortcomings too.

Bureaucratic process and "lack of rigour" from officials led to unacceptable delays in turning policy to protect the public into practical measures.

The lengthy reports concludes: "The Government did not lie to the public about BSE." But it said the campaign of reassurance that beef was safe was a mistake.