Flogging a drugged horse story

Radio Review: Hands up anyone who doesn't now secretly fancy themselves as a bit of a horse-doping expert - most of us can now even pronounce zuclopenthixol, though admittedly it's hard to slip it into casual conversation.

On radio this week the pro-Cian O'Connor camp pointed to the teeny tiny amounts of banned substances that showed up in the horse's blood, while the more black and white among us couldn't quite get beyond the idea that, just as you can't be a little bit pregnant, a horse can't be a little bit drugged.

For MEP and president of the Equestrian Federation of Ireland, Avril Doyle, the gold medal was "tarnished", an expression that gained currency during the week because it's a nicer way of saying what it really implies - that O'Connor is now tarnished.

Such was the insatiable interest in flogging the drugged horse story that callers to Pat Kenny (RTÉ 1, Wednesday) wondered why the programme wasn't covering it. The ins and outs had, Kenny very reasonably said, been well covered just about everywhere else, particularly on Morning Ireland, and he was right to resist the obvious temptation to line up yet more veterinary experts to tell the same story.

The best comment on the saga was Mario Rosenstock's hilarious parody of the Bob Dylan ballad Hurricane on Breakfast with Ian Dempsey (Today FM, Wednesday). His Horse of Cain is a Gift Grub classic, though it is dispiriting that a three-minute slot on one station is the only satirical comment on radio. There were other comic moments during the week, of course - Senator David Norris flippantly commenting on Vincent Brown (RTÉ 1, Monday) that as priests don't seem to have any problem blessing tractors "it wouldn't kill them to throw a few prayers over a couple of gays" - but it's not quite same as having a fully-fledged weekly comedy programme. It's not as if material for a satirical programme isn't in plentiful supply.

There wasn't much to even smile about on the normally upbeat Mooney Goes Wild, (RTÉ 1, Saturday). "It always worries me," said Tom McSweeney, "when man takes it into his own hands to decide what nature should do." The station's marine correspondent was talking about the mass slaughter of seals on Beginish, one of the Blasket Islands, but really his sentiment could have prefaced all the animal-related stories on the airwaves this week.

As a long-time journalist who has covered war zones around the world, McSweeney said he would put the carnage on the island as number three in the list of the horrific sights he has witnessed. Images of some the 60 dead seals had been shown on the news the previous night but they had decided not to show several images on the grounds that they were simply too gruesome. It was as if "a maniac had been let loose on the island".

Presenter Derek Mooney said that in his 20 or so years as a broadcaster, it was the first time colleagues had stopped him and had asked him not to cover a story because it was too upsetting.

A far more devastating example of what can happen when humans decide to interfere with nature was the story of the young man in the Dublin hospital with vCJD. Regrettably it wasn't reported quite like that. The man has, all the bulletins on every station I listened to kept reminding us, "the human form of mad cow disease".

Donald Simms didn't use that unnecessarily cruel and degrading label when, on The Last Word (Today FM, Wednesday), he described to Matt Cooper how his son, Jonathon, is still living with vCJD having contracted the devastating neurological disease two years ago as a teenager. The interview was an example of what ordinary people do when confronted with extraordinary situations. The father, who is a carer for his tragically afflicted son, is now a self-taught expert on the subject - he fought through the courts for experimental treatment believing from his own research that pentosan polysulphate, a treatment for scrapie (a fatal, degenerative disease that affects sheep and goats), might help. Contrary to all medical predictions, his son is now in a stable condition, his father said, advising the parents of the Dublin boy not to give up hope.

Coming at the story from several angles, Cooper interviewed a lawyer, which at first seemed a lateral step too far, until it emerged that the families of vCJD sufferers in France are now suing both the French government and UK meat exporters in an effort to seek compensation for their loss.

Health experts predict that, based on UK statistics, up to 10 more cases of the disease could emerge in this country, so maybe in the interest of sensitivities to those afflicted, the reporting terminology could be changed. If zuclopenthixol now trips off the tongue, maybe it is not unreasonable to expect that we could handle something as simple to say as variant CJD and kill off the perjorative mad cow.