LONDON -- Mad-cow disease may have disappeared from Britain's front pages, but few people here will soon forget the 1990 image of John Gummer, the Tory agriculture minister, trying to feed a beefburger to his reluctant four-year-old daughter.

She wisely refused to touch the burger, but Mr. Gummer took a big bite himself and declared it "absolutely delicious," part of the government's effort to reassure the public that there was no danger in eating beef despite growing fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

Six years later, the government was forced to admit a link between BSE and the devastating neurological disorder called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That led to a crisis for agriculture, a loss of confidence in government and a continuing cost to the treasury.

"This is a hugely costly disease, not just in terms of agriculture but everything that's related to it," said Peter Jinman, president of the British Veterinary Association. So far, there have been 134 confirmed or probable cases of the variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob in Britain, and almost all the pople have died.

Mr. Jinman said statistics bearing witness to the fight against the disease continue to be encouraging, showing that Britain is on the road to eradicating it.

At the peak of the epidemic in 1993, 1,000 new animals a week were suspected of having BSE. Now, the figure is down to only 25. Since its inception in the mid-1980s, almost 180,000 cattle have been diagnosed as having the disease and killed.

The number of confirmed cases in Britain totalled 450 last year, down from 781 the previous year and from more than 14,000 cases in 1995.

The sharp drop has been due to the tough measures taken to stop the disease's spread, particularly a ban on using recycled bone and meat in animal feed. To stop the spread to humans, slaughterhouses must discard tissue seen as particularly susceptible to BSE, including spinal cord, tonsils and brain.

Bowing to concern that the disease is more likely to show up in older animals, the government has also banned the sale for beef of all cattle over the age of 30 months. Dairy cows previously slaughtered for meat are now destroyed and incinerated.

Under that program, more than 5.8 million animals have been slaughtered, at a cost of more than £1.9-billion ($4-billion) to British taxpayers, although the government is in the process of reviewing the measure in light of the disease's decline. London has also lifted its ban on the sale of beef on the bone.

A spokesman for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said he believes beef consumption has "more or less come back to what it was" before the crisis, yet "hardly anything" in the way of beef is exported from Britain, despite the lifting of the European Union's export ban a few years ago. The crisis of confidence remains.

Britain's tourism industry took a huge hit from mad-cow disease and, more recently, from a widespread foot-and-mouth epidemic. It got so bad, with the number of foreign visitors down between 10 and 20 per cent in the spring of 2001, that government ministers were dispatched abroad to try to head off fears that Britain had become an unsafe tourist destination.

Only months earlier, a public inquiry led by former conservative prime minister John Major had criticized government officials for playing down the risk of the ailment. The report, which took more than two years to compile, blamed poor communication and bureaucratic delays for allowing the disease to spread as widely as it did.

Although the report criticized government officials who feared consumer panic and economic harm to farmers, it denied there had been any deliberate cover-up.

"The government did not lie to the public about BSE," the report said. "It believed that the risks posed by BSE to humans were remote."

Mr. Jinman of the veterinary association said he finds it "fascinating" that a case of mad-cow disease has turned up in Canada. He said that attention will certainly shift to cases of chronic wasting disease, a similar ailment discovered among elk in Canada and the United States.

He added that despite the enormous amount of research done on BSE in Britain and abroad, much remains unknown.