MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
EU almost free of ‘mad-cow’ plans to soften 1996 regulations
European Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner John Dalli The nightmare of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis – or Mad Cow Disease) is mercifully almost forgotten in the EU now. In total almost 200,000 cases of BSE were discovered in the EU. But there were only 67 cases last year and those were in very old animals probably infected many years ago.
The EU is therefore proposing to lift the remaining BSE regulations in place; for example, the requirement for an entire herd to be slaughtered if even one animal has the disease. It is now considered that destroying the infected animal and testing the rest of the herd would be enough of a safeguard.
The EU is also considering allowing pigs, chickens and fish to be fed flour derived from bovines, although it is still not considering lifting restrictions on feeding bovine-derived feedstuff to cattle.
“The European Union has made great progress in its battle against BSE and we are finally on the brink of eradicating the disease within the Union,” said European Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner John Dalli.
Fears that mad-cow was linked to a brain-wasting disease among humans who ate tainted beef sparked a panic in the 1990s and a decade-long EU ban on beef from Britain, the epicentre of the outbreak.
The EU slapped a total ban on exports of British live cattle in March 1996 at the height of the mad cow crisis, after London reported a link with a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, connected with eating BSE-tainted beef.
The EU lifted the ban on British beef in 2006.
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Read all commentsScientists say; „Mad cow disease (BSE) was first diagnosed in cattle in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1986... The spread of this disease in cattle is caused by feeding rendered material from infected cattle or sheep back to other cattle...“. However, mad cow disease (BSE) can be a naturally occurring disease, so not an infectious disease, so beef is safe in the all world. WHY? Because, about the BSE/ vCJD diseases; this was never justified scientifically! It was pure, math-model-driven science fiction. But it was pushed very vigorously by the British science establishment, which has never confessed to its errors... WHY? Because, in 1996, a variant form of CJD (vCJD) was discovered in small clusters in Britain. It was immediately suspected that the outbreak of BSE could be connected to the clusters of vCJD in humans. Because of the 100%mortality rate of both diseases, the British government issued a “Mad Cow Warning.” People were cautioned not to eat beef that may come from diseased cattle, for fear the disease could be transmitted to humans via the meat products they consumed. See more about the; BSE/ vCJD mathematical- models, see recent large three comments in Telegraph.co.uk
Jul 19th, 2010 - 09:43 am 0(www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7168326/Does-vCJD-still-pose-a-major-public-health-threat.html). See also other relationships (why great progress about BSE eradicating within the... EU?), according to my web www.bse-expert.cz and recent presentation at 29th World Veterinary Congress in Vancouver; Neurodegenerative Diseases and Schizophrenia as a Hyper or Hypofunction of the NMDA Receptors (www.bse-expert.cz/pdf/Veter_kongres.pdf).
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