” “Ten years’ delay” “

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy ( BSE) is a degenerative disease of the brain that fatally strikes the central nervous system of cattle. BSE belongs to the group of Transmittable Spongiform Encephalopathies ( TSE). It was diagnosed for the first time in the United Kingdom in 1986, rapidly reaching epidemic proportions due to the presence in cattle feeds of meal from meat residues and bones derived from animal carcasses. In the UK, some 400 cases of BSE were registered in the course of 1987, but their number shot up to over 37,000 in 1992; they then fell back to just over 3400 in 1997. Overall, it is calculated that up to last year BSE affected a total of just under 200,000 cattle. In other European countries that imported livestock or meat or bone animal feeds from the UK the number of cases has not risen above the figure of 1325, 90% of them reported in Ireland, Switzerland and Portugal. The disease is now in rapid decline (-90% over the last seven years). The mechanism of contagion. The diseases of the TSE group are caused by an abnormal protein, called a prion, which is not decomposable in the brain tissue and therefore accumulates until it causes madness (hence the “mad cow” moniker) and then necrosis. Though scientific certainty about the prion agent exists both as regards scrapies, which affects sheep and which has been known since the eighteenth century, and as regards Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease (CJD), the spongiform encephalopathy that affects man, conflicting opinions still exist about whether the agent that causes TSE is only the prion or whether there exists a congenital link with “independent genetic information”. Animals are contaminated through the consumption of feeds containing infected meat residues and bone meals: in contrast to scrapies, there is no proof of either any horizontal contamination (from one animal to another) or vertical contamination (from one cow to her calf). Scrapies cannot be transmitted to man, whereas it seems probable that exposure to TSE may cause the new variant of CJD in man: the officially confirmed cases in Europe total about one hundred. The period of incubation may vary between two and seven years, but cases have been reported in which the incubation exceeded twelve years. The EU provisions. In spite of the suspicion that the British Government and the European Commission were already aware of the existence of the disease and its possible negative repercussions on human health as early as the late 1980s, the European Union only took its first practical provisions against the epidemic in 1994. Below we give a brief summary of the main legislative provisions so far adopted: 1994: prohibition to feed ruminants with protein derived from mammals; 1997: Regulations on the treatment of meal made from meat residues; 1988-2001: Provisions on epidemiological notification and control; 1998: Guidelines on the classification of countries by categories; 2000-2001: Regulations on the treatment of materials at specific risk; 2001: Temporary ban on meat and bone meals for livestock destined for human consumption; 2001: Ban on fish meal for the feed of ruminants; 2001: Tests on all cattle above the age of 30 months at the time of slaughter, except in Austria, Finland and Sweden; 2001: Regulation on the prevention, control and eradication of some diseases of the TSE group. G.A.G.