§ Mr. LetwinTo ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, pursuant to the oral statement by the Minister of State of 20 April 1998,Official Report, column 570, what was the basis for his statement that the import of beef from animals aged over 30 months is banned. [40344]
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§ Mr. Rooker[holding answer 30 April 1998]: The Beef (Emergency Control) Order 1996 which came into force on 29 March 1996 banned the sale for human consumption of beef from animals over 30 months old at the time of slaughter, whether imported or home reared. These provisions are carried forward in The Fresh Meat (Beef Controls) (No. 2) Regulations 1996 which came into force on 1 September 1996. The only exceptions are if the beef comes from animals in the UK Beef Assurance Scheme or from animals born, reared and slaughtered in Argentina, Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Mauritius, Namibia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Poland, South Africa, Swaziland, Uruguay, USA or Zimbabwe, from which the Government consider that beef can be imported without risk. I apologise for implying during the Adjournment Debate that the prohibition applied to all imports.
§ Mr. LetwinTo ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, pursuant to his oral statement of 3 December 1997,Official Report, column 372, if he will set out the basis for his statement that no beef from animals under 30 months old was found to have infectivity in the ganglia relevant to BSE. [40346]
§ Mr. Rooker[holding answer 30 April 1998]: In the ongoing experiment to re-assess the parts of cattle which may contain BSE infectivity, the interim results of which have recently been published in The Veterinary Record, cattle were deliberately infected at four months of age by feeding them with BSE-infected brain tissue. Groups of cattle were then killed at regular intervals up to 40 months after the initial infection when the last animals were killed. Tissues collected from these animals were tested for infectivity by assay in mice.
In addition to the tissues originally shown to contain infectivity in naturally infected cattle (brain, spinal cord and eye), and classified as Specified Risk Material (SRM), infectivity was recently detected in the trigeminal ganglia and the dorsal root ganglia (DRG). The latter are closely adherent to the bones of the spinal column. This new information was considered fully and formed the basis of implementing the "beef on the bone" ban of 3 December. Trigeminal ganglia are contained in the skull, and are therefore already classified as SRM and excluded from both human and animal food chains. DRG were not however designated as SRM. The earliest point at which DRG were found to contain infectivity was 32 months after infection. This corresponded to the earliest time that brain and spinal cord became infectious in the same experiment. No infectivity was detected in DRG or trigeminal ganglia at any time before 30 months after infection.
The risk assessment that informed SEAC's deliberations on the risk associated with the consumption of DRG in cattle under 30 months of age attempted to estimate how many such animals could carry infectivity in the DRG and spinal cord. This was done not on the basis of time from exposure to detection of infectivity in DRG in the experiment, but on the interval between detection of infectivity and onset of clinical disease. That interval was three months, but for the basis of analyses we assumed it was seven months to give a margin of safety. Working back from the number of confirmed cases aged under 38 months detected on farm, it was possible to estimate how many would reach this critical stage before slaughter for human consumption at under 30 months. That number was three for 1998, but each infected DRG 303W represented a potential infectious dose to a consumer. Excluding the tail, there are on average 60 DRG in cattle, the largest weighing no more than 0.5g.