§ Mr. Clifton-BrownTo ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on the reasons why the Food Standards Agency are making representations to the Commission to ban the use of sheep intestines in sausages; and what scientific evidence his Department has collated on whether scrapie in sheep could mask the detection of BSE. [63676]
§ Ms BlearsI am advised by the Food Standards Agency that the Agency's Board endorsed a report on bovine spongiform eucephalopathy (BSE) and sheep from a core group of stakeholders at its meeting in Armagh on 13 June. It contained a recommendation that the European Commission be requested to add sheep intestine to the current list of specified risk material for sheep as an additional precautionary measure. The Board agreed the recommendation on the basis that the measure, added to the current controls, could reduce potential infectivity entering the food chain by up to two-thirds if BSE were found in sheep. Current precautionary measures are estimated to reduce risk by approximately one-third.
There is a theoretical risk that BSE exists in the national flock as some consumed the same type of feed that is thought to have infected cattle. A sheep apparently suffering from scrapie could instead be suffering from BSE as it is currently not possible to differentiate between the symptoms of the two diseases. In an Opinion issued in February 2001, the Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) of the European Union stated: 'the agent causing scrapie, the expression of clinical disease in scrapie-affected sheep, cannot currently be distinguished from BSE by any means other than biological strain typing of the agent responsible.' Bioassays in mice take up to two years to complete. It has only been possible to test a small sample of brains from sheep thought to have scrapie to determine whether a BSE-like strain is present.