§ Baroness Byfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will continue with their plan to establish a scrapie resistant sheep flock, following the recent case of a sheep with the genotype that is most resistant to the brain disease scrapie developing BSE after the infective prion was injected into its brain. [HL221]
§ Lord WhittyWhen the Government announced these emerging sheep research findings on 18 November we said we would continue to operate the National Scrapie Plan as normal pending advice from the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC). That remains the position. A subgroup of SEAC is meeting in early December to consider the findings. We will then review the situation in the light of SEAC's advice. The research project used intracerebral inoculation, and this is not a natural route of transmission for TSEs. It remains the case that no sheep of the most resistant (ARR/ARR) genotype has been confirmed as having developed a TSE in natural, non-experimental, conditions or experimentally through the oral transmission route.