Holy cow! It's BSE!

The Mad Cow disease has seized Europe. Now pigs, chicken, shrimp, turkey and salmon may come under the knife. VAIJU NARAVANE reports.

WITH MORE cases of Mad Cow disease being reported, in France, Spain, Ireland and Germany, a fear psychosis is beginning to grip Europe. Beef sales already down have fallen a further 40 per cent and Governments are being forced to negotiate subsidy packages with beef farmers, many of whom face financial ruin.

European Agriculture Ministers are to hold another special meeting on December 4, during which, the European Commission announced, it will propose a total, albeit ``temporary'', pan- European ban on animal-based feed. A 1994 ban on bone-meal for ruminants came into effect on August 1, 1996. Now that ban is likely to be extended to pigs, chicken, shrimp, turkey and salmon. Denmark, Britain and Portugal and now France have already imposed such a ban and Germany, which was one of the main opponents to such a measure, announced last week that it would follow suit.

The Commission is planning to propose a series of measures to control the spread of the disease and rebuild consumer confidence. They are likely to propose the removal from the food chain of all bovines over 30 months of age which have not undergone a prionic test and an improved labelling system which will clearly indicate the origin of the meat.

For Germany, which until last week believed it was BSE-safe, this has been a rude awakening. ``We should act on the principle that we face a real danger from Mad Cow disease,'' the German Health Minister, Andrea Fischer, admitted last week. Although six cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) had come to light in Germany these past few years, Berlin insisted the animals had been imported, when already contaminated, from Britain and Switzerland. And while Germany still has no reported case of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD), the human form of BSE, there is growing doubt about the veracity of these statistics.

With the headline ``The First German Infected?'', BZ, the popular Berlin daily, reported last Friday that a 60-year-old man hospitalised in Bad Homburg showed symptoms of CJD and butchers are reporting a drop in sales of up to 70 per cent and the prices of meat and live cattle have come tumbling down.

Bild, the popular German tabloid, has warned its readers off shrimp, turkey, salmon and other fish saying they too are raised on animal-based bone meal.

In Italy, where no BSE cases have been reported so far, the phenomenon of panic goes even further. In France for a game last week, the Squadra Azzura or the Italian national football team, insisted on a vegetarian menu. Beef has been removed from school lunches and its import, especially from France, has been banned. In Italy, beef sales have dropped 80 per cent this past week. The Agriculture Minister, Mr. Pecoraro Scanio, said: ``Identity cards for cattle could be ready by next January. This will make for greater transparency and give the consumer the guarantees he is seeking.''

The Spanish Government has decided it will carry out over 16,000 systematic tests on cattle in the Galice region where two cases of BSE have been revealed. Madrid has also announced it will invest a billion francs in a national plan to combat BSE.

The French are now mulling over the most recent, and what could be the most serious development so far. A cow in Brittany which died of BSE in October was born in May 1998. The animal was born after a ban on animal meat in cattlefeed, first imposed in 1990, was reinforced in 1996. This measure was expected to bring about a sharp decline in the epidemic as of 2001. The French Food Safety Commission which began enquiring into the case found that the brain of the animal did not correspond to the DNA of its presumed father. The mother, long since eaten, is not available and all they could lay hold of was the frozen sperm of the bull which presumably sired the calf through artificial insemination. This error is likely to add to the panic and confusion already surrounding the issue.

The entire Mad Cow phenomenon has revealed the seamier side of the European Union where national interest has dominated to the detriment of the common good. Germany and Spain, for instance, accused by the E.U. Health Commissioner, Mr. David Byrne, of ``arrogance'' have systematically opposed ``key legislation'' which would have ``drastically reduced the risk of BSE''.

The BSE crisis is expected to cost the E.U. well over a billion euros (almost $1 billion) a year (of an annual agriculture budget of 41.4 billion Euros). It does not want to further hurt either the beef farmers or the animal feed industry.

Most Agriculture Ministers are counting on E.U. funds to help them out of the financial crises created by the epidemic.

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