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Re: BSE panic ends.

In article <HINwQCAlrOdxEwUb@upthorpe.demon.co.uk> Oz <Oz@upthorpe.demon.co.uk> writes:

>In article <4l0s3d$p6d@news.informix.com>, Paul Roberts
><proberts@lynx.informix.com> writes
>>In article <bnDpLBAVPjcxEwN2@upthorpe.demon.co.uk>,
>>Oz  <Oz@upthorpe.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>The European Agriculture Commissioner, Frank Fischler stated to Reuters 
>>>yesterday that there was no health risk in eating British beef
>>
>>I suspect that it will take more than confident statements from Frank 
>>Fischler and the pseudonymous "Oz" to set minds at rest on this one.
>>Who was that British minister who fed his young daughter a beefburger 
>>for the benefit of TV cameras a year or two ago? I wonder how he feels now. 
>Not too bad, I expect. We are not all infected by hysteria you know.

After Fischler's statement the (UK) Daily Telegraph conducted a survey among 
his counterparts from each of the other EU countries. One or two were 
unavailable for comment, but all the rest said they would eat British Beef if 
offered it.

>> ......................... The disease was thought to have been 
>>caused by feeding cattle with infected foodstuffs. That practice was ended 
>>in 1988, but 18,000 cases of BSE have been reported since, and even the
>>Ministry of Agriculture suspects that cases are under-reported.

>Well, see, there's this thing about it taking five to ten years after
>infection before clinical symptoms appear, and it is generally accepted
>that some feed in store etc was used up to 1990. I could go on, but many
>readers in several of the groups posted have heard it all before.
>Needless to say the decline is exactly what the Govt epidemiologists
>prediced in 1988, so surprise surprise.

I've heard that view before but I'm struggling to think what feed manufactured 
before the ban 7/88 might still be usable in or upto 1990.

The expiry date on compound cattle feed is generally 3 months from 
manufacture, the only things I can think of with even a one year shelf life 
are some mineral supplements (no animal protein) or some calf milk replacers. 
I know of no calf milk containing meat & bone meal (as defined by SEAC) - 
surely people aren't suggesting the milk powder and/or tallow in calf milk 
replacers carry BSE?

Many other people seem to have assumed that simply because it was permitted to 
use ruminant meat etc in ruminant feeds that everyone manufacturing cattle 
feed did do so. Clearly there are going to be exceptions where for a variety 
of reasons cattle feed was manufactured without meat & bone meal even during 
the '81-88 period when the "infection" was supposed to have been propagating.

Andy
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