UPDATE - Britain says tests for BSE in sheep flawed
Date: 19-Oct-01
Country: UK
In a news release issued late Wednesday, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said tests on Britain's current sheep flock had so far yielded no evidence of mad cow disease, but said earlier research on samples taken in the 1990s might be flawed.
Agriculture minister Elliot Morley told parliament yesterday that there was significant contamination.
"The DNA testing, which didn't come back until this week did demonstrate that there was serious contamination in relation to the sample that was set and..it was predominantly bovine material."
The questions raised had forced the government's Spongiforn Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) to postpone a meeting, scheduled for Friday, which would have presented results from the research.
"It's not surprising in that respect that SEAC have cancelled their meeting scheduled for Friday until we can...evaluate the situation carefully," Morley said.
DEFRA said it has commissioned an independent scientific audit.
Separate work by the Veterinary Laboratories Agency on 180 scrapie-infected brains of sheep from the current UK flock had detected no presence of BSE, DEFRA said.
The government has said there is a theoretical risk that BSE (Bovine Spongiforn Encephalopathy) could be masked by scrapie - a similar type of disease believed to pose no threat to human health.
In September the government published a BSE contingency plan that said Britain might face the destruction of its entire 40 million sheep flock if mad cow disease was found to be capable of jumping species naturally.
The plan was commissioned after a government inquiry into mad cow disease found that ministers had been "wrong footed" when scientists said in 1996 that BSE was linked to the deadly human form, variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease.
"There is still a theoretical risk that BSE could be in sheep and so the contingency plan still stands," the spokesman said.