AS THE number of cases of BSE continue to fall here, there has been a general welcome for the decision of the EU to increase the age at which cattle must be tested for the disease at slaughter.
At present, all healthy slaughtered cattle aged above 30 months and all cattle above 24 months deemed to be at risk of catching bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) must be tested.
From January next, the test will only be given where animals are over 48 months old in 15 EU states, including Ireland, which had applied for the concession.
The cost of testing for the disease has been carried by the farmers and the industry. The Irish Farmers Association said this week the change in the law will result in savings of €20 a head, or €8 million a year.
IFA deputy president Derek Deane urged Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith to implement the new measure as soon as possible, to ease the financial burden.
The latest BSE figures for Ireland published at the weekend showed that no cases were confirmed this week and that the total so far this year stands at 17.
The total number of confirmed cases in 2007 was 25. This compares with 41 for 2006, with 69 for 2005, 126 in 2004, 182 in 2003 and 333 in 2002, the highest on record.
More than 4.36 million tests for BSE have been carried out up to the end of 2006 under the active surveillance programme run by the Department of Agriculture with an additional 847,000 tests carried out during 2007.
On Friday, Britain’s Food Standards Agency said it supported the proposal to lift the age limit for testing for the disease.
It said the change would mean “a minimal to negligible increase in the risk to human health”, according to an advisory panel of the agency which looks at a range of diseases, including BSE.
Britain, where the disease was first identified in the 1980s, had 67 cases of the disease last year, down from a peak of about 37,000 animals in 1992.
In 1996, the British authorities found a possible link between eating infected meat and a new variant of the fatal human condition, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, known as vCJD. The National CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh estimates that 164 people have died from vCJD in the UK. Four people have died from the disease in Ireland since scientists found it was possible to get a human form of it.