Irish authorities should learn lessons from the British inquiry, particularly on the need to inform the public of health risks as they emerge, according to Dr Patrick Wall, chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
When risks were not known, Dr Wall said this should have been admitted by the UK authorities. "It was not right to reassure consumers when scientists did not really know the risks," he said.
Asked if the Irish authorities had acted in a similar way on the problem, Dr Wall said BSE was on a much smaller scale here. "But could the communication have been better? I think you can never have too much communication." Dr Wall warned the vCJD crisis would not go away. "We just don't know how many more people will get the disease," he said. Scientists had found that humans could incubate vCJD for up to 10 years. One person has died of the disease in the Republic, compared to 77 in the UK.
Improved controls were being introduced all the time, Dr Wall said. Active surveillance was recently introduced to screen casualty animals as well as older animals and animals that have died on farms.
People were understandably angry in the UK because the facts were hidden from them, he said.
A spokesman for the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, said the Minister could not comment on the report until he studied it thoroughly. Asked if the Irish Government could be accused of having played down the risks of BSE, the spokesman said Mr Walsh could not answer that yet.
The situation in Britain was different, as it was on a much bigger scale, he noted. Ireland had just 522 cases of BSE to date while Britain had more than 170,000 cases. Irish controls were "far more exhaustive" than British ones, he added.
From the beginning, entire herds were slaughtered here when a BSE case was found, while Britain just slaughtered the infected animal. The UK had dropped its rendering temperature for the production of meat and bonemeal while Ireland did not do this. By reducing the temperature, BSE could have been transmitted in the meat and bonemeal which was fed to animals.
The Republic has banned the import of cattle and bovine products from Britain and has an extensive series of controls in place, up to and after slaughter, he said.
However, Mr Peter Dargan, Consumers' Association spokesman on food, said the Irish authorities had played down the crisis to the same extent as Britain. "It's the biggest scandal in my lifetime," he claimed.
The threat of BSE crossing the species barrier was known in the late 1980s yet the public was being told there was no risk, he said. The meat and bonemeal ban should have been introduced earlier.
An Irish Farmers' Association spokesman said the organisation would not be commenting as it was a British report and had no bearing on the Irish situation.
