The United States must learn lessons from the European Union if it is to cope properly with BSE, the European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, Mr David Byrne, has said.
Senior Bush administration figures are now "more understanding" of the difficulties faced by the EU following the outbreak of the disease in the United Kingdom in 1996, he told The Irish Times.
Speaking during a two-day visit to Washington, Mr Byrne said the EU has made "huge progress" in dealing with BSE and other threats to food safety since 1999.
So far, there has been "an apparent lack of public concern" in the US to the discovery just before Christmas that the disease had been found in American cattle herds.
However, the outbreak has already fuelled demands that meat should be traceable back to an individual cow and farm, along with calls for mandatory ID tags for all US cattle. The clear lesson from the EU's experience, he said, is that consumers must get "transparent and consistent" information about the dangers, if any exist.
"One lesson we can learn from past experience is that conflicting messages are a major cause of destabilising consumer confidence in times of difficulty," he told US food companies.
In the EU, beef consumption levels have returned to pre-BSE levels, while he expressed confidence that cases would no longer be found "in a couple of years".
Dealing with genetically modified (GMO) food crops, Mr Byrne acknowledged the issue had created significant tensions between the Bush administration and the EU. The EU will, he said, approve two GMO food crops in the next few weeks, including sweetcorn from a Swiss bio-tech company - though both will have to be clearly labelled.
Despite US reservations, Mr Byrne said the EU's approach is "entirely appropriate - and indeed the only tenable way forward in the circumstances, given the weight of public resistance to GMOs. "Our consumers demand clear labelling and traceability as essential prerequisites. Perhaps attitudes will ameliorate over time and with clear choice available. The availability of GM foods with real benefits could help. But despite the protestations of the bio-tech industry, there appears to be no immediate evidence of any short to medium-term benefits," he said.
The US Department of Agriculture plans to increase 10-fold the number of cattle tested for BSE symptoms over a 12 to 18 month period beginning in June.
