The Canadian government is planning to ban the use of some high-risk animal tissues in the production of human food and animal feed, a senior official from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said June 30.
Acting CFIA vice-president Robert Carberry told a parliamentary committee that Canada will heed a recommendation from an expert panel, suggesting that specific risk materials such as brain, spinal cord, eyes and tonsils be excluded from the food chain.
They are potential carriers of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
“We expect to be announcing shortly a new policy on (specific risk materials),” he said.
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Implementing the ban will require changes in slaughterhouse procedures and will add costs to the industry.
Greater care will be required to ensure the spine is not broken apart before carving and to guarantee that banned tissues are disposed of properly.
The government also will consider other regulatory changes suggested by the expert panel, called in by Ottawa to review how the Canadian system handled the BSE episode.
Carberry said the review will look at a variety of issues ranging from surveillance and cattle tracing systems to more stringent feed controls.
Agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief cautioned that not all the changes can be made quickly, even if the government decides to follow the panel’s recommendations.
“We are determined to review and if necessary revise these policies as quickly as possible,” he told a June 27 news conference after the experts’ report was released. “However, we must realize that many of these changes are complex and require co-ordination and in some cases even harmonization with the provinces and with the industry and with our trading partners.”
The minister said changes will add costs to the system and in some cases, there may be a need to convince the United States to change its regulations since the North American beef industry is normally integrated.
The U.S. border has been closed to Canadian beef since May 20 after an Alberta cow was diagnosed with BSE.
Vanclief said new regulations could force Canadian provinces to improve inspection standards in their provincially regulated meat plants. The issue will be on the agenda when federal and provincial agriculture ministers meet in Winnipeg later this month.
Despite its recommendations for improvement, the international experts’ panel was effusive in its praise of the Canadian effort after May 20.
“In a very short time, Canadian experts have collected and assessed a level of information that exceeds the investigations done in most other BSE-affected countries,” they wrote. “This serves as a testament to the competence, capacity and dedication of effort of Canadian officials.”
