The only way of guaranteeing that the animal feed system is safe from potential contamination by bovine spongiform encephalopathy is to ban ruminant protein from all animal feed, says a senior United Nations animal health specialist.
Andrew Speedy, a senior official in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s animal production and health division, said in an interview June 5 that the Canadian detection and tracing system has worked well in the current BSE incident.
“The identification of a single case of BSE is not a cause for panic,” he said in a statement issued from FAO head offices in Rome.
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“It is good news that odd single cases of BSE are being picked up by inspection …. It demonstrates that active surveillance is picking up the one-in-a-million case.”
However, Speedy said Canada can and should make some changes in its regulations for the feed industry.
Nervous system material and other risky materials including brains, eyes and tonsils should be removed from all beef carcasses over one year old and not allowed into the rendering process, he said.
“I think this is the most important step Canada could take to improve the safety and security of its system.”
And there must be absolute guarantees that pig and chicken feed containing ruminant protein cannot be accessible to cows or in contact with cow feed.
“Where this cannot be achieved, the use of meat and bone meal in animal feeds should be banned altogether,” said the FAO.
“We pussyfoot a bit around this issue, but really, the only absolute way to be safe and to be able to guarantee safety is to ban it altogether,” he said.
The FAO said since 2001, at least eight countries have had isolated BSE incidents and there has been no widespread reporting of infection.
“This is the result of effective government programs to find and destroy the disease,” said Speedy.
He said the key to containing BSE is “keeping dangerous material out of the food chain and not amplifying the risk through feeding it back to animals.”
