Brussels, 04/01/2001 (Agence Europe) - Conducting a mass slaughter in the European Union of cows over 30 months old that have not been screened for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to combat mad cow disease would be a waste, observed Margareta Winberg, Swedish Agriculture Minister, on Wednesday in Lisbon. She was commenting, on behalf of the BSE-exempt country that took up the rotating Council Presidency in January, on the measures decided by the Union to restore consumer confidence in beef and veal. Noting that the "buying-for-destruction" system would probably lead to the slaughter of healthy animals from countries lacking the capacity to test all the targeted animals, the Swedish Minister called this situation regrettable "in a world where 800 million people are dying of hunger".
Mrs Winberg also regretted that the Union is not tackling with the same energy the problem of smoking, a public health scourge that does far more harm to EU citizens than the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. "Tobacco and cigarettes kill some half a million people every year in the Union. But that doesn't seem to matter to us. We don't ban tobacco", she declared.