Brussels, 14/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - Consulted by the European Commission on measures that should be taken in case of the appearance of sheep affected by BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the Union's Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) has just made public its preventative assessment of the risk for human health. It considers that, as we stand, the scientific community has not enough information to draw conclusions on the potential health risk, but does not rule out the risk of contamination.
The SSC confirms that, to date, no "mad sheep" has been identified on the ground. However, given the possibility of BSE transmission to certain groups of ovines and caprines has been seen in laboratory conditions and that it cannot be ruled out that animal meal has been unduly fed to sheep (meat meal has been banned in the Union since 1 October 2000 for all ruminants, but the effective implementation of this by Member states leave much to be desired), the SSC reaffirms (as it did in an opinion of 1998), that one has to set out from the hypothesis that BSE may have contaminated part of the ovine and caprine population in the Union). As a result, the scientific committee recommends to: 1) start gathering the information necessary for the correct assessment of the possible prevalence of BSE with ovines from a country or region; 2) improve and intensify the monitoring of ovine herds in view of developing a rapid screening test allowing to distinguish BSE from scrapie in sheep (the clinical signs of BSE can be hard to distinguish from scrapie, endemic disease in the ovine population in most of the Member States, but which does not threaten human health); 3) introduce a system of individual identification of sheep; 4) certify to status of herds of small ruminants with regards to BSE.
Having examined the latest data available concerning the distribution, in laboratory, of the risk of BSE infection in the bodies of ovine and caprine, SSC notes a more general distribution of infection in the tissue of ovine than in bovines. Thus it concludes that in case of the appearance of BSE in sheep, the list of risk ovine tissues, to be eliminated for the human food chain, will be longer that in bovines.