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WSWS : News & Analysis : Medicine & Health : BSE/CJD
Britain: Report highlights BSE danger from infected sheep
By Barry Mason
21 January 2002
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The risk to humans developing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
(vCJD) could be far greater if the brain-wasting disease Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) has entered the sheep population.
This was the conclusion of a study published in the British science
magazine Nature on January 10.
The study was carried out by researchers working in the infectious
diseases department of Imperial College London led by Professor Neil
Ferguson.
BSE in cattle, also known as “mad cow disease”, is believed to have
been spread by the practice of feeding cows the rendered remains of
slaughtered cattle and other livestock. Until legislation banned the
practice, sheep
were also fed the same material.
Since it began in the late 1980s, the BSE epidemic has infected nearly 180,000 cattle.
At its height in 1992 over 36,000 cattle had the disease. Numbers have now declined
with around 700 cases last year.
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—the human form of BSE—is transmitted by eating
infected meat or other animal products. Since 1995, 104 mainly young people have died
of the disease, with nine more people currently diagno
sed as suffering from this terminal and incurable condition. The eventual number of
people who could be affected is still an unknown, because of the extremely long
incubation period for the disease. There also remains the
possibility of a second wave of infection via human-to-human transmission as a result
of surgical procedures. Since the infective agent, the BSE prion, is extremely
difficult to destroy, the usual sterilisation methods u
sed on surgical instruments do not eradicate it.
The researchers at Imperial College considered three possible scenarios if BSE has
passed into the national sheep flock. The worst possible case considered the effect of
BSE spreading both within and between sheep flocks.
The study’s median scenario projected the spread only within a flock, while the
best-case scenario investigated what would happen if it spread neither between nor
within flocks. Sophisticated mathematical models were dev
ised to predict the possible effects on the human population.
In the worst case, the study predicts that 150,000 people could die as a result of
eating infected sheep meat. This figure is three times higher than the worse case
scenario of human deaths from vCJD contracted from eatin
g contaminated beef.
It has not yet been shown whether sheep have in fact contracted the disease. The
report is based on the assumption that BSE has passed from cattle to sheep and has
been spreading from sheep to sheep. Many scientists think
that such a cross over from cattle, and its subsequent spread within sheep, is a
possibility. Professor Neil Ferguson said, “In some ways I’d be surprised if BSE
wasn’t found in sheep.”
One difficulty detecting BSE in sheep is that sheep are also subject to a
brain-wasting disease known as scrapie. This has been in the sheep population for 200
years and is considered harmless to humans. Currently there i
s no test to distinguish between BSE and scrapie in sheep.
Studies have shown that BSE in sheep behaves differently to the disease in cattle. It
infects a wider range of sheep tissues at an earlier age. There are fears that BSE in
sheep could mimic scrapie, which passes easily by
horizontal infection from sheep to sheep.
Under current legislation, the ban on sheep offal is not as extensive as that on
cattle offal, some of the most infective material. With sheep under 12 months old,
only the spleen has to be removed before the carcass can
enter the human food chain. For sheep older than one year, the skull, brain, eyes,
tonsils and spinal chord are banned, but not the lymph nodes or intestines (as in
cattle).
Professor Ferguson said, “The current risk from sheep could be greater than that from
cattle, due to the more intensive controls in place to protect human health from
exposure to infected cattle, as compared with sheep.”
In a newspaper article in August last year, former government advisor Dr Richard
Kimberlin warned of the potential danger from BSE-infected sheep: “We now know that
several tissues from BSE-infected sheep, including lymph
nodes, pose a greater risk than the same tissues from infected cattle”.
The Imperial College team says that banning all internal sheep organs from the human
food chain would reduce the health risk by 90 percent.
Frances Hall, secretary of the Human BSE Foundation, said, “If it is in sheep, people
could have been eating contaminated meat for years.” Frances, whose son Peter died
from vCJD in 1996, added, “It’s very sad to think mo
re families might be having to go through the same nightmare we’ve gone through
needlessly”.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has begun a
programme to screen sheep. Professor Tim Lang of Thames Valley University, who had
written widely on food safety, is concerned about the suita
bility of Defra to conduct such a study. “One of the many things this sorry saga has
taught us is that we couldn’t trust public health controls to be run by a ministry in
charge of production.”
A previous government study set up to estimate BSE infection in sheep brains had to be
abandoned last year. It was discovered that poor laboratory techniques meant the
samples being studied were possibly either cow brains
or sheep brains that had been contaminated with cow brains.
Following the BSE epidemic in Britain, the Labour government set up the Food Standards
Agency (FSA). In October last year it issued an update report on the risk of BSE in
sheep that stated, “If BSE were found to be presen
t in sheep, the current SRM [Specified Risk Material, i.e. offal, spinal cord, etc.]
controls would not be adequate to eliminate the risk of infected sheep meat form
entering the food chain. It has been shown that it is i
mpossible to remove all infectivity from a sheep.”
The FSA, which had commissioned the Imperial College report, issued an equivocal and
defensive statement in response. It read, “We do not know whether BSE entered the
sheep flock in the past and, if it did, whether it is
in sheep today. Given this uncertainty, the agency has been proactive in examining
whether further precautionary measures may be appropriate in addition to those
currently in place.”
Although now at a much reduced level, the risk of BSE from cattle has not yet been
eliminated. The FSA announced last week that the meat of a calf born to a BSE infected
cow had entered the human food chain. The incident
is reported to have occurred in Wales last November.
According to reports, a farmer had sold the calf to an abattoir. Normally, offspring
of BSE- infected cattle would be culled and the carcass destroyed. Among the measures
to combat BSE, a cattle “passport” system has been
introduced, and this should have prevented the calf from being sent to the abattoir
and its meat sold.
The FSA said a backlog on culling infected animals had built up because of the demands
placed on the veterinary service by the foot and mouth epidemic, which was only
declared officially over on January 15. Pressure on ve
ts and other officials had led to a build up of suspect animals.
Defra published a report on November 2001 noting the continuing danger from BSE.
“Despite the measures taken to control the current outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease
in the UK, the controls for restricting, slaughtering
and testing BSE suspects continue albeit at a lower level due to the need to redeploy
resources,” the report said.
The FSA has called on the government to tighten up procedures to ensure that the
offspring of BSE-infected cattle do not enter the food chain. Debby Reynolds
veterinary director of the FSA said, “This is a regrettable inc
ident” adding “We want to see the cull of offspring of BSE animals backlog cleared as
a priority.”
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