Dutch Agriculture Ministry Wants to Ease Mad Cow Controls
Date: 14-Jun-05
Country: NETHERLANDS
The Netherlands, among the world's biggest meat and dairy exporters, said the number of animals testing positive for the disease had fallen steeply.
"Less strict mad cow policy cannot endanger the public health or food safety," Agriculture Minister Cees Veerman said in a proposal to parliament.
"Easing of measures is possible because mad cow has been brought under control in the Netherlands. The number of contaminated cows fell from 24 in 2002 to six last year."
Veerman did not mention specific rules he wanted to change as the proposal had yet to be detailed and discussed in parliament, a ministry spokeswoman said.
Veerman also wanted to initiate a review of mad cow measures at a European Union level, she said.
The Dutch proposal follows Britian's move late last year to scrap a key measure protecting humans from mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
The UK farm and health ministries has said it is safe for Britain to start removing the Over Thirty Months (OTM) rule, whereby older cattle are banned from entering the food chain, and replace it with a new testing system after mid-2005.
It was introduced in 1996 to protect people against variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of BSE from which some 141 Britons are thought to have died.
The Dutch ministry said the strict measures adopted in the 1990s, including testing of all animals over 24 months old, had sharply reduced the chance of cattle born after 1999 developing mad cow disease.
There have been some 77 BSE cases in animals in the Netherlands since 1997, with the peak reached in 2002.
The government says Dutch beef is safe because cattle are tested for BSE and risk material such as brain and spinal matter is destroyed.
In May the Netherlands had its first human victim of mad cow -- a 26-year old woman diagnosed with vCJD.
The health ministry said the woman had not travelled to Britain nor received a blood transfusion, so her illness was probably caused by consumption of tainted meat.
Around 150 cases of vCJD, which is fatal, have been reported around the world, mostly in Britain, but also in France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Canada and the United States.
Most west European countries have been affected by BSE, together wth Japan and more recently Canada and the United States.
