Study finds more French BSE cases

PARIS, France -- A new report has found the incidence of mad cow disease in France is more prevalent than previously thought.

France's Food Safety Board said in a preliminary report on Monday that it had detected at least one case of the disease for every 500 cattle tested in the northwest of the country.

The discovery came as France decided to remove all injured cattle from the food chain, the Farm Ministry said.

"All injured animals will be culled on the farm," Catherine Geslain-Laneelle, general director of food at the ministry, said.

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"There are 25,000 injured animals per year. They will no longer enter the food chain."

She did not make clear if there was a perceived link between animal injuries and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the scientific name for mad cow disease.

The preliminary results of the government's testing programme revealed that of 15,000 high-risk cows sampled between June and October, 32 produced positive traces of BSE.

The new cases brings the total of BSE cases detected so far this year to 129, up from 30 in 1999.

The disease has been linked to the fatal brain-wasting human condition new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) which has killed at least 80 people in Britain and two in France.

Also worrying French officials is the prospect that many infected animals may have entered the human food chain in the mid 1990s.

Of the animals tested, those born between 1993 and 1995 proved particularly vulnerable to the disease and it is now feared many may have slipped past food safety controls and sold for meat for human consumption.

The report says it is likely there was "a breakdown in recognising or declaring cases of BSE by clinical methods first introduced in 1990."

France has been gripped by a mad cow scare over recent months after the discovery of a spate of new cases of the disease.

Officials have banned some cuts of beef and many local authorities have banned beef altogether for school lunches. Meat and bonemeal stockfeed, blamed for the emergence of BSE, has also been banned for all livestock.

The mad cow crisis has rapidly spread across Europe, prompting the EU last week to take tough measures to contain the illness, including a ban on all meat-based animal feeds.

Beef consumption in France has dropped by 30 percent over recent months.

The tests of France's cows will continue for several more months with up to 35,000 cattle to be examined.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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French Government directory
World Health Organization - BSE and vCJD Fact Sheets
Britain Ministry of Agriculture - BSE Publications

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