German safety expert sees permanent EU feed ban 

Reuters 8dec00

PARIS - The European Union is likely to make permanent the ban temporarily imposed on meat-based animal feeds in an attempt to curb the spread of mad cow disease, the head of a German public health authority said on Friday. Dieter Arnold, director of the Federal Institute for Health Protection of Consumers and Veterinary Medicine, said EU measures to combat the deadly brain-wasting illness would have to be re-evaluated in light of new scientific evidence.

"I would assume that we will be in favour after six months of making it final throughout the whole European Union," Arnold said on the sidelines of a meeting of food safety experts at the offices of the Paris-based International Epizootic Office (OIE).

"I cannot see any evidence which could come up during the next six months to end this ban after six months," he said. EU leaders meeting in the southern French port city of Nice on Thursday agreed that the ban, due to come into effect on January 1 and valid for six months, was too short. EU farm ministers on Monday agreed on a tough package of measures after a sharp rise in reported cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the scientific name for mad cow disease, in France this year.

Several EU member states imposed full or partial bans on French beef and cattle after French supermarkets disclosed in October that they had unwittingly sold beef from a herd of cattle potentially contaminated with BSE.

But David Statham, director of enforcement and food standards at Britain's food safety watchdog, the Food Standards Agency, said he did not think unilateral action was appropriate. "I think from the UK point of view, we are convinced that this has to be dealt with on a Europe-wide basis," he said at Friday's OIE conference.. "It is not appropriate to be dealt with by individual nations taking their own measures."

France itself is maintaining a long-standing ban on imports of British beef despite the European Commission's decision in 1999 to lift an EU-wide block on British beef exports on evidence that it was successfully tackling the BSE epidemic.