Britain may have found goat with BSE

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Britain said Tuesday a goat diagnosed as having the brain-wasting disease scrapie in 1990 may have had mad cow disease, but it would take up to two years of further tests to confirm this.

Last month France found the first case of the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), in a goat, the first time the brain-wasting infection that has ravaged European cattle herds and killed at least 100 people has been diagnosed in another species of livestock.

The UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Chief Veterinary Officer, Debby Reynolds, said: “It is important to put this initial finding into context. It dates back to 1990, which was at the height of the BSE outbreak in cattle and before the reinforced feed ban was introduced.

“This means that there is a distinct possibility that the animal, if infected with BSE, was exposed to contaminated feed.”

Testing on the animal will take up to two years because only a sliver of its brain remained.

Britain found only eight animals among its 88,000 goats that were infected with scrapie, which is not thought to pose a threat to human health, since testing began in 1993, a Defra spokesman said.

The Scottish farm that the goat came from no longer exists.

Responding to the possibility that the UK may have found its first case of a goat with mad cow disease, the Food Standards Agency said it was not advising people against eating goat meat or products, including dairy products.

The EU is home to some 11.6 million goats with the largest herds in France, Greece and Spain, primarily reared for dairy items such as milk, yoghurt and cheese, with little meat consumed.

Officials said BSE in goats posed only a minimal risk to human health and was unlikely to jump species to sheep.

Before tests confirmed the presence of BSE, scientists thought the French goat had scrapie, a disease from the same family as BSE that affects both sheep and goats. There have also been fears that scrapie may mask BSE in sheep.

The EU’s executive Commission wants to test 200,000 goats for BSE in the next six months, focusing on countries that are already fighting the disease among cattle.

The panic surrounding Europe’s outbreaks of mad cow disease in the 1980s and 1990s is still fresh in many minds—more than 100 people have died from the human form of BSE after eating tainted beef.

BSE was spread by feeding cattle with diseased parts of other animals. Since that time, Europe has tightened its food and feed safety rules to limit the risks.

According to the EU’s food safety authority EFSA, dairy products made from goat’s milk would be unlikely to pose a risk to human health if the milk came from a healthy animal.

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