Petfood alert was cue for BSE ban

MINISTERS DISCUSSED the possibility of destroying the entire national cattle herd in 1990, the same year the government's most senior health adviser was reassuring the public about the safety of beef.

Keith Meldrum, the former chief veterinary officer, told the BSE inquiry yesterday that when the first cat was diagnosed in 1990 with a spongiform encephalopathy, John MacGregor, who was then the agriculture minister, considered a wide-scale or total slaughter policy. At the same time the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, Sir Donald Acheson, issued a statement, saying that there was no scientific justification for not eating British beef.

But, Mr Meldrum told the inquiry, a BSE-like disorder in cats that year raised the prospect of a mass slaughter of cattle. "It was discussed at the time whether or not the UK should consider implementing either herd- slaughter policy or indeed a policy of the whole herd. I remember discussions taking place in the night. So that was not a new thought. If everything went completely wild and if there was, for instance, evidence that infectivity had been found in meat, which it has not, in beef, then that would raise a totally new scenario."

It also emerged at the inquiry that one of the most important measures to protect against "mad-cow" disease was introduced only after the Government realised the petfood industry was planning to bring in the same precaution to safeguard cat and dog food. The Government became convinced of the need to ban specified bovine offals (SBOs), the most infective parts of the cattle carcass, only when it heard the advice commissioned by petfood manufacturers.

The advice, by Richard Kimberlin, a former head of the Neuropathogenesis Unit in Edinburgh, was "inspirational", because it had gone beyond measures recommended in 1989 by the Southwood committee investigating BSE.

Southwood had not mentioned an outright ban on specified bovine offals but advised that, as a precaution against BSE being passed to humans, certain bovine material should be removed from baby food.

Mr Meldrum said Dr Kimberlin had advised the petfood industry that offals such as brain and spinal cord should be removed from the petfood chain to protect against BSE.

Mr Meldrum said that after meeting Dr Kimberlin and the petfood-making association in May 1989 he became convinced of the argument for introducing a similar ban in the human food chain. But Department of Health officials feared an SBO ban would draw attention to "the problem of pharmaceuticals" also being made with bovine material.

The health officials continued to oppose introduction of an offal ban on grounds that the Southwood committee had thought it was not necessary.

Mr Meldrum said he told Mr MacGregor of the advice given to the petfood industry. The minister met health officials in June 1989 to lobby for a full ban on specified bovine offals, despite the Department of Health's objections.

The ban was designed to protect the public against cows that were incubating BSE without showing any symptoms. It is now believed that many hundreds of thousands of cattle incubating BSE went into the human food chain and that the single most important factor limiting the spread of the disease to humans was the ban on specified bovine offals.