BSE increase threat to NI exports

By Martin Cassidy BBC Northern Ireland rural affairs correspondent

A steady increase in cases of the cattle brain disease BSE is threatening to undermine the latest attempt to get export restrictions on Northern Ireland beef eased.

The province's agriculture minister is due to travel to Brussels next week in an effort to persuade the European Commission to ease controls but that task has been made more difficult by new cases cropping up at the rate of more than two a week.

In the first three months of this year there have been 37 new cases.

BSE has been a growing problem during the past three years after evidence that the epidemic had been tailing off.

Agriculture Minister Brid Rodgers hopes to reassure European Commission

It first appeared in Northern Ireland in 1988 and in the 14 years since, almost 2,000 animals have died.

A special monitoring scheme has unearthed a much greater level of infection than had been thought to exist. While just six cases were recorded in 1999, the following year the number jumped to 76 and the total last year was 69.

Northern Ireland's chief government vet, however, remains bullish about the Department of Agriculture's ability to rid the province of BSE.

Dr Bob McCracken said the vast bulk of new cases being detected are in older animals, which he believes were exposed to low levels of contaminated feed.

He said the fact that the cows only ate small quantities of the feed meant they developed the disease more slowly and that this explained the increase in the number of cases now being discovered in older cattle.

Maternal infection

But European scientists are likely to focus on three BSE cases in particular.

The three cattle in question were born after tighter animal feed restrictions were introduced in 1996. In theory at least, these cattle could not have been exposed to contaminated feed.

Chief vet Bob McCracken believes BSE will be eliminated in NI

So how did these animals contract the disease? The chief vet says that in one case it seems likely that the calf contracted the infection at birth.

Maternal transmission is rare but scientists say there is a risk of a calf being infected by its mother.

The Department believes the other two cattle born after 1996 may actually have come into contact with infected feed still in circulation, after the controls were introduced.

Dr McCracken says he remains confident that BSE will be eliminated, provided the number of cases born after the feed ban does not increase.

"I would firmly contend that the control programme that is in place will see BSE out of Northern Ireland in due course," he said.

Stormont Agriculture minister Brid Rodgers now has the task of reassuring the public at home as well as the European Commission, which she is lobbying for an easing of beef export controls.

She meets David Byrne and the European Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler in Brussels next week to lobby for a practical scheme which would allow meat plants to dedicate their production on specified days for the export trade.

"It looks as if low incidence is now a longer term project than we had hoped. Having come up against that, what I am now doing is ensuring that we find another avenue," said Brid Rodgers.

It was in March 1996 that the beef exporting industry in Northern Ireland ground to a halt and while processors have found alternative markets supplying UK supermarkets, the battle to eliminate BSE looks set to continue.