Mad cow case ‘isolated’

The discovery of the first case of mad cow disease in Britain for three years will not push the beef industry back to the days of the 1990s, say farmers’ leaders, and is no risk to people.

Yesterday all cattle movements around a farm in Aberdeenshire were halted as health experts moved in to seal off the premises and destroy all cattle with a direct connection to the animal that contracted bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

Farmers’ representatives and meat industry officials said that it was an ‘‘isolated incident’’ and that although it was ‘‘disappointing’’ the case would not harm the £3 billion-a-year (NZ$5.9b) beef industry.

The Scottish beef industry will return to ‘‘controlled risk’’ status, the same as England and Wales. In 2015 there was a case of BSE on a Welsh farm and there have been 16 cases in the UK since 2011.

Between 1986 and 2001 a total of 180,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million were slaughtered. In all 178 people have died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease.

Kate Rowell, the chairwoman of Quality Meat Scotland, said: ‘‘The Scottish red meat industry has built a global reputation for the quality of its beef and we developed this with controlled risk [CR] status until 2017 when that changed to negligible risk [NR] status.

‘‘Accordingly, we do not anticipate that the return to CR status, the same status as exists in England and Wales, will have any serious impact on export market growth.’’

– The Times