SCOTLAND has lost its prized “negligible risk” status from mad cow disease until at least the middle of the next decade because of the single case in Aberdeenshire.
However Scottish Rural Affairs Ministers Mairi Gougeon told MSPs she expected the downgrade to “controlled risk” status to have a minimal impact on beef exports.
Scotland was classed as being a negligible risk for BSE in May 2017 after eight and half years without a case, opening access to international meat markets.
However the discovery of BSE in a fallen five-year-old cow at Boghead Farm in Lumsden, near Huntly, last week means Scotland is now back on a par with England and Wales.
Ms Gougeon told Holyrood it would be 11 years from the birth of the animal in 2013 before Scotland could apply to the World Organisation for Animal Health for its old status back.
The infected cow did not enter the food chain and posed no risk to human health.
A movement ban has been put in place and its offspring culled as a precaution.
Farmer Thomas Jackson has described the BSE discovery as “heartbreaking”.
Answering a question from Tory MSP Alexander Burnett, Ms Gougeon said an early probe had not found any problems with animal feed, a frequent source of previous outbreaks.
She said: “We await the outcome of the further investigations which will hopefully provide some more conclusive information that I can bring back to Parliament - we haven't particularly identified any particular problem in the feed."
She said fuller test results could take a month or more, adding: “As far as we're aware at the moment…. there will be a negligible risk (to beef exports)"
She said: "It takes 11 years from the birth of this affected animal before we will be able to apply for the negligible risk status again.
"This is something that we have also seen in other countries across Europe that have been affected by BSE, such as in the Republic of Ireland and in France, that shortly after gaining negligible risk status they also had isolated cases of BSE which meant that they lost that again shortly after. This could well be the tail end of the epidemic that we saw in the 1990s.”
She was unable to say what extra costs would be added to the slaughter process because of the return to controlled risk status.
More than 4m cattle were slaughtered in the UK after BSE was diagnosed in 1986, amid fears it could pass to humans in meat and lead to fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
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