001227 Swedes Snub Beef as Mad Cow Scare Spreads

Stockholm - Demand in Sweden for imported beef has fallen sharply in the past week amid growing fears of mad cow disease in a country with no known cases so far, the meat industry said.

A Temo poll in the daily Dagens Nyheter suggested 62% of Swedes would now avoid imported beef.

The poll showed 72% think bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE (news - web sites)) could break out in Sweden, too, but consumption of domestic beef remained almost unchanged, Ake Rutegard, managing director of the Swedish Meat Industry Association, said.

Demand for imported red meat, which at an annual 50,000 tons accounts for roughly 25% of Swedish consumption, was in decline, he said, but figures were not yet available.

Most of Sweden's beef imports originate in Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Mad Cow disease has ravaged farms in Britain and France. On Monday, European Union (news - web sites) farm ministers imposed a six-month ban on meat and bone meal regarded as the probable transmitter of BSE.

Three of four Swedes said all cows slaughtered in Sweden should be tested for the brain-wasting cattle disorder, which some scientists say may cause people who eat meat from infected animals to fall prey to the incurable Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Public opinion appeared to contradict the view of Swedish Agriculture Minister Margareta Winberg, who argues that Sweden due to its EU-designated status as a “preliminary BSE-free country” should get by with testing only 20,000 animals.

Were Sweden to carry out BSE checks on an equal footing with its European Union partners, the testing program -- currently dimensioned for 6,000 animals per year -- would have to cover 200,000 cows, or 42% of all cattle slaughtered annually.

Lars Jonsson, head of the food and environment department at the Swedish Consumers' Association, said Winberg's reasoning no longer held water after it emerged last week that animal feeds given to Swedish cows had contained meat and bone meal, which experts regard as the likely transmitter of BSE.

“Many people are calling. They are mainly concerned about meat their children eat at school. Most would now prefer that their children ate Swedish meat rather than German or Irish,” Jonsson said.

The Swedish Board of Agriculture has set up a BSE task force, which will seek to remedy the lack of testing capacity and track down animal feeds containing meat and bone meal.

Other urgent tasks are to decide how to destroy existing meat and bone meal feeds and what to do with slaughter waste no longer converted into this product, which Sweden sells as animal feed to mink and fox farms in Finland and the Baltic republics.

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