001238 UK Estimates Scale of French BSE Crisis

London - People in France are more at risk of eating beef contaminated with mad cow disease this year than their British neighbors.

A risk assessment by a British scientist at Imperial College in London shows that more infected cattle were slaughtered for consumption this year in France than in Britain, where the mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE ), epidemic started. “It shows that the number of late-stage infected animals, which would be the ones to be potentially the most infectious, was actually higher, considerably higher in France, than in Britain this year,” Dr. Christl Donnelly said in a telephone interview.

She has been closely involved with the British epidemic while working at Imperial College since 1996. She was previously head of the statistics unit of the Wellcome Trust center at Oxford University monitoring the disease.

One or two infected British cattle were killed for consumption in 2000, compared to 49 or 24 in France, depending on assumptions about under-reporting, she added.

“No published work that I am aware of has looked at the estimates of how many animals have been infected in France throughout the epidemic and then working on from that how many infected animals would be slaughtered for consumption in France this year,” she added.

But Donnelly, whose research is published in the science journal Nature, said it should be kept in mind that there are about twice as many cows in France as in Britain.

Despite the increased risk this year of eating tainted beef, the overall epidemic in France is just a fraction of what it was in Britain.

“There has certainly been a lot of speculation but this is providing the evidence on which people can base a solid risk assessment,” she added.

Restrictions On Age Of Animals

French consumers have been alarmed by the steep increase in the number of reported cases of the brain-wasting disease in French herds. Consumer panic ensued after three French supermarkets revealed in October that they had sold beef from a herd potentially contaminated with BSE.

According to French government statistics, 215 animals have been confirmed with BSE since 1991. By Donnelly's calculations 1,200 were infected since mid- 1987, assuming that case reporting is complete.

So far at least 80 people in Britain and two in France have died from the human equivalent of mad cow disease, a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) which is linked to eating contaminated beef.

Although Britain has a higher incidence of BSE, restrictions on the ages of animals that can be eaten are more stringent in Britain than in France.

“We don't actually eat older animals,” said Donnelly.

Last week the European Union approved a plan to buy and destroy cattle aged over 30 months that have not been tested for BSE. It also issued a ban on all meat-based animal feed.

Donnelly, who has worked on the mad cow epidemic since 1996, used information from the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and data from the British epidemic in her risk assessment.

Her calculations show the risk of infection of French meat fell sharply from 1988 to 1991 and then gradually rose to 1996. But the top range estimate of infected cattle in France which is about 7,000 since mid-1987 is much less than the 900,000 in Britain.

“That alone gives you an order of magnitude,” said Donnelly.

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