It is an evil that made farms (and consumers) tremble in the 1990s. A classic case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), known as "mad cow" disease, was detected on a farm in southwest England, health officials said Friday evening.
According to the British Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), which emphasizes that there is "no risk to food health", the animal died and was removed from the farm, located in Somerset.
As a precaution, "movement restrictions have been put in place to stop the movement of livestock in the area while investigations continue to identify the origin of the disease," the agency said in a statement.
This is, according to its chief veterinarian Christine Middlemiss, a "standard procedure", which proves that "our surveillance system to detect and contain the disease is working".
“The general risk of BSE in the UK remains classified as
controlled
and there is no risk to food safety or public health,” she added.
178 deaths in 20 years in the United Kingdom
The UK has had five confirmed cases of BSE since 2014, all in dead animals that were not destined for the human food chain and presented no risk to the general public, according to the APHA.
As foreseen by international commitments, the World Organization for Animal Health has been and the UK's trading partners have been briefed, but the country's ability to export beef is not affected.
Cases of the disease have appeared sporadically in the UK since the severe crisis of the late 1990s which led to the slaughter of millions of animals.
BSE first appeared in the UK in the 1980s and spread to many countries in Europe and around the world through the use of contaminated animal meal.
Suspected of being the source of the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, it had caused concern among consumers and caused meat purchases to fall.
The exact extent of the epidemic in humans remains unknown.
The number of cases of the new variant CJD has declined since 2000, when the BSE epidemic was under control.
From 1995 to 2016, 178 people, all of whom died, were diagnosed in the UK, while 27 died from the disease in France between 1996 and 2014.
