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NZ mad cow disease risk 'negligible'
Topic Started: Jun 7 2007, 05:37 PM (38 Views)
Kahu
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NZ mad cow disease risk 'negligible'
NZPA | Saturday, 2 June 2007

The main world body for animal health has recognised New Zealand as having "negligible" risk of mad cow disease, scientificially known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

The 75th general session of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), held in Paris last week classed New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Uruguay and Singapore in the most favourable category.

The new classification system for BSE status was adopted last year, and now the United States and Canada – which have both had embarrassing and costly cases of BSE in cattle – can join Chile, Brazil, Switzerland and Taiwan in the class of countries considered to have BSE-controlled risk status, which places restrictions on trading bovine risk products.

"Negligible risk" countries such as New Zealand are not required to meet those restrictions.

Biosecurity New Zealand assistant director general, Barry O'Neil, has welcomed the OIE status.

"This confirms what we have known for a long time," he said. "New Zealand is BSE-free.

"The negligible risk recognition gives New Zealand a status, which will assist exporters."

BSE, which occurs in adult cattle, is one of a group of brain-wasting diseases (known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs).

Another, chronic wasting disease occurs in deer and elk in both Canada and the USA, and a similar disease in sheep, scrapie, occurs in many flocks outside New Zealand and Australia.

New Zealand has never had a case of BSE, and its sheep do not have scrapie. A ban on the feeding of meat, blood or bone meal from sheep, cattle, goats and deer to any ruminants took effect in 2000.

Mad cow disease, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, first surfaced in 1985, causing a black-and-white dairy cow in Britain to stagger, head-butt other cattle and shy away from farmhands.

Britain destroyed 3.7 million cattle in the 1980s and 1990s because of BSE, which has an incubation period of 3 to 5 years in cattle. Brain cells develop holes resulting in the loss of control of limbs, trembling, wide-eyed staring, swaying of the head, and erratic behaviour.

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VickiNC
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Good for New Zealand! Hopefully, the rest of the world will follow suit. I have never understood why 'the feeding of meat, blood or bone meal from sheep, cattle, goats and deer to any ruminants' was ever necessary, anywhere. It's never seemed safe to me, as a mere layperson.
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Deleted User
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:kitti: :kitti:

Great, to see a country actually take resposibility, and, try to reverse a bad situation.
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Kahu
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We would be wiped out economically if Foot and Mouth Disease, let alone Mad Cow Disease struck here, so its in our interests to be vigilant. Even with the most stringent Biosecurity Regulations in the world in force at our borders, some bioterrorist brought in honey or honey products from overseas bringing with it Varroa Bee Mites. This has led to irreversible damage to our honey and agricultural pollination industries, and left Australia as the only Varroa Bee Mite free continent!
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Kahu
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Starving vultures switch to live prey
14:12 01 June 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie

Griffon vulture, Wikipedia
Spanish Ornithological Society (Spanish language)
Big flocks of vultures are attacking live animals in Spain. Near-starvation has forced the scavengers to switch to live prey because of laws brought in to control mad cow disease (BSE).

In 2002, the European Union banned the dumping of cattle carcasses, requiring they be incinerated by licensed firms.

This was to keep the infectious prion that causes BSE from spreading to the environment or other animals. But it meant an end to the age-old farming practice of leaving dead animals for the vultures.

It has led to "a serious problem for carrion-feeding birds, which are failing to find enough food to survive," says Ana Iņigo of the Spanish Ornithological Society.

Griffon suffers most
The big griffon vultures are hardest hit, as Spain's three other vulture species feed on small wild animals, while the griffons depend on cattle.

In fact, increased intensive livestock farming may be behind the Spanish griffons' conservation success story - multiplying "spectacularly" from 3000 to 20,000 breeding pairs between 1980 and 2000, says vulture expert José Donāzar of the Doņana Biological Station near Seville, Spain. But now they are feeling the pinch.

"In 2007, the breeding success of griffons is at its lowest for many years," he says. Starving vultures are turning up at wildlife recovery centres, and the number of griffon attacks on livestock seems to have increased.

New law may help
Griffons have always occasionally attacked sick, unmoving animals or newborns, says Iņigo, but now it is more frequent. So far no healthy animals have been attacked.

The birds normally eat the placentas of newborn sheep in pastures, says Iņigo, but now "the vulture tries to eat it even before it has come off the sheep." And the birds are grabbing shot animals from Spanish hunters before they can reach it.

Farmers are demanding that vulture numbers be controlled. Instead, Spain's environment ministry is drafting a new law based on exceptions allowed under the EU measure, which will let some farmers in remote areas to use vultures for carcass disposal.

However, biologists warn that this could concentrate the birds in those areas, leaving them vulnerable to local disease or environmental upset.

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