Staff Reporter
CYPRUS will import British beef now that the European Union has lifted the mad-cow disease ban on its export, George Neyphytou, senior veterinary officer at the Agriculture Ministry’s Department of Veterinary Services, said yesterday.
Neophytou said his department wrote a letter to Britain’s Agriculture Ministry on June 29, indicating, “our department would look at this matter favourably,” once the ban was lifted.
He was unable to say when the first imports of beef from Britain would reach Cyprus, but said whenever that is, “it will be OK with our department.”
The EU prohibition against exporting British beef, which the EU imposed on March 25, 1996, formally expired on August 1.
The Union imposed the ban when the scare about mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was at its height. BSE had been found in British cattle, and the British government admitted there was a link between eating beef infected with BSE and a new form of the fatal, brain- rotting Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (nvCJD).
The ban devastated Britain’s beef and dairy industries. Farmers were forced to slaughter millions of head of cattle, and beef exports worth more than £650 million sterling were wiped out overnight. Total British losses from the crisis are estimated as high as $3.3 billion, and could top $6 billion.
Under EU conditions for lifting the ban, the beef must meet strict criteria: it must come from cattle aged six to 30 months and born after August 1, 1996; the animals it came from must have been subjected to strict procedures for tracing their lineage; and it must be deboned for export.
“We look forward to lifting this ban,” Dr Pavlos Economides, Director of the Department of Veterinary Services, told the Cyprus Mailon first learning that the ban was to be lifted.
Over 30 people have already died from nvCJD, and no-one knows how many more victims there will be, given the long incubation period for the incurable illness. Some say Britain is a time-bomb for an eventual epidemic of nvCJD.
More than 270,000 tonnes of British beef and veal were sold abroad in 1995, before the ban, with Cyprus among the buyers. Since the ban was imposed, Ireland has shipped the vast bulk of all the beef Cyprus has imported from 11 countries, government figures show.
