THE Cyprus Veterinary Services have shepherded in 5,000 goats for testing after it was discovered on Friday that a goat in France had been diagnosed with mad cow disease, the first case of the disease in goats.
Scientists from the Community Reference Laboratory in Weybridge in the United Kingdom confirmed that the goat has the brain-wasting disease after first suspecting that the goat had scrapie, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), a disease in the same family as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
Speaking to reporters, Markos Kyprianou, the EU Commissioner Responsible for Health and Consumer Protection said that consumers should not panic over the discovery.
“I want to reassure consumers that existing safety measures in the EU offer a very high level of protection. This case was discovered thanks to the EU testing system in place in France.
“The testing programme has shown us that there is a very low incidence rate of TSEs in goats and allowed us to detect suspect animals so that they can be taken out of the food chain, as was done with this goat and its entire herd. I am proposing to extend testing further to determine whether this is an isolated incident.”
Kyprianou said the EU was ordering increased testing for BSE among goats for at least six months (200,000 tests of healthy goats in the EU) to determine if this was an isolated incident.
The extent of the monitoring programme will be based on the goat population in each Member State and will focus primarily on Member States where BSE is present in the cattle population
In Cyprus, this means 5,000 goats will be tested, Veterinary Service head Phidias Loucaides told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
“Despite still waiting for the initial test results from Weybridge, we have been instructed by the European Commission for Health and Consumer Protection to clarify the following two things on the health issues regarding meat from goats. These include tests to check if the goats are actually specified risk material (SRM), which basically means conducting tests on 5,000 goats to find any signs of scrapie disease. We will then take tissue samples from the brains of the goats discovered with scrapie and send them to the UK to see if in fact the strand is a mutated version of BSE.
“Cyprus is actually a low-risk state compared to the other EU states, and therefore we have been instructed to only test 5,000 goats. We have an advantage over the other EU states because our testing measures are very good.”
