A new form of the sheep disease scrapie has been found in Irish sheep, the Department of Agriculture and Food confirmed last night.
Confirmation came 24 hours after the British Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it had found 80 cases of an unknown strain of the disease over the last year.
The authorities here and in Britain have been attempting to rid these islands of scrapie by destroying flocks of sheep where scrapie has been identified and replacing them with sheep with a genotype resistance to the disease. However, 12 of the 80 sheep found with the new strain of the disease were from this genotype.
There was initial speculation the mystery disease could be BSE, which has not been found to occur naturally in sheep.
But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs allayed any fears by confirming the disease is scrapie, although in a form not found in Britain before. There was no information available on the Irish sheep other than confirmation that three had been identified with the new strain.
Scrapie is a fatal neurological sheep disease belonging to a group of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), including BSE in cattle and CJD in humans. It has been present in the British flock for over 250 years and for the same length of time in the Irish flock, but at much lower levels.