ANOTHER case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) has been confirmed in a dairy herd in Co Cork, the Department of Agriculture announced yesterday.
A Department spokesman said the animal concerned was a four-year-old Friesian cow from a 570-animal herd in the county. "The valuation of the herd has been agreed and the rest of the animals will be slaughtered and destroyed," the spokesman added.
He said Department inspectors were now seeking the origin of the cow. If it came from another herd, that would also be slaughtered and all the carcases destroyed.
This is the 22nd case of the disease discovered this year in the Irish herd of seven million animals and the 137th case since the disease was first identified in Ireland in 1988. It is also the second case in recent weeks to involve a young cow born since the ban on feeding bonemeal to cattle was imposed in 1989, a cause of concern in veterinary circles.
Similar cases have occurred in Britain, where the disease was first identified. Since a ban on bonemeal in cattle feed was imposed, there have been 27,000 cases of the disease.
Until recently, British veterinary experts were blaming the post-ban BSE cases on contaminated cattle feed. They claimed that the banned offals were continuing to enter the animal food chain in milling plants, where bonemeal is crushed for pig and poultry food as well as cattle feedstuffs.
But 10 days ago the British authorities said there might be a 1 per cent chance that the disease of the central nervous system could be passed from cow to calf.
In Britain there have been 160,000 cases of the disease in a herd of 11 million animals. There have been more than 1,600 cases of the disease in the Northern Ireland herd of just over 1.5 million animals.
Since the beginning of this year, the Department of Agriculture has been tightening its controls on those herds in which a BSE case has been identified. In January, the Department decided that the carcases of all animals on such farms would be destroyed. Before that the healthy animals had been allowed back into the food chain.
Last March, the slaughter policy was extended to include not only the infected animal and all other animals on the farm, but also the herd of origin of the infected animal.