There has been a fall in the number of cases of BSE this month for the first time since August of last year, according to figures yesterday by the Department of Agriculture and Food.
It said four confirmed cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the national herd were found during April, one fewer than in this month last year.
While this is a welcome reversal of an upward trend in the disease since August, the total number of cases for the first four months of the year, 39, is still up by three on this time last year.
One of the more positive elements in yesterday's announcement was that the animals were all older than four years, indicating that the tightening of controls on animal feed introduced in late 1996 is beginning to impact.
In 1996 the British authorities found there was continuing contamination of cattle feed, which is thought to be the main cause of the disease, at mills where rollers were being used to compound the same feed for cattle, pigs and poultry.
The ending of this practice by designating separate plants for cattle and for other animals and birds, led to a dramatic decline in the number of cases in Britain where the disease was first identified in the mid-1980s.
The April cases of the disease identified this month were in Cos Westmeath, Offaly, Wexford and Cork.
Three were in dairy cows, and the fourth, in Westmeath, in a beef herd.
The new cases bring the total number of animals infected by the disease in the State since 1989 to 486.
Department officials say this is a very low infection rate in a national herd of over seven million animals.
Earlier this month in Dublin, a conference on BSE was told that more stringent "active" surveillance on herds which would be introduced soon by the EU was likely to uncover more cases than before in Europe's herds.
In Switzerland, where there have been a total of 372 cases of the disease in a herd of 1.7 million, routine testing and random sampling of herds introduced in 1999 more than tripled the number of cases.