Irish consumers have a higher risk of eating meat that could be contaminated with mad cow disease than their neighbours in Britain or France, British scientists said today.
A report by a panel of experts that advises the British government on the disease said the relative risks were roughly 220 times greater in Ireland than in Great Britain because more infected cattle had been slaughtered there.
In France the risk is about 24 times higher than in Britain.
The Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) gave details of the study, which was presented to its last meeting, in their latest report.
These numbers are of concern, Professor Peter Smith, the acting chairman of SEAC, told a news conference.
But he stressed that the risk assessment done by Dr Christl Donnelly of Imperial College in London was not complete and assumed that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, had been under-reported in Ireland.
The study, which is on the website of the British Foods Standards Agency ( www.bsereview.org.uk/templates/latest/item.cfm/76), which monitors the quality of food, estimates that 22,000 Irish cattle were infected with BSE between 1985 and 1996. This compares with almost one million in Britain since the start of the BSE epidemic.
In 2000, Donnelly estimated that 346 infected animals were slaughtered for consumption in Ireland and 159 were within 12 months of clinical onset of the disease, compared to one in England and 52 in France.