The policy used to combat BSE in the Irish herd, which has cost Irish taxpayers millions of euro since 1989, is to be changed, the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mary Coughlan, announced yesterday.
Since 1989, when BSE was first identified here, Ireland has been slaughtering all the animals in a herd where an infected animal was found, with the carcases being rendered down and destroyed.
This was a policy that led to the slaughter of tens of thousands of healthy animals and cost the Irish taxpayer millions of euro in compensation, rendering costs and storage costs for the specified risk material.
Now, as the number of cases here has fallen dramatically by nearly 40 per cent each year for the past three, Ireland will slaughter only the infected animal, its offspring and other so-called "cohort" animals raised and fed on the same feed as the infected beast.
Ireland is the only European country with BSE operating the whole-herd slaughter policy.
Britain, where the disease first occurred, successfully used the policy Ireland is about to adopt, though it also slaughtered and destroyed all cattle over 30 months old to rid itself of the disease.
The Minister said that the decision to discontinue the whole-herd policy was possible only because of the control measures that had operated in recent years and those currently in place.
With all other measures still being implemented, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland indicated there was no increased risk to consumer health arising from the ending of the whole-herd slaughter policy, the Minister said in a statement last night. "We continue to operate a very robust control regime which is designed to provide maximum public health protection and consumer confidence. We cannot and will not ever compromise on the issue of food safety and consumers can be assured that nothing changes in that regard as a consequence of today's announcement," she said.
BSE in Ireland peaked in 2002, when there were 333 cases. Since then numbers have fallen dramatically - to 182 in 2003, 126 in 2004 and 69 cases in 2005.