Human disease risk would not be reduced by culling older cows in pre-clinical stages of BSE, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) said yesterday.
The authority announced details of a report by its BSE sub-committee on strategies to reduce incidence of the disease in the State.
Providing all existing controls and regulations are strictly complied with, the report says there is no added food-safety value in culling animals born before January 1998.
BSE is confined to a small proportion of older cows in the State herd born before 1998, which had access to contaminated meat and bone meal.
The disease will decline as those older animals die off or are removed from the national herd, the authority said.
Animals born after this date, however, pose no risk to consumer health, as they have not been exposed to contaminated meat and bone meal. Those animals could not , therefore, be incubating BSE.
The authority said additional control measures have been introduced last year which provide further protection for consumers.
They include enhanced surveillance and the checking of all animals aged over 30 months with a post-mortem BSE test, and the removal of the vertebral column from animals born before 1998.
The FSAI chief executive, Dr Patrick Wall, said: "There are 2.07 million cattle in Ireland born before 1998. While a total culling of these would remove all future clinical and non-clinical cases, our report finds that from a food-safety perspective this would have no additional benefit."
He said "this finding is based on a situation where there is complete adherence to EU legislation regarding Specified Risk Material (SRM) regulations and all other food-safety measures to ensure food posing a risk does not enter the food chain".
Dr Wall added, however, that the sub-committee's remit was to consider whether there were benefits from a cull in terms of consumer protection only.
"It did not evaluate other reasons why a selective cull might be considered, which might include improving Ireland's trading position in international beef markets, where the anxiety level over BSE is high," he said.
A number of risk reduction measures are already in place, said Dr Wall. These include the removal of all SRM at the abattoir, and extensive checks by veterinary inspectors to ensure this removal has been performed.