Volume 1: Findings and Conclusions
5. The animal health story

296 By the time that the Southwood Report was published, the two major measures that the Working Party had recommended were in place. The ruminant feed ban had been extended - not indefinitely as the Working Party had recommended, but for a further year. An indefinite extension was to come later. If feed were the only means of infecting with BSE, the ban should in due course eradicate the disease. So far as the risk to humans was concerned, the Working Party considered that slaughter and destruction of animals showing clinical signs sufficed to protect against the remote risk of transmission as a result of eating infective tissue. So far as occupational risks and risks in relation to medicinal products were concerned, the Working Party had alerted those responsible for addressing these.

297 Substantial further measures were, however, to be taken to address food risks, for both humans and animals. These were, first, the ban on using Specified Bovine Offal (SBO) for human food ('the human SBO ban'), followed by a ban on incorporating SBO in animal feed ('the animal SBO ban'). Our task of reviewing the action taken in response to BSE up to 20 March 1996 requires us to examine the circumstances in which these measures were introduced. It also requires us to review the various measures that were taken in response to BSE and how they were enforced and monitored. That is a complex, but important, part of the BSE story. It is important because there were significant shortcomings in both the human health and the animal health measures, and in their enforcement and monitoring. Had we attempted to cover all of this in simple chronological order in our Report, the result would have been to confuse. Accordingly we decided at this stage to divide our coverage into two. In Volume 5 we have traced the story of measures taken to protect animal health. In Volume 6 we have followed the story that relates to the protection of human health.

298 We propose to follow the same course in this volume. In this chapter we shall cover that part of the story which is told in detail in Volume 5. We shall moreover subdivide the topics in the same way as we have in that volume. This means that we shall give separate treatment to the ruminant feed ban and the animal SBO ban. The former was the measure designed to protect cattle and other ruminants. The latter was designed to protect non-ruminant animals, but provided fortuitously an additional line of defence for cattle, which proved of great importance.

299 It may be thought that we have got our priorities wrong in considering animal health before human health. The reality is that, although introduced in the interests of animal health, the action taken to eradicate BSE was of critical importance in protecting humans should BSE prove, as indeed it did, to be a zoonosis. It is for this reason that we considered it logical to look first of all at that part of the BSE story which was motivated by the immediate demands of animal health.