Volume 9: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
Part 3: Northern Ireland
15. Chronological account of specific Northern Ireland issues
Enforcement of the ruminant feed ban
Cross-contamination

15.47 The ruminant feed ban was enforced by DANI Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Inspectors. ¹ The Feeding Stuffs Inspectorate was part of the Agri-Food Development Service headed by the Chief Agricultural Officer (CAO - see paragraph 14.25). Mr Martin explained why vets were not used for feed ban monitoring:

The Veterinary Service is normally charged with implementing all matters veterinary. However, the judgement was made whenever the Order was brought in in 1990, that because the Department of Agriculture had other inspectors who were already there in feed plants to take samples [of] the fertilisers and feedingstuffs . . . they would do it rather than [duplicate] efforts by putting in vets one day and other inspectors the other day. So the checking of whether the ban was being applied at feedmill level was left to those inspectors. ²

15.48 Indeed, there appears to have been minimal input from the veterinary side on the enforcement of the ban, at least initially. Mr Sullivan had not heard of the UKASTA Code of Practice for Cross Contamination in Feedingstuffs Manufacture (first published in 1982) and therefore did not know if it was in use in feedmills in Northern Ireland. He was doubtful whether feedmills had a practice of purging the production lines between each 'run' of feed for a different species. ³

15.49 Mr Martin said that he did not personally discuss the ruminant feed ban with the CAO, and that there was no resource input from the veterinary side. In his view, the 'person responsible was the Principal Officer in the Animal Health Division on the administration side', and it had been decided to leave enforcement to the CAO's staff. ⁴ The 'Principal Officer' in question was Mr Shannon. He told the Inquiry: 'I was not concerned about their efficacy in carrying out their responsibilities largely because of the more direct control chain [that] operated in Northern Ireland.' ⁵ However, by 'their' he meant 'the Chief Agricultural and the Chief Veterinary Officers' (emphasis added).

15.50 Dr Jack himself said that, when the ban was introduced, he did not give any consideration to matters of enforcement:

I personally did not come to a view about enforcement, because that is the kind of detail that I would normally have left to my professional advisers. We had professional veterinarians, we had professional agriculture officers in and out of these plants. I am afraid I had a fairly wide range of duties and therefore I did not get into that kind of detail. ⁶

Cross-contamination

15.51 The issue of cross-contamination of feed had been raised in Northern Ireland as early as June 1988, before the introduction of the ban in Great Britain. ⁷ It was accepted that some cross-contamination was inevitable, but at that stage it was generally believed by DANI that a considerable dose of infective material would have to be present in any MBM to cause BSE in another animal. ⁸ It seems that it was not until cases in cattle born after the ban started to cause anxiety (see paragraphs 15.67-15.68 below) that the issue of cross-contamination began to be seriously discussed in Northern Ireland. When it became known in 1995 that less than 1 gram of infective material was sufficient to infect another animal, enforcement of the ruminant feed ban in feedmills was seriously addressed (as was enforcement of the SBO ban in slaughterhouses and rendering plants - see below).

15.52 Since no test for the presence of ruminant protein in feed was available when the ruminant feed ban was introduced, checking was initially done by examining the formulations for ruminant rations. ⁹ In 1994, when MAFF began testing feedstuffs on farms using the ELISA test, DANI agreed to introduce its own checking system. Because the MAFF laboratory could not handle samples from Northern Ireland in addition to those from Great Britain, DANI decided to use a different test, the commercial CORTECS test, which could be processed by the NI Veterinary Service. DANI also decided to use samples of feed already being taken at feedmills in Northern Ireland by the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Inspectors, instead of testing on farms. In early 1995 an initial set of 24 samples taken from 15 feedmills all tested negative. ¹⁰ A further 74 cattle feed and 63 sheep feed samples taken between March 1995 and March 1996 also proved negative. ¹¹ A year later, as a result of European Commission Decision 95/287/EC, routine monitoring using the ELISA test became compulsory. ¹² Northern Ireland began more regular testing, including on home-mixer premises. ¹³