Volume 9: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
Part 1: Wales
5. Chronological account of specific Welsh issues
The SBO ban

5.7 On 27 February 1989 the Report of the Working Party on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (the Southwood Report) was published. ¹ An opinion expressed in paragraph 5.3.5 of the Report - 'we consider that manufacturers of baby food should avoid the use of ruminant offal and thymus' - provided a stimulus for the subsequent general Specified Bovine Offal (SBO) ban. The ban on SBO was introduced by means of the Bovine Offal (Prohibition) Regulations 1989, which came into force simultaneously in England and Wales on 13 November 1989. The Regulations specified cattle tissues that were banned for human consumption: brain, spinal cord, spleen, thymus, tonsils and intestines. (The ban was later extended, in 1990, to the use of SBO in animal feed.) WOAD was not directly involved in implementing or enforcing the SBO ban, since operational responsibility lay with local authorities and - after April 1995 - the Meat Hygiene Service. Responsibility for monitoring the work of these bodies lay with the SVS. ²