[Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and food safety]

Abstract

The governments of Great Britain and France disagree on the safety of British beef with respect to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Eventually the consumer might have the burden to decide whether beef from Britain is safe to eat with regard to the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Outside Britain the incidence of BSE increases. Probably in continental Europe, the use of high risk material, derived from non-British cattle in the subclinical stage of BSE, poses a greater threat than beef imported from Great Britain. The risk to contract vCJD depends on two unknown factors: the susceptibility of man to BSE and the amount of success in keeping infectious tissue of BSE-incubating cattle out of the human food chain. Until the susceptibility of humans to BSE and the extent to which our food is contaminated become known, no clear-cut advice can be given on the safety of certain food items. There appears to be a genetic predisposition to vCJD, i.e. methionine homozygosity at codon 129 of the normal human prion protein gene. The European Community should ban the use of any high risk material for production of food, except in production processes for which inactivation of the BSE agent has been proven. The facts that are known at this moment allow the conclusion that gelatin and beef products of unknown origin and composition pose a greater health threat than eating genuine beef (muscle tissue).