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Roast beef joints on the way back to British menu

By Gerrard Raven

LONDON, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Agriculture Minister Nick Brown said on Monday he

hoped to put roast ribs of beef back on British dinner tables soon after

scientists reported the risk from mad cow disease had more than halved in the

last year.

Ribs of beef have been denied to millions of Britons since December 16 last

year when Brown's predecessor, Jack Cunningham, banned sales of beef on the

bone.

Cunningham's ban followed a report by the government's Spongiform

Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) which said there was a slight risk of

catching brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) by eating in-bone beef.

The ban angered farmers and consumers alike.

In a new report sent to Brown last week, SEAC said the number of British

cattle infected with mad cow disease which are slaughtered for human

consumption next year was likely to be about 43 against around 99 in 1998.

Only one or two of these beasts -- against the 2-1/4 million slaughtered every

year -- were likely to have high levels of infectivity in their dorsal root

ganglia, posing a possible risk to anyone eating their meat on the bone.

" Clearly the time is coming when we can lift the domestic ban on beef on the

bone, " Brown said at London's annual field livestock show. " I hope to

have something to say reasonably soon. "

He said the government would first consult its senior medical advisers and the

European Union.

Earlier, Dorrell, Health Secretary in the Conservative government from

1995 until its election defeat last year, appeared before the official inquiry

into mad cow disease set up by the new government.

Chairman Sir told Dorrell he felt he and fellow ministers

had failed to stress the importance of rules designed to keep infected beef

out of the human food chain.

The Conservatives introduced the rule in 1989 that specified material,

including the spinal cord, must be removed from cattle carcasses by abattoirs

before they were sold to butchers.

But in November 1995, the State Veterinary Service reported that it had found

17 occasions when spinal cord had been found attached to carcasses after

dressing.

This was just five months before scientists announced evidence that people

could develop CJD by eating beef from animals suffering from Bovine Spongiform

Encephalopathy.

The announcement led to a worldwide ban on British beef exports by the

European Union which the bloc's farm ministers only agreed earlier this month

to lift.

The European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs Emma Bonino on Monday told a

European Parliament conference on food safety that Britain should be free of

mad cow disease by 2003 and criticism of a decision to lift the export ban on

British beef was entirely without foundation.

Some 32 Britons have so far been identified as suffering from the new variant

of CJD. Most have died.

told Dorrell that the abattoir regulations were at first said to be

" ultra-precautionary. "

" As time went by, those who knew about the subject attached increasing

importance to these regulations as evidence raised question marks over the

thesis that this is not transmissible, " said.

" We have not found anywhere a stage at which this message was passed to the

trade -- 'Looking at it now, the following pointers suggest that the risk of

transmissibility may be higher. In these circumstances, it is absolutely

crucial that the bits which may be infected are removed'. "

Dorrell said the Conservative government had regarded the rules as important

and expected abattoirs to follow it to the letter.

16:03 11-30-98