PARIS

The British government last week announced that it is to extend strict bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) controls to sheep, to guard against the risk that the disease has jumped to sheep and is coexisting in flocks alongside scrapie.

The new measures, which were announced by the agriculture minister, Jack Cunningham, include removal in the abattoir of the spinal cord from sheep and goats over one year of age, and the spleen from all animals — heads are already banned from human consumption and animal feed.

The risk that sheep have acquired BSE from contaminated animal feed was raised by the government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee. Oral transmission of BSE to sheep has been demonstrated experimentally, despite no evidence for its existence in the field.

Cunningham said the government was taking “sound, precautionary measures” to avoid any possible risk to consumers, “no matter how remote”. Similar controls have been introduced in France, Ireland and the Netherlands.

But European Commission proposals for controls on sheep throughout the European Union, as recommended by its scientific veterinary committee, have been repeatedly rejected by the council of farm ministers, with several countries arguing that they do not have BSE (see Nature 384, 8; ).

In a separate move, the British government is threatening to ban the import of beef from countries with BSE unless they bring their controls up to UK standards.

The European Commission says such a unilateral move would be illegal. But Britain is finding sympathy in some quarters. “Cunningham's move is extremely sensible,” says one European Parliament official.

Britain is also likely to find ammunition for its demands in a paper submitted to the Veterinary Record suggesting that BSE has been under-reported in countries on the continent, and that the approximately 50 declared cases are fewer than the several thousand expected, given the level of exports of contaminated animal feed and cattle (see Nature 382, 4; 1996).

The findings, from an international research group led by Bram Schreuder from the Dutch DLO-Institute for Animal Science and Health in Lelystad, are likely to weaken the position of Germany and other countries who oppose stricter BSE controls on the grounds that they have no BSE.