your right to demand purity

01 January 2000
your right to demand purity

Once again a bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) scare has played havoc with menu planning and food ordering. This time it was caused by a Government announcement last Thursday that during an experiment young beef calves fed BSE-infected material had traces of the agent which causes the disease in their intestines.

As a result, the Government has asked caterers to voluntarily stop using the thymus and small intestines of calves under six months of age until a legal ban is introduced by parliament in a few weeks' time.

It is good that the Government has acted so quickly, while at the same time seeking to reassure the general public that there is little or no risk of humans catching BSE. But the constant reassurances are starting to wear a bit thin - after all, there have now been more than 130,000 cases of the disease in cattle when the original prediction was that there would be less than 25,000.

The whole sorry mess also raises questions about the general quality of food production and one would hope that the BSE saga had taught the Government a lesson. But the evidence is not clear.

A drug which increases the milk yields of dairy cows by up to 25% has just been legalised in the USA. Called bovine somatotropin (BST), it is a genetically engineered protein which is given as an injection to cows every 14 days.

At present there is a moratorium on the use of this drug in the EC, but this finishes at the end of December, and many scientists in the Ministry of Agriculture are believed to favour its legalisation.

It is true that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that genetically engineered BST will harm humans or cows. But then when diseased sheep remains started being fed to cows using new feed-manufacturing techniques in the 1980s, there was no evidence at the time that this would lead to BSE in cattle.

However, common sense indicated that it was wrong to feed animal remains to herbivores. And the same logic suggests it is wrong to inject cows to produce extra milk when there is no reason to do so other than to increase the profits of the manufacturer of the drug.

Caterers have a right to expect food of the highest quality and purity. British beef once had the best reputation in the world - we don't want dairy produce to go the same way. If you believe in purity of foods and are opposed to genetically engineered BST in your milk, write to your local MP now. n

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