Animal disease

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) classifies the BSE risk status of the cattle population of a country on the basis of a risk assessment and other criteria.

The three risk categories are:

• negligible BSE risk
• controlled BSE risk
• undetermined BSE risk

Since record keeping began in 1988, the epidemic in the UK has been in decline for many years and as a result, the UK currently has controlled risk BSE status.

Further information on these categories can be found on the OIE website. 

There are strict controls in place in Scotland to protect people from BSE. We have inspection staff in all slaughterhouses and cutting plants to monitor compliance with the requirements of the European and domestic legislation. Every carcase is subject to a final inspection before being health marked as fit for human consumption.

The key food safety control is the removal of specified risk material (SRM). However, there are also controls on animal feed and a requirement to test certain categories of animal for BSE. In addition to these controls, cattle with BSE or suspected of having BSE, and the offspring and cohorts of BSE cases, are removed from the food chain.

Although no sheep in Scotland’s flock have been found to have BSE, there are a number of precautionary safety measures in place, since it has been shown under laboratory conditions that sheep can be infected with BSE. We support research into TSEs in animal species used for food. 

Specified risk material (SRM) is tissues of cattle, sheep and goats such as the brain, spinal cord, tonsils and certain bovine intestines that are most likely to carry BSE prion proteins which have been implicated in variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans. These materials are banned from the food chain under EU TSE rules and must be removed at slaughterhouses or cutting plants

SRM controls are agreed at EU level and kept under constant review to make sure they reflect the latest scientific evidence. For example, following a favourable opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the definition of bovine SRM was amended to allow certain parts of bovine intestines from cattle of all ages back into the human food chain. These changes applied from May 2015.

SRM is subject to the BSE status of the country – Further information on material defined as SRM can be found at Article 11.5.14. of Chapter 11.5. on the OIE website.