London - Britain's Agriculture minister says the government's latest ban against beef on the bone consumption was based on a tiny chance a fatal brain infection might be passed on to humans.
Agriculture Fisheries and Food Minister Jack Cunningham advised the government to impose the ban Thursday after receiving a report from the Government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee.
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is known as mad cow disease. Research in the past year has strongly suggested but not yet proved that mad cow disease has been passed to humans in the form of a new variant of a rare deadly form of the brain disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
The report calculated six animals this year and three next year, of 2.2 million cattle slaughtered each year, risked infection of BSE.
Scientists said infected cow tissues from cattle slaughtered at four- month intervals after infection were then injected into mice brains.
The government report said tissues were tested at different periods after infection with the intent of determining if they caried the BSE agent before the cattle showed any symptoms of the disease.
Test results, on which the government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee based its report, showed that two such tissues previously excluded might be infectious.
Those test results forced new focus on the dorsal root ganglia found within the bones of the spine, and bone marrow.
The government report noted the ganglia, nerve branches emerging from the spinal cord and within the bone, would normally be found only in beef sold "on the bone."
The report said the ganglia were found to be infectious in cattle 32 months after infection with BSE but not in animals 26 months after infection.
Clinical signs did not develop in these animals until 35 months after infection. That means there is a three-month gap in which these organs, from apparently healthy cattle, might pass on the disease.
Minster Cunningham said the advisory group felt it necessary to play it safe and assume "infectivity" may be present earlier _ even seven months before symptoms appear.
But scientists told British officials the risk that this may cause any cases of human CJD was extremely slight. They estimated a 5-percent chance of a single case next year.
Cunningham adopted the most severe measure, he said, "because it would not be acceptable to allow tissues shown to transmit BSE to remain within the human food chain".
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