MADRID (Reuters)
- The regional government of Navarre said on Tuesday it had detected
Spain"s first outbreaks of scrapie in sheep, a variant of
mad cow disease that is not believed to be transmissible to humans.
A spokesman
for the government of the northern region said the problem was
under control, with a herd of 2,200 sheep having already been
sacrificed and another 600 due to be culled. "We have had
cases...of scrapie in two farms and they"re the first cases
(in Spain) to be publicly declared," Navarre agricultural
spokesman Javier Errea told Reuters. The newspaper El Pais reported
that there had been other cases in Spain, but they had not been
confirmed publicly. No one at the Agriculture Ministry was available
to comment.
Scrapie is
a variant of the same family as bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), the cattle brain-wasting disorder also known as "mad
cow disease," that has been blamed for more than 79 human
deaths in Britain alone. The European Union said last week that
BSE probably exists in cattle in Spain, Germany and Italy, although
those countries deny the presence of the disease.
BSE has yet
to show up in sheep, but Professor Emmanuel Vanopdenbosch, one
of the European Union"s top scientists in the subject, told
the Belgian newspaper De Morgen last week: "The BSE question
with sheep is a time bomb that continues to tick." Errea
said the risk of the sheep disease being passed on to cows and
perpetuated had been eradicated by a 1994 law banning the use
of animal remains in cattle feed. "In reality there is no
reason for concern," he said.
However concerns
that BSE may appear in sheep have recently been highlighted by
a case in Vermont in the United States where four sheep tested
positive for transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), of
which both scrapie and mad cow disease are derivatives. Experts
say it could take years before it is known which form of TSE the
Vermont sheep had.
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