German BSE Outbreak Confirmed
GERMANY – Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has been confirmed in a ten year old cow farmed on the border with Poland.
21 January 2014
1 minute read
The animal, now destroyed, did not enter the food chain and no offspring of the cattle are alive, the World Organisation for Animal (OIE) has announced.
Notification was issued on 17 January, confirming the slaughter of the ten year and five months old cow with the fatal neurodegenerative disease, as well as the destruction of all related offspring.
The location of the 80 cow holding is in Brandenburg’s Eisenhüttenstadt district, in the far east of Germany where farm veterinarians found the animal during routine surveillance, although no clinical signs were on show.
Samples were then taken to the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute in Greifswald which returned positive results to the Directorate of Animal Health and Animal Welfare in Bonn on 9 January.
The immunoblot tests found an atypical BSE case, which the OIE stated was not generally associated with an animal consuming infected feed.
An OIE spokesperson said: “The OIE does not recognize an atypical form of BSE as a distinct entity for the purpose of its international standards; therefore, it is not mentioned in the OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Code, which does not distinguish between different forms of BSE.”
BSE was last confirmed in Germany in mid-2009. Control measures have been put in place.
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