EU to Lift Four-Year Mad Cow Disease Ban on T-bone, Famous Fiorentina Steaks
Oct. 5th, 2005 by adminBy CONSTANT BRAND, Associated Press Writer
October 5, 2005
BRUSSELS, Belgium
Associated Press
Excerpt…
European Union veterinary experts recommended lifting a four-year ban on steaks on the bone Wednesday, including Italy’s famous Fiorentina steaks, ending a moratorium imposed during the 2001 mad cow crisis.
The European Commission said the official return of the T-bone steak to butcher shops and kitchens could happen within the next two months, after experts accepted advice from the EU’s European Food Safety Authority to raise the age limit of sales of beef with backbone to 24 months. The EU banned the sales of steaks on the bone from animals aged over 12 months in 2001, to reduce the risk of humans contracting a brain-wasting disease from eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad cow disease…
…The Commission said experts found a “significant decline in the number of positive BSE cases detected in the EU over the past few years and the age of those positive cases has steadily increased.”
A rare but fatal form of the disease in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is linked to eating meat products contaminated with BSE and was blamed for about 150 deaths, most of them in Britain, beginning in 1995.
EU experts last week also issued a “satisfactory” progress report on the containment of mad cow disease in Britain, raising prospects that the ban on British beef exports may soon be lifted.
The ban was imposed in 1996 when it became clear there was a link between mad cow disease in cattle and a deadly human equivalent. The incidence of BSE in Britain has dropped from 37,280 cases in 1992 to 342 last year.
