Brazil: minister welcomes new BSE status report - leatherbiz: Leading Leatherbiz

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Brazil: minister welcomes new BSE status report

28/02/2012
Brazil’s minister for animal health, Guilherme Marques, has welcomed an announcement from the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) that it will downgrade Brazil’s status for risk of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) from controlled risk to negligible risk.

At a meeting in Paris in mid-February, the OIE’s Scientific Commission for Animal Diseases, decided that the risk of an outbreak of BSE in Brazil was insignificant.

Brazil has never registered any cases of BSE and feels that the feed regime for most of its cattle (based on pasture) will help it stay free from the disease. In the last seven years, there have been no imports of live cattle and imports of bone meal from countries with a higher risk of BSE have also ceased. It is this that has led to the new OIE decision.

Mr Marques said in response that the development would help the Brazilian cattle industry in export markets. He commented: “It’s not enough for us just to say we don’t have BSE in Brazil. We have to be able to show it, based on scientific evidence. The absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence.”

 


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