Food scares are obviously big news for people in towns and cities but when you are in a rural area and keep farm animals, they take on huge importance. When foot and mouth was rampaging up and down the country a few years ago, Helen and I were living on a smallholding and keeping sheep. The hideous disease stopped just a few miles away from us and never reached our sheep. I can still picture very clearly the pyres of railways sleepers covered in burning sheep and the thick, noxious smoke lingering in the valleys.
Before foot and mouth there was BSE in which a factor was using animal remains in feed, a practice that was banned by the EEC in 1994. But now they are thinking of partially undoing the ban and allowing dead pigs to be fed to chickens as part of their feed. The details are here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/04/foodtech.food
It’s being proposed, as you might expect for nothing but financial reasons. The cost of cereal for poultry feed has gone up recently, and this would make feed cheaper. Philip Comer, a former “Risk Assessment Adviser for the FSA” said: “The by-products of slaughter are a very valuable source of protein…we should not be wasting it”.
To my mind this suggestion is almost breathtakingly stupid. The risk of some serious illness in chickens, and of this then being passed to humans is very small. That’s what they said about BSE too and that resulted in hundreds of people getting Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease which is a form of dementia (as is Alzheimer’s disease).
The risk might be small, but it isn’t worth it.
Cheers, Tom.
http://lois.co.uk
06/05/08 @ 16:41