Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Intervention Board : BSE, the cost of a crisis report / by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

  • National Audit Office
Date:
1998
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Intervention Board : BSE, the cost of a crisis report / by the Comptroller and Auditor General. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    68/130 (page 62)
    The steps involved in implementing the Selective Cull the scheme lie with the Ministry’s Animal Health Division, while the Ministry’s State Veterinary Service is responsible for operating it through its central headquarters and its network of regional Animal Health Offices. The Intervention Board is responsible for making compensation payments to farmers on the basis of information provided by the Ministry and for the collection, slaughter and disposal arrangements. The Department of Agriculture, Northern Ireland is © responsible for making payments in Northern Ireland. The total cost of the scheme is likely to be about £160 million, £0.1 million of which was incurred during 1996-97. Selection of animals to be culled E¥*J Implementing the Selective Cull involves several distinct stages as shown in Figure 21. FUE 20 HI using the epidemiological database at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge to identify all confirmed cases of BSE in animals born after the ruminant protein ban; @ tracing these animals back to the herd in which they were born or reared for the first six months (the natal herds’); & identifying within those herds other animals in the same cohort (i.e. born in the same season) and assessing whether they were exposed to the same feed. If more than one cohort is affected, separate natal herd reports are completed for each cohort year; &@ tracing all these other exposed animals, or establishing that they have been slaughtered; @ arranging for the valuation and slaughter of exposed animals. The process of tracing and identifying exposed animals is iterative, since within a single herd they may have come from a variety of sources. EZ] In this process a key concept is that of the cohort year. This was intended to cover all calves which were born in the same season as a confirmed BSE case. However, for practical purposes the Ministry initially defined it as follows (Figure 22):