Int’l - UK sees mass sheep cull in BSE contingency plan

More than half of Britain's sheep flock could be slaughtered in the "highly unlikely" event that mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was found to have permeated the national herd, agriculture officials said on Wednesday. No case of BSE has ever been confirmed as naturally occurring in sheep, but there are fears that some sheep diagnosed as having the related prion disease scrapie -- not known to be harmful to humans -- might be carrying the brain-wasting affliction. "Around 25 million animals would go in the worst case scenario," Mike Segal, head of the government's livestock strategy division, told reporters at a press briefing. Segal said one year's production of lambs could be culled but that the breeding flock would probably be kept in a bid to maintain supplies. Officials said the "highly unlikely scenario" was one of a list of proposals aimed at dealing with any possible discovery of sheep infected with BSE. "We have no information which makes the government believe there is now a higher likelihood of BSE being in the national flock," UK agriculture minister Ben Bradshaw said in a statement. "If BSE were found in sheep, consumers, farmers and other stakeholders, including the EU, would expect us to have a plan," Bradshaw added. Scientific experts have said sheep could be at risk because they were once fed the same infected material linked to the spread of the disease in cattle during the 1980s and early 1990s. The need for a contingency plan was prompted by the BSE Inquiry in 2000 which found that the agriculture ministry had failed to prepare for the link between variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of the disease, and BSE. The plan, which is up for discussion for 12 weeks, says that depending on the time of year, between 14 and 23 million lambs normally destined for the food chain, and up to three million older rams and ewes, could be killed. Government figures show that UK farmers held around 36 million sheep and lambs last year. UK scientists first identified BSE in 1986 and the disease devastated dairy and cattle herds in the mid-1990s.