Up to 10,000 BSE-risk cattle buried

25 May 2001



Up to 10,000 BSE-risk cattle buried

By Donald MacPhail

TEN thousand cattle at risk from BSE may have been buried in landfills in the first few weeks of the foot-and-mouth crisis, say government advisors.

And it is probably already too late to attempt to dig up the carcasses as bodily fluids may have already be leaking out, admits BSE advisors SEAC.

These cattle, aged five years or over, which are most at risk from the disease, are buried at least 55 sites, the SEAC working group was told.

Assuming a 0.4% prevalence of late-stage BSE-infected carcasses, this equates to about 40 infected carcasses, say the advisors who met on Thursday (24 May).

This disclosure will heighten anxiety among communities close to burial sites, who fear that BSE-infected carcasses could contaminate water supplies.

SEAC acting chairman Peter Smith told the Daily Express on Friday (25 May) that he would not drink water from close to foot-and-mouth burials.

He estimated that the risk of contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of BSE, from infected water was as high as one in 200,000.

The Environment Agency is carrying out specific risk assessments on all affected sites, although body fluids could have leaked out within two months.

SEAC said that digging up and transporting carcasses and transporting them could potentially involve a greater risk than the one being avoided.

“It was likely that most body fluids would already have leached out of the carcasses which would no longer be intact,” admitted SEAC.

“Digging up the remains would itself create significant risks – for example of bringing deep soil to the surface – that would need to be taken into account.”

However, SEAC claimed that the risk would be small and should be kept in perspective.

The SEAC working group was also advised that there were at least 400 locations where pyres had been used to burn 50,000 cattle over five years old,

Analyses of ash indicated that 90% of infectivity in cattle aged over five years was destroyed.

Calculations indicated that unburied ash contained infectivity equivalent to roughly 60 BSE infected animals.

This equated to 0.01 infective units per tonne – a very low level, said SEAC.

The working group said incineration would ensure the greatest destruction of any residual infectivity in the ash, but that the risks from landfilling were also very small.

The group also said that provided vehicles used to transport culled animals were properly cleaned they could resume transporting foodstuffs.

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