New Scrapie Fear After Sheep Tests

The sheep industry was put on edge yesterday following an announcement by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London that tests had thrown up a new strain of scrapie, the fatal brain disease of sheep associated with BSE in cattle and, by implication, variant CJD in humans.

However, senior officials with both Defra and the Scottish Executive’s Environment and Rural Affairs Department were at pains to stress that this discovery is not linked to BSE and that there is no need for concern over food safety.

But what is of major concern is that the fact that the government funded Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) in Weybridge, Surrey, has confirmed that 83 "atypical" cases of scrapie have been found over the past three years in 110,000 sheep brains tested. More worrying is the acknowledgement that of those abnormal results, 12 have been found in sheep with the genotype normally associated with the highest resistance to scrapie.