Thousands of BSE cases `not reported'

THOUSANDS of cases of mad cow disease have been covered up by farmers and the Ministry of Agriculture, it was claimed yesterday.

Dr Stephen Dealler, a microbiologist at Burnley General Hospital, claims that only one in five cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - have been reported to the Government by farmers. He will present his evidence to the BSE inquiry tomorrow.

"Since it became mandatory to report all cases in 1988, the number of reports of BSE to the Ministry of Agriculture has declined when statistically the reporting should have been at a high level," he said.

"There has been a gradual drop in reporting, which I can back up, which suggests that farmers have not been honest about the extent of the problem."

Dr Dealler said the under-reporting was certainly going on until 1996, the last year for which figures are available, and "there is no reason to doubt that this covering up is still going on in the farming community".

He suggested that farmers, who were worried about financial ruin decided to declare clean herds by sending animals for slaughter and rendering at the first sign of BSE.

"That way they would not have to declare they had a BSE problem. Declaring you have BSE leads to a huge financial loss for farmers, which is outweighed by compensation."

Animals sent to the renderers are boiled down and turned into powder which is stored at sites around the country. Rendered animals are meant to be BSE-free and the waste material, according to the Government, is safe to store.

But Dr Dealler claimed there could be a health risk if cows with BSE were rendered and their remains stored.

Some of the stores are near water courses and there have been fears that if the rendered powder contained BSE contaminated material it could get into drinking water.

His fears were backed up yesterday by Dr Alan Colchester, a consultant neurologist at Guys Hospital, London, who said he was concerned about the risks to humans and animals from the rendering process.

Giving evidence to the inquiry, Dr Colchester said infectivity could be encountered in materials associated with rendering and was concerned about Thruxted Mill, a rendering plant near Ashford, Kent which was licensed to receive animals which could have been incubating BSE. There have been four suspected cases of new variant-CJD near Ashford.

"I remain very concerned that the risks to humans and animals from the rendering process and its products have still not been fully evaluated and the precautionary principle is still not being appropriately applied," he said. He was also concerned about the possibility of water-supply contamination as Thruxted Mill lay over an aquifer.