Government denies BSE-milk tests

The Government denied yesterday that it is doing research into the possibility that BSE, or mad-cow disease, might be passed on in milk. The claim followed the disclosure last week that BSE can be passed from mother to calf, and that the mechanism of such "vertical transmission" is unknown.

A Government spokesman called the reports of experiments with cows' milk "absolute rubbish". The Govern- ment has denied milk could be a route of infection for the disease, or that it could pose any threat to humans. Under a long-standing rule, milk from cattle with BSE is thrown away as a precaution.

In the past decade, only one published piece of research has examined whether BSE might be transmitted by milk: the result suggested it could not.

Media reports suggested yesterday that the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) is carrying out experiments to test whether milk can carry the BSE agent. A MAFF spokesman said: "The advisory committee SEAC reiterated last week that it is satisfied with the precautions presently taken with milk, and MAFF is in agreement with that." SEAC had not asked for any further research into milk, he said.

SEAC forced the Government to announce in March that a dozen recent cases of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) brain disorder could have been caused by exposure to the BSE agent. But cows' milk has never been implicated. Worries have focused instead on cattle brains, spinal cords and various organs which have repeatedly been shown to be highly infective to other cattle. Some monkeys have also developed the disease after eating BSE- infected material.

Government documents suggest MAFF has never funded any studies to investigate whether milk could transmit BSE to calves. "Observations in the field support the hypothesis that it cannot," said the spokesman. In the recent experiment which showed vertical transmission, many of the calves that developed BSE and had BSE-infected mothers never had any of their mother's milk.

Since BSE was identified in 1986, the only published study into the infectivity of milk was carried out by the Institute of Animal Health in Edinburgh.