Food Standards Agency
Friday 19 March 2010
Business campaign
AZ-Directory
What's NewRSS
What is RSS?Listen
Listen to this siteWednesday 25 June 2003
This research project aims to estimate the current risk to human health of BSE in cattle and the effect on the risk of possible changes to the OTM rule.
Study Duration : November 2002 to March 2003
Contractor : Imperial College Consultants Ltd
Risk analysis is necessary to inform policy decisions on the use of control measures for cattle production.
The following objectives are to be investigated by Imperial College: UK agricultural census and cattle tracing scheme databases will be used to update estimates of key demographic parameters for the GB cattle herd; BSE screening data will be cross-linked with other cattle databases and analysed for evidence of selection biases; backcalculation methods will be adapted to make use of data from random screening of healthy animals as well as data on reported clinical cases, this will be used to estimate the level of case ascertainment; casualty/fallen stock surveys will be used to explore different hypotheses accounting for under-ascertainment; maternal transmission and ongoing feed-borne infection will be investigated as possible mechanisms for ongoing infection risk in recent cattle cohorts; projections of future case and infection incidence and of human exposure will be made for UK; the effect of a wide range of possible future human risk reduction strategies that might replace the current over-thirty-month (OTM) scheme will be investigated. In addition DNV Consulting are to estimate the potential exposure to BSE infectivity for a range of possible risk reduction strategies that might replace the current OTM Rule by considering the infectivity present in different tissues and the ways by which that infectivity could enter the human food chain.
Two final reports are awaited for this project, one from DNV Consulting and one from Imperial College.
Project completed - Final report is awaited.
Contact
: Stephen Dixon
Tel
: 020 276 8342 (Intl. +44 (0) 20 7276 8342)
Email
: stephen.dixon@foodstandards.gsi.gov.uk
Find out what our other sites have to offer