BSE: Disease control & eradication - Offspring and cohort culls
Offspring cull
Regulation (EC) No.657/2006 came into force on 2 May 2006. Thereafter the BSE controls rules in the United Kingdom became identical to those in other European Union Member States. Regulation (EC) No.999/2001 requires the culling of the offspring of female BSE cases, born within two years prior to, or after, the clinical onset of disease, as soon as possible.
Operation of the cull
The State Veterinary Service traces eligible offspring of female BSE suspects using data from the Cattle Tracing System and farm records. Eligible offspring are placed under movement restriction. If BSE is confirmed in the dam, the offspring are slaughtered. If BSE is not confirmed, the movement restrictions are lifted. The latest statistics on the progress of the cull are available.
Maternal Transmission
In July 1996, the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) advised that maternal transmission would not sustain the BSE epidemic in cattle. Since 2002, the probability of maternal transmission has been estimated to be approximately 1% in the last six months of the maternal incubation period. In 2003, SEAC were advised of the potential future change from culling all offspring born after July 1996, to a cull of offspring born within two years of the clinical onset of disease in the dam. SEAC advised that they saw no scientific grounds for maintaining the policy for culling offspring in the UK in place at that time.
Further information on the studies into the maternal transmission of BSE is available.
Reference
Donnelly, C. A., Ferguson, N. M., Ghani, A. C. & Anderson, R. M. (2002) Implications of BSE infection screening data for the scale of the British BSE epidemic and current European infection levels. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 269, 2179-2190.
Cohort Cull
Regulation (EC) No.999/2001 requires that all Member States identify, trace, restrict and cull the cohorts of confirmed BSE cases. Cohorts are cattle which were either:
- born in the same herd as a BSE case, up to a year before or after its birth; or
- reared with a BSE case when both were up to a year old.
Cohort cattle might have consumed the same feed as the BSE case during the first year of their lives. Feed contaminated with the BSE agent is the most important source of BSE infection for cattle. Experts believe that the majority of BSE cases were infected during the first year of their lives.
Until 2005, the United Kingdom (UK) did not cull cohorts aged over thirty months, because the OTM Rule acted as an equivalent measure. Along with the UK’s other BSE controls - the removal of specified risk material and the reinforced feed ban - the OTM Rule provided consumers with equivalent protection from BSE. Before the OTM Rule could be amended, the UK needed to cull all cohorts born after 31 July 1996. This meant culling the existing backlog of cohorts along with the cohorts of new BSE cases.
On 1 March 2005, the State Veterinary Service (SVS) began to cull the backlog of cohorts of BSE cases. The backlog cull was completed by the end of June 2005. The cohorts of new BSE cases are restricted, culled and tested for BSE as soon as possible after they are identified.
Regulation (EC) No.1923/2006, which came into force on 19 January 2007, allows Member States to apply for a derogation to defer the culling of cohorts until the end of their productive lives. The request would only be granted subject to a favourable risk assessment, taking into account the control measures in the Member State, and the support of the European Commission and other Member States. However, a UK veterinary risk assessment 
(99 KB) has concluded that continuing to cull cohorts supports the Government’s challenging target of eradicating BSE in Great Britain by 2010, promotes consumer confidence in UK beef and avoids the need for expensive additional control measures to monitor cohorts left on farms.
Compensation
Further information is available.
Page last modified:
18 March, 2008
Page last reviewed:
23 September, 2006