Get safety down to a science

The food industry must exert more pressure on the European Parliament to get decisions based on science and risk rather than politics, professor Patrick Wall, chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, has argued.

"There is a lot of politics in food safety," said Wall last month at a conference organised by the British Meat Processors Association. Wall, who was speaking in a personal capacity as a former risk manager, having previously been chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, said: "We are trying to introduce more science across Europe in meat inspection."

In particular, Wall called for some of the controls introduced since the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) disease outbreak to be relaxed.

"Meat and bone meal did not cause the problem of BSE," said Wall. "It was contaminated meat and bone meal."

He suggested the decision to incinerate these by-products rather than use them for animal feed was a waste given the shortage of protein around the world. Wall said feeding poultry waste to pigs and vice versa, as proposed within the EU risk managers transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) roadmap, could be justified. "The risk is minuscule ... Neither of these animals have ever had BSE, so you are not giving it to the same species," he said. "We might see some movement on that from the risk managers' side."

The roadmap is investigating how BSE controls could be rolled back without compromising animal health or consumer safety.

Wall accepted the scientific basis of removing specified risk material - identified with a possible transfer route from BSE in cattle to variant Creutzfeld Jacobs Disease in humans - during the processing of sheep carcasses, was questionable. "I think we have to move away from the whole BSE story, but you've got to convince the politicians," he said.

He accepted that policy makers took factors other than science into consideration, but said that potential media reaction often carried equal weight with the science.