Vincent Baeten and Juan Antonio Fernández Pierna
Quality Department, Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W)
24, Chaussée de Namur, 5030 Gembloux (Belgium),
Since the earliest case of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic was first confirmed in the United Kingdom in 1987, strict legislation was set up year after year.
This has been done taking into account new scientific and epidemiologic evidences showing that meat and bone meal are the most probable vector of the disease, in order to eradicate BSE in Europe.
Nowadays, the European Commission has come to the stage that amendments of certain measures could be envisaged, without endangering the health or the policy of eradicating BSE, provided that the positive trend continues and scientific conditions are in place.
The scientific conditions to complete regarding the amendments of the total feed ban are the development and validation of analytical methods and tools for the detection of the presence of species-specific animal proteins in animal feed.
Actually, the existing methods do not allow species-specific identification and lead to the impossibility to lift the total ban and to implement the anti-cannibalism ban. The SAFEED-PAP project aims to complete the scientific conditions that should allow the repealing of the extended feed ban.
SAFEED-PAP project uses the inherent difference and complementarities of the various methods in terms of their targets to develop and validate methods that will allow reaching the scientific conditions for the amendment of the total feed ban.
The SAFEED-PAP project has three main objectives that should lead to solve the problematic of the species specific detection of MBM in compound feeds: (i) Development of suitable validated methods for the species specific detection and quantification of animal proteins in compound feed in order to allow the amendment of the extended total ban; (ii) Development of tools and analytical kits for the correct implementation of the methods in the labs; (iii) To set up the appropriate environment for the optimum application of the methods.
In the framework of the SAFEED-PAP two workshops have been planned.
The first one concerned a workshop dedicated to the new Member states and took place in Vilnius (Lithuania) the 15th and 16th May 2008.
The second one was organised in Qingdao (China) and aimed to gather researchers involved in BSE problematic from Asian and European countries.
Keywords : SAFEED-PAP, BSE, PAP, Workshop, China