NR AWMR
AU Ru,G.; Maurella,C.
TI BSE in the world
QU International Conference - Prion 2006: Strategies, advances and trends towards protection of society - 3.10.-6.10.2006, Torino, Italy, Lingotto Conference Centre - Oral sessions ORAL-02
PT Konferenz-Vortrag
AB
Few months ago a press release was issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with an encouraging title: "Mad cow disease on the wane worldwide". The FAO focussed on the period between 2003 and 2005 when the BSE epidemic was dropping at the rate of 50 percent a year. It holds also for the current year with only about 200 cases confirmed so far.
Those figures are the result of a huge number of animals recruited by the international surveillance despite large differences among nations. For instance in the US since June 2004 some 785,000 cattle, most of them fallen stock, have been tested; the effort in the European Union (EU) has been tremendous involving more than 21 million cows in the last 2 years.
To gain a throughout insight in the spread and recent trend of BSE, many sources of data are available and have been looked up for this review. The European Commission has issued annual reports of the monitoring activity since the implementation of the EU-wide active surveillance in 2001 and similar data are available for extra-EU countries. A parallel work of data collection involving 64 countries of the five continents has been carried out to assess the geographical risk of BSE (GBR): it provides fundamental information on the spread of the disease, in particular where few or any surveillance data were made available. Meanwhile the GBR methodology is being reviewed and new assessments are ongoing.
At the moment, comparisons are not easy to carry out and the researcher must be cautious. Data provided by the countries are heterogeneous in their quality, the enforced surveillance systems differ each other both in term of criteria applied and efficacy (even within the EU!), only unadjusted prevalence/incidence rates are available and finally population data often are missing.
What we are observing is a real overall declining trend associated with a decrease in the prevalence in the youngest birth cohorts. However some alarming exceptions are evident and the major risk is in the ongoing will of softening part of the measures of known efficacy
AD Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale del Piemonte CEA, Turin, Italy. E-mail: giuseppe.ru@izsto.it
SP englisch
PO Italien