EUROPE'S Food Safety Authority has published its first summary report on the monitoring of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in cattle, sheep and goats, taking over the job from the European Commission.

TSEs are a group of diseases that affect the brain and nervous system of humans and animals, which came to public prominence when the 'classical' bovine version, apparently caused by the recycling of cattle protein into feed, jumped the species barrier and triggered cases in humans, sparking the 'mad cow' health scare.

EFSA's latest results suggest that bovine spongiform encephalopathy has been virtually wiped out, with only five cases reported in EU member states – none of which entered the food chain – out of about 1.4 million animals tested.

There is no scientific evidence that any other livestock TSEs can be transmitted to humans. Which is just as well, given their higher incidence rate in the EU. There were 641 cases of scrapie in sheep, out of 319,638 tested, and 1052 in goats, out of 135,857 tested.

Since 2001, approximately 114 million cattle in the EU have been tested for BSE. In 2015, the year covered by the latest figures, the five cases were detected in four member states – one case in Ireland, one case in Slovenia, one case in Spain, and two cases in the United Kingdom (and one case was detected in Norway during parallel Single Market testing).

Two of these cases, in Ireland and the United Kingdom, were affected by classical BSE, both born after the EU-wide feed ban enforced in 2001. The remaining four cases were atypical BSE cases – a version of the disease that is not transmissible.

Since 2002, approximately 8.4 million small ruminants have been tested during the EU-wide surveillance for scrapie. Although in a number of member states the decrease in classical scrapie is clear, at the EU level there is no clear decreasing trend in its occurrence.

Results obtained from genotyping in sheep confirm that cases of classical scrapie are clustered among certain genotypes, and animals with these genotypes seem to account for less than 20% of the European randomly sampled sheep population.