Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-05-Speech-2-275"
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"en.20020205.13.2-275"2
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"Madam President, the Commissioner is in danger of hearing the same speech many times in different languages. This is the English version. I am speaking here on behalf of Mrs Roth-Behrendt, as her father died yesterday and she has had to return home. I am sure the whole House will join me in expressing sympathy to her.
These are the things I want to say. First and foremost, we still do not know enough about BSE and about how it is spread. We certainly do not know enough about its incidence in all the Member States of the Community. We know that we still have it in the UK and although in the coming year it may be that other Member States have more cases than us, that is not a cause for satisfaction for us, but rather for commiseration with those who are still discovering the full horror of what this may mean for them. In the UK we have had over a hundred cases of the human form of CJD. We pray that other Member States will not go through that agony either.
The Commissioner will be entitled to say to us, when we talk about inadequate testing, that the Commission has said time after time that the real truth about BSE was hidden because there was no effective testing. If this debate does one thing at least, as Mr Graefe zu Baringdorf and others have said, it may impress upon us that the Member States need to be able to do this.
I am glad that Mr Olsson accepts that there is an equality of effectiveness between the way the UK takes out animals at 30 months and the slaughter of affected herds and testing of individual animals before they enter the food chain in other European countries. I would not want to see any misunderstandings about that. I believe we need more effective checks for contamination. There are some late, worrying statistics in the UK and elsewhere about animals born after the checks were put into effect, which are still now showing symptoms of BSE. There are obvious suspicions about the hoarding of meat and bonemeal and about where and how the testing is effected.
Mr Olsson wants the FBO to be in effect the monitoring agency. I do not mind that, but I believe that nothing should subtract from the responsibility of the individual Member States to ensure that their testing and external controls are effective and are carried through.
Then there is the question of animal waste to herbivores. We will be debating this when Mrs Paulsen's report comes back for its chequered second reading. I would simply say that I am in that party in this House that believes, with Mr Olsson, that we should outlaw the feeding of animal waste of any form to ruminant animals. It is high time that was done.
Finally, on the issue of sheep, I would just say to Mr Olsson that when we look at that lamentable failure over the testing of what turned out to be cows' brains, all that tells us is that there was incompetence of a grotesque kind. It does not tell us that we have proof positive that BSE has not jumped species once again and got into the sheep population. I would like to hear the Commissioner's views on those things and I apologise for repeating some of the other excellent remarks made in this debate."@en1
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