Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE): prevention, detection of ruminant protein in meat and bone meal and inactivation of the prion

Recently number of papers have been addressed to scrapie in sheep and a related disease in cattle: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Especially in Great Britain, BSE occurred in epidemic form. The agent of SSE, a proteinaceous infectious particle (prion), was thought to originate from scrapie. The spread of BSE to countries other than the U.K. should be viewed with the substantiation that it is transmitted by ingestion of prions which may have contaminated the feed. The wide distribution of scrapie through out the world and the use of animal protein in cattle feed require in-depth analysis of rendering procedures. The agent can gain access to new countries through export and import of meat and bone meal (MBM) made from the offals of BSE-infected cattle or through the transition of animals in preclinical stage of disease. There are many techniques to control the presence of meat and bone meal by detecting efficacy of the heat treatment of the rendering procedures or by detecting the species-specific sequence of nucleic acid. Since the addressing of this problem, there have been reports of various chemicals and schedules, which considerably reduce the infectious titre. Recent reports of export of meat and bone meal to different countries add highly to the concern. In this review we try to explain some measures that a country can adopt to prevent the entry of BSE in its premises.