On Jun. 25, 1999, an important step forward was announced in the fight against the mad cow disease. Three rapid post-mortem BSE tests have shown remarkable effectiveness and achieved a 100% success rate in distinguishing animals clinically affected with BSE from healthy animals.

Three tests, Prionics, Enfer and CEA showed all a sensitivity (the ability to correctly identify infected animals), and specificity (the ability to correctly identify non-infected animals) of 100 %, when tested on 1400 mixed contaminated and non-contaminated samples. The French test was able to detect the prion at the lowest concentrations. The tests take from four hours (Enfer) to 24 hours (CEA). The Wallac test did not perform as well as the others but developmental work on this test was ongoing.

The European Commission presented a report on the evaluation of the BSE tests to the Scientific Steering Committee. In its statement the Scientific Steering Committee considers that the objectives of the evaluation have been achieved in showing that these tests can identify animals clinically affected with BSE; however, the results, given that they were obtained from animals showing clinical signs of BSE, cannot be extrapolated to animals in a pre-clinical phase of BSE.

Therefore this new development does not necessitate any changes to our BSE related legislation at this time. The Committee also recommended the Commission to have the results of this evaluation published in the peer reviewed scientific literature as rapidly as possible.

Contaminated samples of brain and spinal cord were supplied by the Central Veterinary Laboratory of the United Kingdom, uninfected reference samples were collected in New Zealand where no case of BSE has been reported and which has a widely recognised high status as regards freedom from TSE diseases. As the evaluation used positive samples from clinically diseased animals only, it is not yet possible to conclude whether he tests also could detect the BSE prion (the agent generally accepted to cause the disease) in animals in the early stages of the disease before clinical signs are present.