In Japan cattle screening tests for BSE are conducted at slaughterhouses for surveillance purposes and as a meat safety measure. By constructing a probabilistic risk model, we evaluated the influence on human exposure to the BSE agent of removing specified risk materials and changing the age limits for cattle testing at the slaughterhouse. A stochastic model using the Monte-Carlo simulation was constructed in order to estimate the BSE infectivity from a single BSE-infected animal at slaughter destined for the food chain. The impact of different testing strategies and risk material removal was then compared. The removal of risk materials reduced the median value estimates of infectivity in cattle destined for human consumption by 95%. Cattle screening tests reduced the infectivity further, but this reduction effect did not differ between the various testing strategies.
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References:
Tsutsui and Kasuga (2006) Int. J. Food. Microbiol. 107:256-264.
