EU Commissioners Defend Handling of Mad-Cow Crisis
May 16, 2011
BRUSSELS -- The European Commission defended its handling of the mad-cow crisis following accusations that during the early 1990s it played down health risks to humans to protect the beef industry. ``The commission's actions speak for themselves,'' a spokesman said, referring to a series of measures adopted by the commission that culminated in an export ban on British beef earlier this year. He added that these measures ``confirmed the necessity of protecting public health ... but at the same time not disrupting the markets as long as there was a lack of scientific evidence.'' The spokesman said the commission would cooperate fully with a public inquiry by the European Parliament into the European Union's handling of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, crisis. The Parliament will launch its investigation at hearings Tuesday. The commission spokesman was commenting on allegations in the French newspaper Liberation that the commission's director-general for agriculture, Hal Amaral, sent a memo in 1993 urging that the EU avoid discussions about the possible transmission of BSE to humans to avoid upsetting the beef markets. Earlier this year, French newspapers published a memo from another commission official outlining a similar policy. Critics of the commission argue that it wasn't aggressive enough in pressing the British government for tougher action against BSE, which appeared in British herds in the late 1980s. In March, the British government sparked a consumer panic over beef when it said BSE may be linked to a similar deadly brain disease in humans. The statement reversed years of reassurances in London that the disease couldn't be transmitted from cows to humans.
