Opinion of the Scientific Panel on Biological Hazards of the European Food Safety Authority on the "Quantitative risk assessment of the animal BSE risk posed by meat and bone meal with respect to the residual BSE risk"

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Biohaz Panel was invited to assess the validity of the outcome of a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) of the residual BSE risk in mammalian derived meat and bone meal. If the outcome was considered valid the previous Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) opinion "Revised opinion and report on the safety of mammalian derived meat and bone meal (MBM) forming a crosscontaminant of animal feedstuffs" adopted by the Scientific Steering Committee at its meeting of 24-25 September 1998 (EC, 1998) should be reviewed and an advise should be given on how to interpret the results of the calculation in order to make an estimation of the number of potential BSE cases expected per year in a population. The general conclusions of the SSC Opinion are supported by the QRA. This should not be surprising since both are based on many of the same assumptions and many of the same parameters. As a worst case, cattle, in an intensive system, obtaining about 8 kg of compound feed containing 0.1% MBM with a 40% bovine origine from a GBRIV country with unreliable surveillance and where no SRMs were removed prior to rendering, could be exposed to a median (p50) of 5 x 10(-5) CoID50 units per animal per year. However, the risk calculations for the most common and realistic scenario for the EU15 GBRIII country with reliable surveillance and all SRM removed-indicated that the risk would be substantially lower: for cattle extensively fed MBM produced in this scenario could be exposed to on average 1.2 x 10(-7) Co ID50 per animal year. Assuming a lineardose response curve at very low dose, this would be equivalent to a few animals per year in the EU cattle population: 1 infected animal per 10(7) cattle extensively fed 2-3 kg per day of compound feed systematically contaminated with 0.1% bovine-derived MBM. While the Work Group was asked to flag any errors or inconsistencies with the QRA Report or the MBM Opinion and Report, the complete revisions of these documents were not attempted. However, the QRA Report should be considered a dynamic document and, consequently, its content and data need to be reviewed periodically.