At least some of the regulatory approaches to excluding bovine spongiform encephalopathy from transmission via food to humans were predicated on detecting prohibited bovine tissues in animal-origin foodstuffs. We were able to contribute to the selection of detection methods (Hajmeer et al. 2003) and their application to ''advanced meat recovery'' products (Hajmeer et al. 2006) . The methods used immunological procedures to detect banned tissue: the latter was a method for detecting abnormal prions, minus the proteinase K that would remove normal prions from the sample.