Mr President, if the BSE crisis taught us anything, it is that health takes top priority over all other policies. This is essentially the basis on which this proposal for a regulation has been drawn up and we really must use this opportunity to make a concerted effort to prevent, control and eradicate transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. We have been well aware of this problem for many years now. Unfortunately, however, we have still not managed to eradicate the disease, nor have we managed to identify all the causes for it, hence all the concerns, restrictions and irregularities in the production and marketing of products of animal origin. It is therefore essential that action be taken throughout the Community so that firstly: we can effectively guarantee public health protection and, secondly, we can restore consumer confidence which, in turn, will help the internal market to develop and operate properly. One of the important measures recommended in the regulation is the establishment of rapid diagnosis tests, because rapid detection is one of the keys to combating this disease. Consequently, these tests, which produce results within a relatively short period of time, will most certainly help us to take immediate and appropriate action. Three tests have already been proposed, although we predict that we shall see future improvements in this area, together with rapid diagnosis tests on live animals, so that we can monitor better how the whole epidemiological picture of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies is developing in the European Union. A second key measure is to establish an ongoing epidemiological study based partly on laboratory tests using an established protocol. The introduction of uniform procedures and truly comparable results from analyses by national and Community reference laboratories will help us to monitor the situation closely and to create reliable scientific data and methods of diagnosis which include rapid diagnostic tests. It would be a good idea if, at the same time, we monitored scientific progress on the new variant disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which, as we all know, attacks humans and is caused by food from animals contaminated with BSE. Finally, the slightest suspicion of any form of spongiform encephalopathy in any animal must be notified to the competent authorities so that we can take appropriate action. I should like to stress at this point, that in my view, we will in fact only eradicate the disease effectively if we destroy the whole herd, regardless of how much this would cost both in economic and sentimental terms. That is why the compensation paid by the Commission to beneficiaries must be quite substantial. Of course, it is hard when just one animal out of a whole herd is sick, as it is very difficult to discern if there are animals which appear healthy but which may fall ill later on. That is precisely why we are proposing this measure. “Prevention is better than cure”, as Hippocrates said all those years ago, thereby paving the way for preventive medicine. This is particularly true today, given that there is no cure either for BSE or for the equivalent human disease, the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob. In closing, I should like to commend and thank both Mr Böge, the rapporteur for the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, and Mrs Roth-Behrendt, the rapporteur for the Committee on the Environment. Thanks to their cooperation and with the help of all their other colleagues, I feel this is truly a much better regulation, and is a vast improvement on what the Commission originally presented to Parliament.

Political group: PPE-DE