3.163 He noted from personal experience the problem of carcasses being split in a manner that caused serious contamination of the meat from spinal cords and risks to abattoir workers of exposure to the BSE agent. Richard Kimberlin may think less. Based on this information we can expect lymphoreticular infection in cattle during the second year of life and brain soon after. It can therefore be anticipated that even in infected BSE animals destined to get clinical disease at say 4 years infectivity will certainly be in lymphoreticular tissue and possibly also in brain and cord even at normal slaughter age. 3.164 Mr Bradley discussed scrapie, and noted that 'since 1985 BSE infected material via rendered products may have been exposed to sheep . . .
Muscle however is likely to be safe except if it is cross-contaminated.
It is a big step to take to try to eliminate certain items from the food chain. However it would be relatively simple to reduce risks considerably by sending for rendering or incinerating specified easily identified, organs and ensuring the necessary training and adjusted slaughter and butchering procedures to reduce cross-contamination. I specifically recall advising Dr Martin on the infectivity of spleen and lymphoid tissue and this is reported in paragraph 5.3.5 of Professor Southwood's Report. 3.165 Mr Bradley discussed the problem of cross-contamination of 'clean' carcasses with potentially infected material. The risk factors to humans are presumed but not actually known to be low.