(19) Whereas Decision 96/362/EC laid down certain preconditions which had to be met before the United Kingdom could dispatch from its territory gelatin made from raw materials from bovine animals; whereas those preconditions have not been fulfilled and such dispatch has not been authorised; whereas, however, in order to regularise the situation, pending further scientific knowledge and advice, it is appropriate to withdraw the possibility of dispatch of gelatin made from raw materials from bovine animals slaughtered in the United Kingdom for human food, animal feed, cosmetics pharmaceutical and medical purposes; whereas that is in con ...[+++]formity with the advice from the Multidisciplinary Scientific Committee of 3 April 1997, according to which no production can be considered safe if the base material used for gelatin production is potentially infectious;

On receipt, each batch of concentrated inactivated antigen will be checked by the CCI for possible residual infective virus in vitro and in cattle using the method prescribed for vaccine in the European Pharmacopoeia; and

The paper also makes a useful summary of the state of knowledge in the key areas. The following is a list of areas considered by the group as worthy of research : - research aimed at establishing whether or not BSE has been transmitted to man; - working on the hypothesis that BSE may be transmissible to man, a number of suggestions are put forward aimed at establishing a risk assessment such as work on determining whether multiple dosing is cumulative and an estimation of the utilisation of offal in different human food products prior to the ban and the consumption of those products by individual age groups and socio-economic criteria; - is there infectivity in BSE-in ...[+++]fected cattle derived products other than SBO (Specified Bovine Offal) ?; - further research to establish the precise reason or route for maternal transmission of BSE in some cases; - establish if it is possible that BSE originated as a (rare) spontaneous event in cattle and that the BSE agent is different from the scrapie agent; - can BSE be transmitted orally to pigs ?; - research into the development of diagnostic techniques for BSE and CJD; - establish the efficiency of BSE inactivation procedures used in the food and pharmaceutical industry; - certain areas are suggested for research into developing therapeutic treatment for victims of the CJD disease and also into developing a test which would indicate those people susceptible to the disease; - predictive research is also proposed as it has been shown that CJD occurs rarely in individuals with certain genes.