Tracking Spread of 'Mad Cow' In Europe Remains Random

January 8, 2001 by Geoff Winestock
from The Wall Street Journal

Two summers ago, a German doctor named Ingo Malm decided to set up a private laboratory to test cattle for mad-cow disease. By last March, Bovinia GmbH was offering its services to slaughterhouses and retailers across southern Germany... The 45-year-old general practitioner soon received a written warning from the Health Ministry of Bavaria, Germany's biggest cattle region. It said that the test kit his eight-employee outfit was using hadn't been certified by Germany's federal government and that, in any case, only the government had the right to test for BSE. The kit was licensed from Switzerland's Prionics AG, which had developed one of the first reasonably effective tests for BSE. Dr. Malm kept using the kit, which had been approved by the European Union's top scientific panel, and drew a blunter warning in June... A spokesman for the Bavarian Health Ministry, BernhardSeidenath, says the state government blocked the use of Prionics' tests because it feared they might be unreliable; Prionics says its test is the most reliable available. Mr. Seidenath called the threat to effectively shut down Bovinia "history from a long time ago." Complete article...