Germany Seeks to Ease Public’s ‘Mad Cow’ Fears

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his government sought Thursday to calm the near hysteria sweeping this country over an outbreak of “mad cow” disease that has cast suspicions on Germans’ beloved sausage and caused a pre-holiday run on poultry and fish.

Germans who were convinced as recently as a month ago that their farms were free of the brain-wasting disease afflicting cattle in Britain and France have been horrified by the sudden discovery of five infected cows and warnings from health officials that the number of cases is likely to grow.

Austria slapped an import ban on German cattle and beef products Wednesday, and German Health Minister Andrea Fischer warned the public that some lower-quality types of sausage might contain reprocessed meat from cows’ spinal area, which is thought to be most susceptible to the disease.

At a crisis meeting in Bonn, health and agriculture ministers from Germany’s 16 federal states weighed Fischer’s appeal for a recall of sausages that may have been made before an Oct. 1 ban on using backbone meat as filler. But the officials decided that they were unsure which products still on the shelves are suspect and instead urged every butcher and meat processor to identify potentially affected products.

Most German sausage is made with pork, which has so far not been found to be tainted by the bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, discovered in European cattle over the past five years. But before the October edict, some of the 100-plus varieties of sausage for sale at German butcher shops and supermarkets also had beef from the backbone area added as filler.

Germans tend to give goose, fish and turkey pride of place on their Christmas tables, but millions consider the holiday season incomplete without a stop at the ubiquitous sausage stands while out shopping. Sausage also is an essential offering on any holiday buffet table, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner.

At his year-end news conference Thursday in Berlin, Schroeder said the government is making every effort to ensure that all meat products sold in the country are safe.

“The ministries involved are doing their utmost to make sure we have the best possible consumer safety, one that stands up to the best in the world,” he said.

He noted that testing for BSE is now mandatory for all cattle born more than 2 1/2 years ago, when farmers began adhering to a European Union ban on feed containing bone meal and other ground-up animal parts. Until the first case of an infected German cow was discovered last month, testing was only sporadic. Four new cases have been identified since the new testing procedures took effect.

Consumers have been reacting to the BSE discoveries even without formal government action. Meat sales have been plummeting with each new disclosure, and the German Assn. of Meat Industries said many of the 20,000 butcher shops it represents are short of fish and poultry as shoppers have been panic-buying ahead of the four-day holiday weekend, when all stores in Germany will be closed.

Consumption of BSE-contaminated meat can lead to a human equivalent of the mad cow syndrome known as “new variant” Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. There have been no cases confirmed in Germany, but the disease has claimed about 80 lives in Britain and, recently, a few in France.