Chronicle of German Scrapie Cases

Roland Heynkes 17 September 2007, CC BY-SA-4.0 DE

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Remarks

Remarks

With regard to this scrapie chronicle one has to bear in mind that the number of notified scrapie cases is bound to increase with the number of tests carried out, and that sheep owners are still able to clandestinely dispose of suspect sheep as sheep contrary to cattle need not be marked and registered as individuals. Additionally, German scrapie cases are not always made public by press release and are not individually listed in publicly accessable official chronicles. This impedes the compilation of data and also renders this chronicle partly unreliable. For the 1980ies and the 1990ies as well as for the year 2003, however, the BMVEL kindly forwarded its data to me. With regard to the obligations of the Federal Ministry to the Federal States I am not in a position to name communities and counties unless they have already been published by other sources like AHO. Moreover, some Federal States are not subdivided into districts.

Despite increasing test numbers we shall not gain a reliable impression of the actual scrapie incidence in Germany as long as there is no sufficiently sensitive scrapie test like the Lelystad test which can be used in a larger sample of healthy sheep and goats. The testing of diseased or fallen sheep would only make sense if such animals could not be disposed of unnotified. Since the 1st of April 2002 an EU-wide scrapie monitoring program was implemented according to which Germany has to test 60.000 slaughter sheep and 6.000 fallen sheep. This is not very expedient as in Germany mostly lambs are slaughtered, making it difficult to achieve testing in 60.000 adult slaughter animals. On the other side the sample size of only 6.000 fallen sheep is too small. This number is, however, to my knowledge exceeded in Germany.

Annoyingly - like in the early days with regard to BSE - the assumption is habitually repeated that according to current knowledge the sheep disease scrapie is not dangerous for humans, although this assumption cannot be substantiated by the meager epidemiological data. In vitro normal human prion protein is equally efficiently or inefficiently misfolded by scrapie prions as by BSE prions (Raymond,G.J.; Hope,J.; Kocisko,D.A.; Priola,S.A.; Raymond,L.D.; Bossers,A.; Ironside,J.; Will,R.G.; Chen,S.G.; Petersen,R.B.; Gambetti,P.; Rubenstein,R.; Smits,M.A.; Lansbury,P.T.; Caughey,B. - Molecular assessment of the potential transmissibilities of BSE and scrapie to humans - Nature 1997 July 17; 388(6639): 285-8). In my opinion the absence of scientific data is misused by the authorities to play down the risk.