EU set to lift four-year mad cow disease ban on T-bone
European Union veterinary experts today recommended the lifting of a four-year ban on steaks on the bone, including Italy’s famous Fiorentina steaks, ending a moratorium imposed during the mad cow crisis in 2000.
The European Commission said the return of the T-bone steak to butchers and kitchens could happen within the next two months after experts accepted advice from the EU’s European Food Safety Authority to raise the age limit of sales of beef with backbone to 24 months.
The EU banned the sale of steaks on the bone aged over 12 months in 2000 to reduce the risk of humans catching mad cow disease – also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.
A rare, but fatal, form of the disease in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is linked to eating meat products contaminated with BSE and was blamed for about 150 deaths, most of them in Britain, beginning in 1995.
The initial ban was the demise of the popular T-bone steak in many EU countries. Austria, Sweden and Finland were exempted because they had no BSE cases.
