By CATHERINE FIELD
PARIS - Reacting to a new scare about mad-cow disease, French supermarket chains this week cleared their shelves of suspect beef, the Government strengthened hygiene measures and the farming lobby urged harsh punishment of farmers who cheat on controls aimed at containing the crisis.
Retail giants Carrefour, Auchan and
Cora rushed to throw out beef suspected to have come from a Normandy abattoir where inspectors had spotted an animal with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad-cow disease.
Desperate to shore up public confidence, Carrefour ran full-page newspaper ads, offering full compensation for any returned beef and filed suit against a cattle dealer suspected of slipping the infected cow into the herd, 13 of which had already been slaughtered and processed.
Health officials insisted that the chance of eating any tainted meat - a suspected cause of the degenerative brain disorder variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) - was extremely remote.
France has had far tougher anti-BSE regulations, and for far longer, than Britain, the epicentre of the European Union's worst food-hygiene crisis.
It banned cattle feed containing ground-up animal matter, the suspected cause of transmitting the infective agent, in 1990 and its policy is to destroy the entire herd if a single animal is infected.
What torments the Government, farmers and the food processing industry - France's biggest money-spinner - is the fear that French consumers could shun beef.
So far there have been two detected cases of vCJD in France, each of which have made the headlines. As for BSE, there have been 74 documented cases since the start of the year, almost the same tally as for the entire period since the disease first appeared in France in 1991.
Belatedly aware of loopholes in their regulatory wall, the authorities this month banned beef intestines from sausages - sounding a potential death knell for the andouillette, a well-loved rustic banger - and warned of increasing spot checks on abattoirs.
Public pressure is now rising for an EU-wide bar on all animal matter in any kind of feed to prevent farmers from cheating by, for instance, giving pig meal to cattle or sheep or vice-versa - the sort of practice that encouraged BSE to leap the species barrier in the first place.
