She revealed the decision of the producers ahead of tomorrow's extraordinary meeting of European Agriculture ministers in Luxembourg, following last week's EU ban on exports of all beef products from the U.K. The ban stems from the discovery that there may be a link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, known also as "mad cow" disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans who ate beef from infected cattle.
European cosmetics makers have agreed to pull products made with beef tissues from shelves, and companies will use alternative ingredients in the future, French daily Le Journal du Dimanche reported Bonino as having said Friday. Until that happens, some consumers prefer not to take any chances. "We had one client earlier who was asking all sorts of questions about what went into Estee Lauder creams," said Martine Drauart, a cosmetics vendor at Bon Marche department store in Paris.
Cosmetics makers use a variety of beef by-products in the composition of products, including fat as an emulsifier in skin creams. The animal parts most likely to carry disease, Bonino reportedly told consumer protection representatives at a Brussels meeting Friday, are brain tissues, eyes and tissues from the central nervous system.
"I imagine it'll take a few days to see whether this really changes peoples' behavior," Drauart said. If the consumer reaction to the "mad cow" scare in edible beef products is a gauge, cosmetics makers could be in for a tough campaign to prevent a collapse of sales.
Since the first report of a link between BSE and the brain-wasting disease in humans, beef sales in French stores have fallen as much as fifty percent. Stores are using measures such as labeling beef products "made in France" to reassure consumers, but this has done little to win back customers.
Outside France stores are being hurt too. "In Italy, our Continent stores have seen a similar drop in beef sales, as well as in virtually all the countries where we have a presence," said Corinne Henry, director of marketing for Promodes SA, France's second-largest supermarket and mall chain operator, recently.
Of these, 40 had been withdrawn voluntarily, 15 had been reformulated to replace bovine material for a different animal source such as porcine material, 20 had been prohibited by the IKS because of an unfavourable cost/benefit analysis, and the remainder were still in production because of their irreplaceable medical value and very low risk, of which bovine insulin was an example.
U.S. scientists noted, however, that very few of these products use pieces of the steer's brain and spinal cord, the only parts of the steer's body where mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encepthalopathy, has been found. The most widely used beef product is collagen, the spongy substance derived from beef skin or bones. Collagen is often an ingredient in ice cream, custards, cheeses, candies, sausage casings and cosmetics.
Even if it were found to be a carrier, the vast majority of the collagen in U.S. products comes from domestic beef because it is so plentiful, said Bob Rust, professor emeritus in meat science at Iowa State University.
The FDA, prior to approval of any drug with beef products, requires the manufacturer to certify that the beef only come from countries free of the disease, he said. [Wrong - manucturers have refused to do this, saying they take their supplier 's word for this-- webmaster]
The variety of drugs derived from cattle parts is diverse and includes:
The ministry also called on drug makers who use cattle substances for their products to quickly declare which parts of the animals they process and their raw materials' country of origin.
[04-10-96 at 13:27 EDT, 1996, Kyodo News International]
The proposed action comes after evidence surfaced that the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, might be linked to Creautzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, fatal brain disease in humans.
Many supplements and cosmetics, ranging from "energy boosters" to "anti-aging creams" contain beef proteins or hormonal extracts from bovine organs and glands.... FDA officials have grown increasingly concerned ... that a contaminated cosmetic could infect a person through a cut in the skin or contact with the eyes, providing easy access to the brain.
Herds in at least five European countries are known to harbor the cow disease. with little or no documentation to indicate the country of origin for bovine ingredients, consumers cannot be certain that the products are free of the disease agent, experts said.
Representatives of the food supplement and cosmetics industry said keeping track of indivdual sources for every lot of product sold would be unnecessarily burdensome. Instead they rely on promises from supppliers that ingredients come from countries without the cow disease.
Copyright 1996 The Washington Post
At this time, FDA is not extending the recommendation in this letter to dairy products or gelatin, because available evidence does not suggest transmission via these foods. Furthermore, meat (i.e., skeletal muscle) is not covered by this letter. For guidance on importation of meat and other products regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), refer to Title 9 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
The Agency is providing the following information to explain why it believes that BSE may potentially be a concern with certain dietary supplements and cosmetic products. BSE has been identified in more than 100,000 cattle in the United Kingdom and, to a much lesser extent, in several other countries. BSE has not been diagnosed in the United States. This neurological disease is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) and is similar to other TSEs such as scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans. The spongiform encephalopathies are uniformly fatal and no rapid diagnostic test for infection in living animals or humans is presently available. Current scientific information indicates that the causative agent is extremely resistant to inactivation by normal disinfection or sterilization procedures. A range of research projects into the exact nature of both the BSE agent and other TSE agents, host range, patterns of pathogenicity, and development of rapid ante mortem diagnostic tests is ongoing.
Since 1991, USDA has prohibited the importation into the U.S. of certain tissues and organs from ruminants from countries where BSE exists (BSE-countries; see 9 CFR 94.18). USDA's regulations are intended to protect livestock in the United States from contracting TSEs and address known or strongly suspected modes of transmission. For the up-to-date listing of BSE-countries please contact USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) at (301) 436-7830.
The USDA regulations permit, under certain conditions, the importation of some cosmetic ingredients (i.e., collagen, collagen products, amniotic liquids or extracts, placental liquids or extracts, serum albumin, and serocolostrum) derived from ruminants from BSE-countries; see 9 CFR 95.4.
The USDA regulations do not apply to imports of:
While documented transmission of the causative agents of BSE or scrapie to humans has not been reported to date, the FDA wrote to manufacturers of dietary supplements in November 1992, alerting them to the developing concern about TSEs in animals and CJD in man. That letter recommended that manufacturers voluntarily investigate the geographic source(s) of any bovine or ovine material used in their products (generally neural or glandular tissue or tissue extracts). The Agency also suggested that each manufacturer develop a plan "to assure, with a high degree of certainty," that such materials are not from BSE-countries, as identified by USDA's APHIS, or from scrapie-infected sheep flocks, either foreign or domestic.
FDA now considers further protective steps to be reasonable and is restating and expanding its recommendation to manufacturers and importers of dietary supplements and their ingredients, to develop plans for ensuring, with a high degree of certainty, that specific bovine-derived materials (see Appendix A) from BSE-countries are not being used. The Agency is also recommending that manufacturers and importers of cosmetic products and their ingredients develop the same type of plans. FDA is not, at this time, recommending restrictions on the use of ovine-derived materials in the manufacture of dietary supplement and cosmetic products and ingredients, as the epidemiological evidence now appears convincing that scrapie is not related to TSEs in humans.
FDA believes it is prudent to expand its recommendation to cosmetics and cosmetic ingredients because extracts of listed tissues, e.g. sphingolipids isolated from brain tissue and extracts of bovine placenta, are used in cosmetics. Additionally, FDA is unaware of data demonstrating that processing techniques used in the manufacture of cosmetics will inactivate TSE agents. Further, little is known about the potential human risk of transmission from topical application of cosmetics containing TSE agents to intact, broken or abraded skin.
To assist manufacturers and importers whose products are within the scope of this recommendation in developing their plans, the following guidance is provided: