BSE Lawsuit Allowed to Proceed

TORONTO - Jan 9/06 - SNS -- A class action lawsuit against the Canadian government and Canada's Ridley Inc. will be allowed to proceed.

The class action lawsuit by approximately 100,000 Canadian cattle producers alleges that the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis and the resulting loss of export markets for Canadian beef and live cattle was "the result of gross incompetence on the part of the Canadian government and negligence on the part of feed manufacturer Ridley Inc. The damages claimed are in excess of 20 billion dollars."

Toronto Regional Senior Justice Warren Winkler dismissed a motion brought by lawyers acting on behalf of the federal government and Ridley Inc. (Canada) to strike out the cattle farmers' claim. The motion to dismiss the claim against Ridley Corporation Limited (Australia) was granted.

The lawsuit notes the Canadian government estimates 80 of 191 cattle imported from the United Kingdom and Ireland between 1982 and 1990 may have entered the Canadian animal feed system through rendering after slaughter or death from some other cause.

Following a serious outbreak of "mad cow disease" in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, the Canadian government responded in 1990 by banning the importation of live cattle from the UK and Ireland and placing the cattle that had been imported since 1982 in a monitoring program.

When one of the monitored cattle from the UK in Alberta tested positive for BSE in December, 1993 the government took stock. In early 1994 the government ordered the remainder of the original 191 cattle then in Canada to be exported or destroyed.

On May 17, 1994 the government's own internal risk assessment on past importations of cattle from the UK concluded that "the probability of entry of BSE infected cattle through the 1982-89 importation of 183 cattle from the U.K. appears to be very high" and that "further cases of BSE would likely prompt a trade embargo against Canadian exports of cattle, beef and dairy products for an indefinite period of time".

The assessment identified potential losses to cattle producers amounting to billions of dollars. The government finally enacted a ruminant feed ban which came into effect in October 1997, in response to recommendations by the World Health Organization and a similar ban in the United States which became effective in August 1997.

There were no further cases of BSE in Canada from 1993 until May of 2003, five and one half years after the ban was introduced, when the first case of BSE in a Canadian-born cow was diagnosed. Following this discovery, the United States, Mexico and Japan immediately closed their borders to Canadian beef and live cattle.

The infected cow was born in Saskatchewan in the spring of 1997. The federal government identified the most likely source of BSE for the infected cow as being a product known as Feed-Rite Calf-Glow produced at the Feed-Rite mill in St. Paul, Alberta, that contained ruminant meat and bonemeal contaminated with the BSE prion. Feed-Rite was the predecessor company to Ridley Inc.