Officials have warned that inefficient live cattle checks at the Bosnian borders are facilitating the spread of BSE.
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
At a press conference in Sarajevo last week (28 November), federal agricultural minister Faruk Mekic explained that because of a absence of controls, nearly 130 Bosnians have been infected this year alone with Q-fever. Recent tests have confirmed that around 2% of the Republic’s cattle and over 2.5% of its sheep are infected with Q-fever.
Jozo Bagaric, veterinary medicine assistant to Mekic, revealed that the lack of control labs also means that there is no way to prevent the spread of BSE. A beef ban was implemented on German imports earlier last week, but in the neighbouring administration district of the Serb Republic there remains no supervision on cattle imports at all.