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Workshop on BSE and vCJD Risks in Canada
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario
June 25, 2008
The goal of the
proposed PrioNet Canada half-day
workshop is to share risk management expertise of bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE), variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and
chronic wasting disease (CWD) issues. PrioNet Canada is attempting
to advance the use of research, basic science, and social science for
policy making. PrioNet’s approach is to improve the understanding
of emerging prion disease risk issues and to identify approaches for
better risk assessment and management of prion diseases. This meeting
will allow policy makers to discuss management issues related to BSE,
CWD and vCJD. The meeting will be attended by various Federal and Provincial
government departments as well as multi-stakeholder participants, scientific
experts and industry leaders.
Decisions for public policies can be enhanced by using an integrated
risk management framework that incorporates more than the standard
scientific assessments of risk. A comprehensive risk management framework
is one in which all of the major components of this approach have been
analyzed and included – specifically, risk assessment, impact
assessment (economic, social, regional, trade), public perception of
risk, and risk control or risk reduction options. Although the
components must be analyzed separately, the results of the analysis
must be carefully integrated in order for the benefits of the approach
in policy making to be realized. For example, if the risk frequency
is properly characterized, but the full range of potential impacts
is not, the analysis is incomplete and the results might not be as
useful as they could be or may even be misleading.
The lack of any information regarding non-economic impacts or impacts
to farm producers is a huge gap for policy makers and regulators. With
this in mind, a new BSE Risk Assessment and Management Framework was
developed that includes information at the micro (individual), meso
(family and community) and macro (national and international) levels. Cataloguing
the results and integrating them into an improved framework will allow
resources to be appropriately prioritized to better manage the ongoing
risks of prion disease. To our knowledge this project funded
by PrioNet is the only research that is attempting to comprehensively
catalogue impacts to producers, families and communities in a way that
the results can be incorporated into future policy decision-making.
The prototype risk management framework was completed and includes
(i) analysis of farm family focus groups; (ii) country case studies
best practices; (iii) BSE risk assessment and modeling; and (iv) a
national survey and its analysis. An overview and additional
details of the framework will be presented for discussion at the workshop.
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