US ‘mad cow’ to create Tipperary cash cow

An Irish company stands to double its turnover and create up to 80 jobs following the discovery of BSE, better known as “mad cow” disease, in the US.

Enfer Scientific, which is headquartered in Cashel, Co Tipperary and has a manufacturing facility in Newbridge, Co Kildare, is the developer of a test for the disease that delivers results in less than four hours and is already in use in the EU and Japan.

US pharmaceutical giant Abbott, which signed a marketing and distribution agreement with Enfer in 2001, has exclusive rights to sell the test outside Ireland and yesterday announced it had applied to the US government for a licence to sell the test in America.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) asked companies to submit tests to diagnose BSE after a cow in the state of Washington was found to have the disease last month.

Riona Sayers, technical project consultant with Enfer Scientific, said much of the groundwork to get US approval had already been completed. Ms Sayers said 35 million cows were slaughtered in the US every year and that a government decision to test even a fraction of these would be “very significant” for Enfer.

She said screening just 10% of cows in the US using the Enfer test would double the company’s turnover and could treble the workforce at its production facility.

Forty people currently work on producing tests, while a further 80 evaluate tests received from Irish farms. Enfer sells between 700,000 and 1 million test kits each year, with Ireland accounting for one-third of sales. The company began selling its kits in Japan in October and has already captured 20% of the market there.

US government officials have already visited the site where the test is manufactured, as well as Abbott’s distribution centre in the US. The short time required for the Enfer test to deliver a result gives it a key advantage over other tests, which can take over a week to confirm the presence of BSE in an animal.

The US government has approved one BSE test so far, but this takes several days to deliver results.

“Our success with the Enfer BSE tests in Europe and Japan gives me confidence we will rapidly implement our action plans when called upon to do so by the USDA,” said Joseph Nemmers, Abbott’s senior vice president in charge of diagnostic operations.