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		Save our Haggis - and our bangers! Lincolnshire Echo - August 29 2002 I've always been rather fond of haggis. Maybe it's because I was born on January 25th - the birthday of Scotland's famous bard, Robert Burns. During the dozen years I spent in Asia, I always looked forward to the Saint Andrew's Ball, the great expatriate Scots celebration, and haggis was always on the menu, specially flown in from Glasgow, and usually washed down with a liberal drop of whisky. So I am alarmed to see that proposals put forward from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to the European Commission would ban a key ingredient - sheep's intestine. This would affect not only the haggis, but also the great British banger. While mass-market sausages now have plastic skins, the top quality banger (about 15% of the market) still has natural skin. There's a small but worthwhile industry in processing and supplying the skins. And if they're banned, a useful by-product of meat processing becomes waste, that is expensive to dispose of - another blow for our farmers and abattoirs. So why are they proposing this new regulation? They say there's a theoretical risk of BSE getting into sheep, and being transferred to humans via the skins. Now BSE, and variant CJD, is a dreadful disease. The death of even one patient is a huge tragedy for the victim and the family, as East Midlands folk well know. We had a cluster of cases in Leicestershire. But we need to get it into perspective. Thank heaven, variant CJD is still one of the rarest diseases in Britain. BSE is now well controlled in the beef herd. There is no evidence at all that BSE can transfer to sheep, despite years of research, and no evidence that if it did, intestines would represent a danger. The risk is vanishingly small. It is much more dangerous to cross the road, or drive a car, or walk downstairs - and hugely more dangerous to smoke cigarettes, which are said to kill half a million people a year in the EU. Yet because of this incredibly remote risk, the FSA proposes an EU-wide ban. I have written to the FSA asking why they propose this draconian action in response to a merely theoretical risk. Their Chairman, Sir John Krebs, has written back. He re-states the problem, he explains in some detail the decision making-process - but he doesn't explain why this close-to-zero risk is a good reason to ban traditional food products. But if it is a good reason, we should also ban tobacco, alcohol, ladders, and all forms of transport, which pose far greater risks. The Scottish nationalists are up in arms about the threat to their national dish. I rarely agree with the Nats, but this time they're spot on, and I hope we English will speak out for our traditional banger. Sir John and his FSA are wrong twice over. First of all, the proposed ban is out of all proportion to the tiny risk. And second, for these most traditional of Scottish and English foods, any decision should be made in Britain, not Brussels.