E.R. and Others v Council and Commission (Environment and consumers)

(Common agricultural policy - Animal health - Bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") - New variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - Action for damages - Non-contractual liability - Community liability in the absence of unlawful conduct of its institutions - Damage - Causal link - Procedural defects - Parallel national proceedings - Limitation period - Inadmissibility)

I - Outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Community and national measures to combat those diseases

BSE was detected for the first time in the United Kingdom in 1986. The epizootic disease developed rapidly in that country, rising from 442 cases at the end of 1987 to a maximum annual incidence of nearly 37 000 cases in 1992. Since the early 1990s cases of BSE have been recorded in other Member States.

In July 1988 the United Kingdom decided to prohibit the sale of feed for ruminants containing proteins derived from ruminants and to prohibit breeders from feeding ruminants with such feed (the "ruminant feed ban" contained in the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Order 1988, SI 1988/1039, and subsequently amended).

Commission Decision 94/381/EC of 27 June 1994 concerning certain protection measures with regard to BSE and the feeding of mammalian derived protein (OJ 1994 L 172, p. 23) prohibited the feeding of mammalian derived protein to ruminants throughout the Community; however, Member States which enforced a system that made it possible to distinguish between animal protein from ruminant and non-ruminant species could be authorised by the Commission to permit the feeding to ruminants of protein from other mammalian species.