Cattle breeding: A fast screening procedure to control the bovine fodder contamination

The European Commission has adopted a large number of emergency measures to prevent the spread of the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the Member States, and among them, a European Regulation prohibits the feeding to ruminants of animal protein and animal feed containing such protein. Aim of this work has been to propose the thermal analysis as a new rapid and sensitive screening tool for a preliminary determination of possible contamination in products destined to bovine growth, since the possibility to screen the samples by a rapid and sensitive tool could reduce the time of analysis required by the actual methodology and could allow the systematic surveillance of bovine feeding, with the official EU methods applied only to positive samples.