LIFTING a ban on feeding meat to animals could resurrect the spectre of "mad cow disease" and hit public confidence in the safety of British beef, it has been claimed.

The European Commission has announced it is considering easing the rules to allow feed containing animal proteins, rules that were introduced to halt the spread of BSE 20 years ago.

It wants to reduce the cost of guarding against the disease and its human form, Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease (CJD), which has claimed the lives of 169 British people since 1995.

In a consultation document, the Commission claimed the changes would be based on sound science and would reduce farmers' dependency on crop-based alternatives and their volatile foreign markets.

The report admitted it was "impossible" to remove all risk of the disease entering the food chain.

Neil Parish, the Conservative MP for Tiverton and Honiton and a former EU agriculture committee chairman, said the public needed reassurance that there was no contamination of the meat and bone meal feed.

"What was so wrong before was that we were feeding meal back to the same species," said Mr Parish, who is also a dairy farmer.

"The mills which produce these feeds are often in the same place and meal from poultry and pigs must be kept entirely separate from those for ruminants."

Since the first case of BSE was discovered in 1986, 181,114 cattle have been diagnosed with the prion disease and four million culled.

The condition was sparked by cattle eating animal feed containing infected proteins from a sheep which had died of a related disease, scrapie.

A spokesman for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs has submitted a response to the Commission's consultation saying it supports its aims.