A CHEETAH called Saki which died of the feline form of BSE at Fota Wildlife Park in Cork has become the centre of an international scientific investigation into the disease.
The Department of Agriculture has confirmed details of the death, which were published last week in a book, Mad Cow Disease and the Risk to Mankind.
The book, by Mr Brian J. Ford, a sector chairman of the Institute of Biology in Britain, discusses the death of the cheetah in Ireland.
The Department of Agriculture confirmed this week that the cheetah had died at Fota Wildlife Park in 1993, two years after it was imported into Ireland.
A spokesman for the Department said that the animal was born in South Africa in November 1986 and arrived in Ireland in November 1991.
A post mortem examination on the animal in March 1993 had revealed that it had died of FSE, the feline version of "mad cow disease".
"What is very interesting is that another cub from the same jitter died in Perth Zoo from the same disease," said the spokesman.
"This animal, a female, was fed on the same diet as Saki and there is a lot of interest in what caused the death," he said.
The spokesman added that scientists were concentrating on the food source in South Africa, where the animal was born, to see if there was any link between that and the development of the disease.
To date, South Africa has not reported any cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in its herd and neither has Australia.
The Department spokesman added that the practice of feeding the carcasses of zoo animals back into the zoo food chain was now the subject of intense scrutiny.
The death of the cheetah in Cork would have gone unnoticed were it not for the book which says that it was possible that most of the FSE deaths in big cats occurred in Britain.
"The few that are found outside British shores were infected and then exported," the book said.
However, Cork, with nearly a quarter of the Irish dairy herd, has had the highest proportion of BSE cases in Ireland.