BRUSSELS - Eu food safety chief Emma Bonino stepped up pressure on Tuesday for a total ban on meat and bone meal in animal feed to help restore consumer confidence after the public health scare over mad cow disease. Infected meat and bone meal is believed to be the main cause of the fatal cattle brain disease, known medically as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), which has ravaged mainly British herds. Britain's disclosure in March 1996 that the fatal brain wasting disease might be caught by humans in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), through eating infected beef, spread panic across Europe and sent prices crashing. Although the British government and the European Union took a series of measures to improve food safety, consumers remained suspicious of the meat sold in shops. "(People) now want to go further. They want to ban all consumption of meat and bone meal in animal feed," Bonino said at the opening session of a major two-day scientific conference on meat and bone meal. The conference w

as organised at the insistence of the European Parliament, which has warned Bonino and the 19 other EU commissioners that they face possible dismissal unless they take corrective measures by November 1997. German Socialist Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, who heads a parliamentary committee monitoring the Commission's actions, said it was immoral to feed ground-up animal parts to grass eating farm animals. "Parliament used to be a voice crying in the wilderness," Roth-Behrendt told the conference, noting it had called for safety measures in 1990. "We now have the backing of science," she added, stressing that consumer health protection must be put centre-stage. Bonino noted that last week the European Commission started legal action against 10 countries for failing to implement animal production rules and controls. But she said that a balance must be struck between eliminating risk of the deadly disease and safeguarding the economic interests of the meat industry.