Is gelatine haraam?

Sausage skins face ban over BSE fear
By Robert Uhlig, Food Correspondent12:01AM BST 23 May 2002
The future of premium sausages was under threat last night after the Food Standards Agency called for a Europe-wide ban of sausage casings made from lamb intestines because of a hypothetical risk of BSE in sheep.

With around one in six sausages covered in lamb casings, the ban will hit the new ranges of "artisan sausages" made from high-quality ingredients and using lamb casings instead of collagen skins.

Members of the sausage industry immediately condemned the proposed ban, saying scientists had yet to find any evidence of BSE in shee

Bill O'Hagan, a former Daily Telegraph journalist who became the pioneer of speciality sausages in 1988, said: "I am horrified at the thought of it. Many of my customers buy sausages in lamb casings because their children are allergic to collagen casings or because they cannot eat pork casings for religious reasons."

Bob Harder, a committee member of the Natural Sausage Casing Association, said the ban would lead to the loss of 15,000 jobs and kill a business worth £2.8 billion a year throughout the European Union where 128 million sheep intestines are consumed every year.

"They are cherry-picking one item and pretending we are protecting the public from a risk - albeit a hypothetical one - when it would be present in much greater amounts in the brain and lymph nodes of muscle such as leg of lamb, both of which are not banned," he said. The measure could cost the sheep industry up to £6.5 million and the sausage industry around £60 million a year.

The FSA report also suggests that communities which are more likely to consume mutton and goat, such as Muslims and Afro-Caribbeans, should be alerted to the higher theoretical risk in older animals.

Baby food manufacturers should also be asked to label products containing lamb with the country of origin so parents can make "informed choices", the report said.

The report was produced by key "stakeholders", including the Meat and Livestock Commission, the Consumers' Association, the Human BSE Foundation and the FSA itself.

Tests are still being carried out to see if BSE has crossed from cows to sheep but the FSA has acknowledged there was a "theoretical" risk to consumers.

Sir John Krebs, chairman of the FSA, stressed that the agency was not advising against eating lamb, mutton or goat meat.

"While no sheep alive today are likely to have been exposed to any original source of infectivity, the theoretical risk that BSE could be present in sheep by virtue of transmission, and masked by scrapie, remains."

The report also called for the development of a rapid test to detect the disease in sheep.

Public uncertainty over the issue was fuelled last October when Government research into BSE in sheep in the 1980s collapsed after it emerged that scientists had been testing cow brains instead of sheep brains.

Gelatin is a soluble albumin-like protein derived from the prolonged boiling of animal tissues (typically bones, skin, and tendons). As a result, the product loses some of its gelling properties, but becomes a more effective fining agent.

Gelatin is employed primarily to remove excess tannins from wines. It is usually added early during maturation. This avoids color loss that would be more pronounced if conducted later (due to the continuing polymerization of anthocyanins with tannins). When gelatin is added to white wine, there is a risk of leaving a gelatin-derived haze. This may be avoided by the simultaneous addition of flavorless tannins, Kieselsol, or other protein-binding agents. These materials favor the formation of the fine meshwork of gelatin fibers that removes tannins and other negatively charged particles. Excessive fining with gelatin can result in undesirable color loss in red wines.

Although the risks are minimal, gelatin use has been mentioned as a possible source of wine contamination with prions associated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or mad-cow disease). Wine fined with gelatin derived from infected animal tissue could contain active prion proteins. The internal bondings of this infectious protein are so remarkable that the rendering process used in producing gelatin does not inactivate these infectious agents. Although the actual risk of gelatin's use to human health is unknown, the possibility has prompted the study of substitutes made from plant proteins, such as wheat gluten (Marchal et al., 2002; Fischerleitner et al., 2003). In the United States, most gelatin is derived from pig skins, a source free of BSE.

Ok, so here we have the process of making gelatine

the point is...

gelatine is not from the animal... it has no properties that are like those ov an animal...its just sumthing that can be made from a part ov an animal by changing the structure of something which is found in animals..

and if u know science...biology and chemistry in particular....you kno that once something has changed structure...it no longer has anything to do with the original place it came from...its not the same thing it was when it came from the animal....and who know's science more than any1? eh?

u need to get ur head around the fact that gelatine is not actually obtained from an animal....before u can even have this conversation.

even if you look up on a basic site about how u make gelatine...u'll understand why people see it as halal...

Certain types of medications contain geletine Just saying