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April 24, 2012

Gov’t: New case of mad cow disease in California

From The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The first new case of mad cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 has been discovered in a dairy cow in California, but health authorities said Tuesday the animal never was a threat to the nation’s food supply.

The infected cow, the fourth ever discovered in the U.S., was found as part of an Agriculture Department surveillance program that tests about 40,000 cows a year for the fatal brain disease.

No meat from the cow was bound for the food supply, said John Clifford, the department’s chief veterinary officer.

“There is really no cause for alarm here with regard to this animal,” Clifford told reporters at a hastily convened press conference.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is fatal to cows and can cause a fatal human brain disease in people who eat tainted beef. The World Health Organization has said that tests show that humans cannot be infected by drinking milk from BSE-infected animals.

In the wake of a massive outbreak in the United Kingdom that peaked in 1993, the U.S. intensified precautions to keep BSE out of U.S. cattle and the food supply. In other countries, the infection’s spread  was blamed on farmers adding recycled meat and bone meal from infected cows into cattle feed, so a key U.S. step has been to ban feed containing such material.

Tuesday, Clifford said the California cow is what scientists call an atypical case of BSE, meaning that it didn’t get the disease from eating infected cattle feed, which is important.

That means it’s “just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal,” said Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University. “Random mutations go on in nature all the time.”

The testing system worked because it caught what is a really rare event, added Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.

“It’s good news because they caught it,” Doyle said.

Clifford did not say when the disease was discovered or exactly where the cow was raised. He said the cow was at a rendering plant in central California when the case was discovered through regular USDA sample testing. Rendering plants process animal parts for products not going into the human food chain, such as animal food, soap, chemicals or other household products.

There have been three confirmed cases of BSE in cows in the United States — in a Canadian-born cow in 2003 in Washington state, in 2005 in Texas and in 2006 in Alabama.

The Agriculture Department is sharing its lab results with international animal health officials in Canada and England who will review the test results, Clifford said. Federal and California officials will further investigate the case. He said he did not expect the latest discovery to affect beef exports.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association said in a statement that “U.S. regulatory controls are effective, and that U.S fresh beef and beef products from cattle of all ages are safe and can be safely traded due to our interlocking safeguards.”

Clifford said the finding shows that safeguards the U.S. government and other nations have put into place in recent years are working. In 2011 there were only 29 worldwide cases of BSE, a dramatic decline since the peak of 37,311 cases in 1992. He credited the decline to effect of feed bans as a primary means of controlling the disease.

There have been a handful of cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease — the human version of mad cow — confirmed in people living in the United States, but those were linked to meat products in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

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