Send Mad Cow Surfaces Again in California

Posted: 3:06 PM Apr 24, 2012
Reporter: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - 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 Britain 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.

Dennis Luckey, executive vice president of Baker Commodities,
told The Associated Press that the disease was discovered at its
Hanford, Calif., transfer station when the company selected the cow
for random sampling.

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
Britain and Saudi Arabia, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.

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