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24 December 2003
U.S. Using All Out Effort to Trace Origin of Suspected Mad Cow Disease
U.S. human food supply remains safe, Veneman says
Washington -- U.S. Agriculture Department officials are using all their resources to trace the birth location of the cow suspected of being infected with what is called mad cow disease, and the sources of feed she ate, says Ann Veneman, secretary of agriculture.
In a December 24 briefing, one day after Veneman announced that a slaughtered cow in Washington state had "presumptively" tested positive for mad cow, the secretary said the risk to humans from the disease is "extremely low" because the parts of the cow that could be infected -- the spinal cord, brain and parts of the intestine -- had been removed before the tissue parts were sent to a meat processing plant.
As an added precaution, Veneman said, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) recalled on December 24 more than 4,500 kilograms of beef from the processing plant. However, she added, this was done more out of concern for the public's perception that there could be a risk to human health.
A duplicate sample from the suspect cow has been sent to an internationally recognized laboratory in England for confirmation of USDA's findings that the cow was infected with mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Veneman said.
"We are using an abundance of caution" in the investigation, she said.
The 4,500 kilograms of meat being recalled is the carcass weight of the total of the 20 cows the slaughterhouse processed December 9, when the sample of the suspected cow was taken, Veneman said. The dairy farm on which the cow had lived since October 2001 has been quarantined, she added.
Veneman said several countries have offered to help the United States in the investigation of the suspected origin of the disease. However, 11 countries have already announced they are banning U.S. beef imports, according to news reports: Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia and South Africa.
In 2003, the United States exported $2.6 billion worth of beef, with most of it going to Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Hong Kong. This amounted to 10 percent of all U.S. beef production, said Ron DeHaven, deputy administrator for veterinary services at USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the agency responsible for analyzing testing samples.
Canada, which discovered one case of mad cow in May 2003 in Alberta, has not announced a ban of U.S. beef imports, DeHaven said. This is because Canada recognizes the soundness of the U.S. inspection and response system, which it has used as a model for making improvements to its own system, he said.
He added that until the case arose in Canada, the "internationally accepted" view was to cut off all meat imports from a country if even a single case of BSE was found, even though none of the infected parts of the cow may have made their way into the human food system.
Asked why it took 13 days to obtain the test results on the Washington state cow, DeHaven said that the cow did not exhibit abnormal behavior at the slaughterhouse, only weakness related to calving. Samples taken after slaughter were sent to the USDA's testing lab in Ames, Iowa, where thousands of samples from animals with perceived health problems are tested each year, and where the testing of this sample was not expedited because there was no particular reason to expect a positive BSE test result, he said.
Eating feed contaminated with infected ruminant material is the only known way the disease is transmitted to animals, DeHaven said. He said the United States has banned imports of feed containing ruminant material since 1997.
USDA plans to have daily technical briefings on the investigation to update the media on developments. The public also may get updated information in English and Spanish by calling 1-8800-MP-HOTLINE (1-888-67-468-54630).
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
