USDA: British lab concurs with mad cow test results
 |
A vendor arranges domestic beef at a supermarket in Beijing on Thursday.
Story Tools
RELATED
|
As a British lab verifies the first U.S. case of mad cow, the list of nations banning American beef grows.
|
| THE HUMAN LINK |
• Mad cow disease was first reported in the United Kingdom in 1986, peaking in 1993 with almost 1,000 new cases per week.
• In 1996, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) was detected in humans and linked to the mad cow epidemic. Eating contaminated meat and cattle products is presumed to be the cause.
• Both are fatal brain diseases with unusually long incubation periods, often lasting years.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
|
|
(CNN) -- Scientists in Waybridge, England, confirmed the test results done by U.S. scientists on a cow presumed to be infected with mad cow disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday.
The Department of Agriculture considers this confirmation of the disease, but the British laboratory must conduct its own tests on the tissue before reaching the conclusion that the U.S. cow had Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.
"The UK veterinary pathologists concur with our interpretation of the December 22 positive test conducted by USDA pathologists at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa," the department said in a statement posted on its Web site.
The department expects additional tests "will be consistent with the earlier finding," according to its Web site.
On Tuesday, the Department of Agriculture announced the case in Washington state was possibly the first instance of mad cow disease in the country.
Mad cow disease decimated the European cattle industry in the 1990s, where its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, has been linked to more than 100 deaths.
The first confirmed case in North America appeared in Alberta, Canada, in May.
Since Tuesday's announcement, nearly a dozen countries have temporarily banned the import of U.S. beef.
Canada, Mexico, Australia, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore have each announced at least partial bans. (Full story)
Mexico, Japan and South Korea are the top three importers of American beef by volume, buying nearly three-quarters of the total, according to the U.S. Meat Export Federation Web site. Mexico imports 28 percent, Japan 27 percent and South Korea 19 percent, the site said.
The United States is the leading exporter of beef in the world, with sales totaling about $3.5 billion for 2003, according to Philip Seng, president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Meat Export Federation in Denver, Colorado.
The brain-wasting disease is usually transmitted through contaminated feed and has an incubation period of four to five years.
USDA chief veterinarian Ron DeHaven said it is "important to focus on the feed where [the infected cow] was born" in 1999.
Since 1997, the United States has banned the use of cow and sheep byproducts for animal feed, which cuts off a major mode of transmission of the disease.
