Agriculture chief: U.S. learned from British mad cow epidemic
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Mad cow disease was found in a cow in Washington state.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the infected cow was born before feed bans went into effect.
CNN's Maria Hinojosa details methods some farmers use to avoid mad cow disease.
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| 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
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HEALTH LIBRARY
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. government acted early to prevent the spread of mad cow disease after it devastated the British beef industry in the 1990s, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said Wednesday.
"We have had a number of measures in place in this country for several years to mitigate the possibility of mad cow spreading in this country," Veneman told CNN's "American Morning."
On Tuesday, the federal government announced several measures to try to keep the disease out of the human food chain.
Veneman said the U.S. food supply and public health remains safe a week after the country's first case of mad cow was discovered in Washington state.
"We have found a single case, but the fact of the matter is we've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country, that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small," she said.
Mad cow disease, known to scientists as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is a brain-wasting disease usually transmitted to cows through contaminated feed. It has an incubation period in the animals of four to six years.
BSE is linked to a similar form of the incurable and fatal brain-wasting disease in humans, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. There have been a small number of those cases worldwide, primarily in the United Kingdom, in people who ate BSE-contaminated meat.
The disease first appeared in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s. Millions of cattle were slaughtered as a result.
Veneman said it was not necessary to test every animal before it is slaughtered, as is customary in Britain.
"Great Britain had a much different situation than we do here in the United States in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks," she said.
In a lesson learned from Britain's experience, U.S. and Canadian authorities banned the use of brain and spinal cord tissue in cattle feed in 1997, but the infected cow discovered last week was born before the ban took effect, investigators said Monday.
The feed ban has helped protect the U.S. food supply from BSE, Veneman said. Another measure instituted this week include banning the slaughter of "downer" cattle for consumption. Downer cattle are unable to walk because of injury or disease.
Veneman said downer cattle are a small number of the animals processed in the United States, ranging from 150,000 to 200,000 of the 35 million head of cattle slaughtered each year. She said the price of U.S. beef was not expected to rise as a result of the new rules.
Other steps Veneman announced Tuesday include mounting an aggressive animal tracking system and forbidding the slaughter of tested animals until results are available.
The animal found to have carried the disease was unable to walk after giving birth. It was slaughtered December 9 in Moses Lake, Washington, prompting federal officials to recall more than 10,000 pounds of meat from animals slaughtered with it once it was diagnosed with mad cow.
That meat was shipped to eight states and the U.S. territory of Guam, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said. (Full story)
In the Washington state case, the Holstein cow was identified as a downer -- which flagged the animal for testing but did not stop the meat from being processed and sold to the public.
Several nations have banned U.S. beef imports since last week's revelation, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia, Mexico and China.
In May, Canada reported its first BSE case -- in an 8-year-old beef cow. That led a number of countries -- including the United States -- to restrict imports of Canadian beef.
Critics of the meat industry have long called for some of the regulatory changes Veneman announced this week.
