USA BSE

from another place, for information


WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of
Agriculture was quick to assure the public earlier this week that
the third case of mad cow disease did not pose a risk to them, but
what federal officials have not acknowledged is that this latest
case indicates the deadly disease has been circulating in U.S. herds
for at least a decade.
The second case, which was detected last year in a Texas cow
and which USDA officials were reluctant to verify, was approximately
12 years old.
These two cases (the latest was detected in an Alabama cow)
present a picture of the disease having been here for 10 years or
so, since it is thought that cows usually contract the disease from
contaminated feed they consume as calves. The concern is that humans
can contract a fatal, incurable, brain-wasting illness from
consuming beef products contaminated with the mad cow pathogen.
"The fact the Texas cow showed up fairly clearly implied the
existence of other undetected cases," Dr. Paul Brown, former medical
director of the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory for
Central Nervous System Studies and an expert on mad cow-like
diseases, told United Press International. "The question was, 'How
many?' and we still can't answer that."
Brown, who is preparing a scientific paper based on the
latest two mad cow cases to estimate the maximum number of infected
cows that occurred in the United States, said he has "absolutely no
confidence in USDA tests before one year ago" because of the
agency's reluctance to retest the Texas cow that initially tested
positive.
USDA officials finally retested the cow and confirmed it was
infected seven months later, but only at the insistence of the
agency's inspector general.
"Everything they did on the Texas cow makes everything they
did before 2005 suspect," Brown said.
Despite this, Brown said the U.S. prevalence of mad cow,
formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, did not
significantly threaten human or cattle health.
"Overall, my view is BSE is highly unlikely to pose any
important risk either in cattle feed or human feed," he said.
However, Jean Halloran of Consumers Union in Yonkers, N.Y.,
said consumers should be troubled by the USDA's secrecy and its
apparent plan to dramatically cut back the number of mad cow tests
it conducts.
"Consumers should be very concerned about how little we know
about the USDA's surveillance program and the failure of the USDA to
reveal really important details," Halloran told UPI. "Consumers have
to be really concerned if they're going to cut back the program,"
she added.
Last year the USDA tested more than 300,000 animals for the
disease, but it has proposed, even in light of a third case, scaling
back the program to 40,000 tests annually.
"They seem to be, in terms of actions and policies, taking a
lot more seriously the concerns of the cattle industry than the
concerns of consumers," Halloran said. "It's really hard to know
what it takes to get this administration to take action to protect
the public."
The USDA has insisted that the safeguards of a ban on
incorporating cow tissue into cattle feed (which is thought to
spread the disease) and removal of the most infectious parts of
cows, such as the brain and spinal cord, protect consumers. But the
agency glosses over the fact that both of these systems have been
revealed to be inadequately implemented.
The feed ban, which is enforced by the Food and Drug
Administration, has been criticized by the Government Accountability
Office in two reports, the most recent coming just last year. The
GAO said the FDA's enforcement of the ban continues to have
weaknesses that "undermine the nation's firewall against BSE."
USDA documents released last year showed more than 1,000
violations of the regulations requiring the removal of brains and
spinal cords in at least 35 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin
Islands, with some plants being cited repeatedly for infractions. In
addition, a violation of similar regulations that apply to beef
exported to Japan is the reason why Japan closed its borders to U.S.
beef in January six weeks after reopening them.
Other experts also question the adequacy of the USDA's
surveillance system. The USDA insists the prevalence of mad cow
disease is low, but the agency has provided few details of its
surveillance program, making it difficult for outside experts to
know if the agency's monitoring plan is sufficient.
"It's impossible to judge the adequacy of the surveillance
system without having a breakdown of the tested population by age
and risk status," Elizabeth Mumford, a veterinarian and BSE expert
at Safe Food Solutions in Bern, Switzerland, a company that provides
advice on reducing mad cow risk to industry and governments, told
UPI.
"Everybody would be happier and more confident and in a
sense it might be able to go away a little bit for (the USDA) if
they would just publish a breakdown on the tests," Mumford added.
UPI requested detailed records about animals tested under
the USDA's surveillance plan via the Freedom of Information Act in
May 2004 but nearly two years later has not received any
corresponding documents from the agency, despite a federal law
requiring agencies to comply within 30 days. This leaves open the
question of whether the USDA is withholding the information, does
not have the information or is so haphazardly organized that it
cannot locate it.
Mumford said the prevalence of the disease in U.S. herds is
probably quite low, but there have probably been other cases that
have so far gone undetected. "They're only finding a very small
fraction of that low prevalence," she said.
Mumford expressed surprise at the lack of concern about the
deadly disease from American consumers. "I would expect the U.S.
public to be more concerned," she said.
Markus Moser, a molecular biologist and chief executive
officer of Prionics, a Swiss firm that manufactures BSE test kits,
told UPI one concern is that if people are infected, the mad cow
pathogen could become "humanized" or more easily transmitted from
person to person.
"Transmission would be much easier, through all kinds of
medical procedures" and even through the blood supply, Moser said.



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