Posted on 12/28/2003 9:03:31 AM PST by yonif
WASHINGTON (AP)--Investigators disclosed Sunday that they have found meat cut from a Holstein sick with mad cow disease was sent to four more states and one territory.
Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an Agriculture Department veterinarian, said investigators have now determined that some of the meat from the cow slaughtered Dec. 9 went to Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana and Guam. Earlier, officials had said most of the meat went to Washington and Oregon, with lesser amounts to California and Nevada, for distribution to consumers.
He stressed, though, that the parts most likely to carry the infection--the brain, spinal cord and lower intestine--were removed before the meat from the infected cow was cut and processed for human consumption.
``The recalled meat represents essentially zero risk to consumers,'' Petersen said.
Although federal officials maintain the food supply is safe, they have recalled as a precaution an estimated 10,000 pounds of meat from the infected cow and from 19 other cows all slaughtered Dec. 9 at Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co., in Moses Lake, Wash.
Petersen, of the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said the department still is recovering meat and won't know if all of it has been returned until later this week.
Officials say the slaughtered cow was deboned at Midway Meats in Centralia, Wash., and sent Dec. 12 to two other plants, Willamette Valley Meat and Interstate Meat, both near Portland, Ore.
Petersen has said that much of the meat is being held by those facilities.
Petersen said Willamette also received beef trimmings--parts used in meats such as hamburger. He said those trimmings were sold to some three dozen small, Asian and Mexican facilities in Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada.
In response, representatives from supermarket chains in the West _ Albertsons, Fred Meyer, Safeway and WinCo Foods have voluntarily removed ground beef products from the affected distributors. Safeway has said it will look for another supplier.
Mad cow disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a concern because humans who eat brain or spinal matter from an infected cow can develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In Britain, 143 people died of it after an outbreak of mad cow in the 1980s.
Despite assurances that meat is safe, Japan, the top importer of American beef, and more than two dozen countries have blocked U.S. beef imports. Jordan joined the list on Sunday. U.S. beef industry officials estimated this week that they've lost 90 percent of their export market. Ranchers export 10 percent of the beef they produce.
U.S. agriculture officials arrived Sunday in Japan to discuss maintaining beef trade even as the United States investigates how the Holstein in Washington state got mad cow disease.
Dr. Ron DeHaven, the department's chief veterinarian, said on Saturday that investigators have tentatively traced the first U.S. cow with mad cow disease to Canada. This could help determine the scope of the outbreak and might even limit the economic damage to the American beef industry.
The tentative conclusion traced the diseased cow to the province of Alberta, where Canada had found another case of mad cow infection last May.
However, DeHaven re-emphasized Sunday that investigators aren't certain of that because U.S. records outlining the animal's history do not match ones in Canada. Canadian officials had complained it was premature to reach any firm conclusion.
DeHaven said Sunday that DNA tests were being arranged to help resolve the matter.
Canadian papers show the cow had two calves before it was exported to the United States, contrary to U.S. documents which classified the animal as a heifer when it arrived, meaning it had never born calves.
Also, according to Canadian documents, the diseased cow was 6 1/2-years-old--older than U.S. officials had thought. U.S. records say the cow was 4- or 4 1/2-years-old.
Officials are concerned about the cow's age because it may have been born before the United States and Canada in 1997 banned certain feed that is considered the most likely source of infection.
A cow gets infected by eating feed containing tissue from the spine or brain of an infected animal. Farmers used to feed their animals such meal to fatten them.
I don't think so, but you never know.
This cow that apparently weighed over 5 tons!, is everywhere!:-)
It was not sick. It had a broken pevis from birthing a calf.
It was tested because it was a downer and all downers are tested regardless of the reason for being off their feet.
It was a good catch by the government and I really don't see a reason to test all the animals. It seems this disease is all but eliminated and in a couple years, it will be as the remaining cattle that had any potential exposure will have been eliminated.
The Europeans do. I was raised on brains and eggs for breakfast.
My grandparents came from Yugoslavia.
You would think. But according to a documentary on the subject I saw a few years ago, the protein molecule that causes the disease is virtually indestructible, even when put to a temperature of 2000 degrees F.
That's almost 2 years; do mice really live that long?
For the TSE that affects sheep and goats (scrapie), studies were conducted which used brain tissue (going on memory, will look up when I get home) from a sheep infected with scrapie being surgically implanted into a healthy sheep's brain, with the recipient sheep at some point testing positive and eventually demonstrating clinical signs for scrapie. I believe the amount of the brain tissue used was very small in weight/size.
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