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 heard somewhere last week that it is transmissable to many other animals. I don't know if that is accurate, but I have heard reports of some other animals contracting the disease, not realated to this incident, but perhaps when all the chaos was going on in the UK. I'll see if I can find anything.
PBWY has been researching this issue some. Perhaps he knows more.
Well then I guess CBS news was wrong. Fancy that.
"There is no known risk to dogs . . . " http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/28/health/main542336.shtml
Glad I feed my dogs lamb.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), popularized in the recent press coverage of the European epidemic as "mad cow disease," belongs to a group of progressively degenerative neurological diseases, collectively known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE’s)(See Table 1.) TSE’s are characterized by long incubation periods, short clinical course, 100% fatality, and no known course of treatment. The causative agent has not been fully characterized; however, resistance to physical and chemical agents that destroy nucleic acids essentially rules out conventional microbial and viral agents. The scientific community is increasingly referring to the "prion" theory as the most likely source of infection. The infection seems to be dependent on the infected animal’s own proteins, while the lack of foreign proteins allows the infectivity to remain invisible to the host’s immune system. This "invisibility" fails to provoke an antibody response, which. causes the development of typical vaccines and simple detection techniques to likely be improbable. The current test, other than post-mortem histopathology, involves the isolation of the appropriate suspected infected tissue (brain and other nervous tissue being best), injecting it into mice and waiting about 700 days for any symptoms to develop. The peculiar nature, invisibility, of the disease explains the possibility of spontaneous mutation as well as the spread from exposure, as this disease has the peculiarity of being both an acquired infection and a Mendelian inherited disease, generally considered inconsistent with an infectious agent. Additionally, the vulnerability of one species versus another varies considerably. A number of domestic cats (>86) in Great Britain have contracted encephalopathy; however, not a single dog, pig or horse have, despite exposure to the same agents thought to have transmitted the disease to the cats.
Then how come England destroyed the entire animal?
Because Brits eat cow brains? It is the brain/spinal cells that cause the problem. The British feed their cattle a feed mixed with the brain cells of other cattle. IF the one cow's infected cells are ingested by another cow, it too will probably become infected wiht Mad Cow. The U.S. (I believe) has stopped the sale & use of such feed. After all it is basically cannibalism. Same type (mad cow) of disease occurs in human cannibals.
They probably did not want to chance any of the infected cows/cattle becoming feed.
This sounds like the "miracle of the cows".
Is this a bad time to point out that cows got BSE from being fed remains of sheep with scrapies?
...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.
How big a freakin cow is this??? (And it is a dairy cow to to boot, not a beef cow.)
One cow feeds eight states and a territory. This is a bigger miracle than the fish one a couple thousand years ago.
Hot dogs?
Weren't steak and kidney pies made of offal, which were intestines and stuff? I remember years ago reading that because of BSE, offal was banned from those pies and other food items I wasn't familiar with.
I don't think they are supposed to accept 'downers', but some do anyway.
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