Only if you kiss cows with a certain shade of red.
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.
The Food and Drug Administration is trying to find out if the cow ate contaminated feed - a difficult task because the animal may have gotten the disease from feed it ate years before it appeared sick. The disease has an incubation period of four or five years.
Dr. Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said that an animal could get sick if it eats a little bit of infected material, as little as half a gram.
"Even if a small amount amount of brain or central nervous system (material) were to get into cattle feed, there is the potential for even that very small dose to result in the disease," Sundlof said.
Sundlof said officials are less certain about how much would infect a human. "It's not known what dose would infect humans, but it would higher for humans than for cattle," he said.
Investigators have considered other ways the disease could spread. Although scientists have never found a case of mad cow infection being passed from a mother cow to its calf, they want to test the sick cow's calves for the disease as a precaution.
My questions: How can Sundlof possibly know this (i.e. "... half a gram")? What is the basis for his statement?
My relatives eat TRIPE, which is the lining cow's stomach... I suppose that is safe?
I'm not touching a hot dog, or potted meat, or spam..or even a T-Bone steak cut because it's supposed to be closest to the contamination area of the cow.
sw
Only if you kiss cows with a certain shade of red.
The vast majority of downers are just that - can't walk. Old, broken leg, etc. I can't imagine a house taking a cow that's foaming at the mouth or otherwise suffering from a disease.
They test for this by checking it's reflexes.
Can errors be made? Well, we just learned that they can. Did the industry get a wake up call from hell? You betcha. I think it would be a massive competitive advantage to "sell safety" by earning credibility with the public.
Remember how Intel recalled all early Pentium chips even though there was a virtually no chance of the error affecting anybody? It wasn't about chips - but rather trust and integrity. Andy Grove, Intel's CEO at the time, called this, a "Strategic Inflection Point". It probably saved the company and neutralized a whole squadron of trial lawyers that were fixing to feast on Intel's misfortune.
I'm not expecting the beef industry to recall every beef product, but they need to do a little more than just the government minimums. And then they need to communicate how well they do their job to the public. After all, lose their trust and you're outta business. As it stands, they're going to lose a bunch.
I, on the other hand, will enjoy a respite from record prices as a beef consumer.
Leni
I'm eating steak and will continue to do so. Since BSE takes 20 years to show up, what's the sense stopping eating beef now? We may already have it.
I don't go the track or casino or buy lottery tickets, but subtract the numbers of beef stock destroyed in UK with the number of human victims and you'll realize you have better odds of winning the lottery than getting Mad Cow.
So eat steak and buy lottery tickets. If you win the lottery buy your own herd.
No, I just sent Bill and Hillary a couple of Canadian ribeyes.
Since this was a dairy cow, what are the risks to the milk supply?
When they were in serious trouble, UK banned offal from steak & Kidney pies, etc., and I've gotten differing definitions of offal. Here is an Offal Recipe Page and it refers to calves liver, kidneys, organ meats. How dangerous are those compared to the brain and spinal cord threat?
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