Mad Cow Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark : Mad Cow Blog

May 23, 2006

KNEB.com (Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Dakota)

Reuters

Washington -- A livestock tracking program being developed as part of the U.S. fight against mad cow disease could lose funding next year under a bill facing a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Agriculture Department would lose $33.1 million funding for fiscal 2007 the program unless it produces a written version of its plan, for public comment, according to the $93.6 billion agricultural funding bill that the House was scheduled to vote on late on Tuesday.

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May 23, 2006

The Japan Times

Knight Ridder Tribune

Japan and the United States have reached a general agreement on the conditions to resume the importing of American beef to Japan. Beef imports have been suspended since the Japanese government imposed a ban on Jan. 20 after discovering that a U.S. meatpacker had violated safety rules. If everything goes smoothly, the Japanese government is likely to make a decision on the import resumption by the end of June and U.S. beef may start arriving in Japan in July.

Japan was once the most lucrative market for U.S. beef. In 2003, Japanese consumed 150 billion yen worth of American beef. But there is no guarantee that if the ban is lifted Japanese consumers, who have witnessed the fiasco that led to the second import ban in January, will become enthusiastic about American beef again.

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AP TUESDAY, MAY 23, 2006 01:43:35 PM

TULSA: After growing up on a cattle ranch, John Hassell became an electrical engineer specialising in wireless technology. So he feels doubly qualified to offer this warning about the system taking shape to track cattle across America: It wonít work.

To be sure, he doesnít quibble with the logic of the system. It stems from the Bush administrationís plan to give agriculture inspectors the ability to pinpoint the origins of mad cow and other diseases within 48 hours. Livestock facilities and individual animals will get identifying numbers, which owners will use to document the beastsí movements in industry databases.

The system isnít expected to be fully online until 2009, but already itís clear that in the sprawling US beef and dairy industries home to 100 million cattle many producers will automate data gathering with radio-frequency chips attached to cattle ears. And thatís what has Hassell worried. He contends most of the radio-frequency chips making their way onto cattle ears are a terrible fit.

Those chips based on the same radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology being integrated for inventory control by large retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores are known as ìpassiveî tags that broadcast identifying numbers for only a short range, generally just a few feet.

While cattle may be considered docile creatures, they are a lot more mobile and skittish than cases and pallets in Wal-Mart warehouses. Hassell believes only ìactiveî tags, which broadcast identification data for up to 300 feet, will consistently work for the multiple owners and many environments that cattle pass through, from pastures to stockyards, feed lots and slaughterhouses.

Hassell is so convinced that heís launched his own company, ZigBeef, to sell long-range tags. The name is a play on the ëZigBeeí wireless standard employed by his tags. ìI really donít think, on a mass scale that short-range, passive devices are going to be practical,î he said.

ìThe Betamax of the industry is the short-range tags. That makes Hassell sound like many other start-up technologists pooh-poohing a rival standard at the expense of his own. But something makes it a bit unusual: Even beef producers who are using the passive flavour of RFID donít seem thrilled with it either.

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May 15, 2006

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Media Release

The U.S. Agriculture Department's mad cow disease-testing program is wholly inadequate and the agency's refusal to let processors do their own testing further undercuts the safety of American beef, a University of Illinois scholar writes.

Eating meat from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, can cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal human brain-wasting disorder. More than 160 deaths in Britain were attributed to eating BSE-infected beef, and the disease spread to Europe and Asia before the slaughter of cattle and better testing helped curb the outbreak.

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Sun May 14, 8:50 PM ET

Japan has confirmed its 26th case of mad cow disease, this time in a 68-month-old Holstein dairy cow on the northern island of Hokkaido.

The Ministry of Agriculture said that experts had concluded that the cow had tested positive for the brain-wasting disease officially known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which was first discovered in Japan in 2001.

The meat and intestines from the slaughtered cow will be destroyed and will not enter the market, the ministry said.

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May 8, 2006
The Modesto Bee, California
Knight Ridder Tribune

A ranching and meat-processing company in Kansas wants to test all its cattle for mad cow disease at its own expense.

The Bush administration won't let the firm do it. Oh, but that's not all. If the company tries to buy the $20 testing kits, the feds will treat such a transaction as an illegal purchase of a controlled substance.

We wish we were making this up, but we're not. Talk about mad cow, this is crazy people. It's also an intrusive government abusing an old law.

In 1913, when cholera was decimating hog herds, scam artists were selling fake serums to farmers. Congress responded with the Viruses, Serums, Toxins, Anti-Toxins and Analogous Products Act. It gave the federal government authority to regulate diagnostic testing devices for farm animals.

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River Block Daily News

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The government has given up trying to track the origins of an Alabama cow infected with mad cow disease.

The trail went cold after seven weeks of investigation of more than three dozen farms, the Agriculture Department said in a report issued quietly late Tuesday.

Meantime, in a separate investigation, the U.S. is tracing 15 cattle imported from Canada that ate the same feed as an infected cow discovered last month in British Columbia. So far, the government has found one cow and intends to kill and test it, the Agriculture Department said.

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May 4, 2006

Wall Street Journal

Scott Kilman

Government regulators closed a mad-cow-disease case in Alabama without learning the animal's origins and said that their fruitless search highlights the need for a proposed national livestock identification program.

Federal and state officials said yesterday that they spent several weeks following leads to 37 farms in a search aimed at preventing other cattle that might have been in contact with the infected cow from ending up in the human food supply. The fatal brain-wasting disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, can trigger a rare neurological ailment in people who eat products from infected cattle.

The 10-year-old Alabama beef cow, which was diagnosed in March and didn't enter the food chain, was breeding stock and most likely contracted the disease by eating contaminated rations in the first year of its life. Investigators were trying to find the infected cow's birthplace to track down other cows that probably ate the same feed.

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May 2, 2006

Associated Press

GENEVA (Kyodo) -- Japan's Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Shoichi Nakagawa told U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns on Tuesday that reducing the number of cows to be checked for mad cow disease is never likely to be accepted positively in Japan.

Nakagawa made the remark when he met in Geneva with Johanns, who said the United States plans to cut the number of cows to be checked for BSE because the likelihood of the disease's occurrence in the United States is almost nonexistent, Nakagawa said later.

The issue is not even about safety and such a measure is never likely to be accepted positively in Japan, Nakagawa told Johanns.

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April 29, 2006

The Associated Press

Libby Quaid

WASHINGTON -- There are probably a few undetected cases of mad cow disease in the United States, but the total -- estimated at four to seven -- is "extraordinarily low," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns says.

The calculation comes from new testing data released Friday. Testing is likely to be scaled back after a panel of independent scientists reviews the figures, Johanns said.

"The data shows the prevalence of BSE in the United States is extraordinarily low," Johanns told reporters on a conference call. "In other words, we have an extremely healthy herd of cattle in our country."

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April 29, 2006

Reuters

Marcy Nicholson

WINNIPEG, Manitoba - The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Friday that 15 herdmates of Canada's latest mad cow case were exported to the United States.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has located one of the 15 animals in Washington State and continues to trace the others, agency spokesman Ed Loyd said.

"We have just under 150 animals that we are tracing ... and 23 were located in Canada and quarantined," said Dr. George Luterbach, senior veterinarian with the CFIA.

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