As our loyal readers know, we have followed the controversy surrounding the re-entry of U.S. beef to South Korea. Forces have combined to whip Korean public opinion into a frenzy over the alleged Mad Cow disease threat poised by U.S. beef.

Now the South Korean government has imposed a another delay—the third since the agreement reached in April---and asked the U.S. government to go along wih a ban on cattle over 30 months old.

As we reported last time, U.S. beef is literally in South Korean meat lockers waiting for green lights for re-entry, but Mad Cow keeps sticking up the deal. U.S. beef exporters are now trying to persuade South Korea to accept labels on product from older cows.

You know the financial stakes involved are big when Bloomberg News steps up its coverage of rallies and never-ending negotiations that make up South Korea’s Mad Cow politics. Go here for their latest story.

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United States beef is moving in South Korea today for the first time since 2003 when  a single cow from Canada showed up in Washington State with Mad Cow disease.   The U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement cleared the way for U.S. beef to the nation that was its third largest export market.

Fears and street protests about Mad Cow disease  held up re-opening South Korea to U.S. beef for a few extra days.   According to the AFP news service:

Agriculture Minister Chung Woon-Chun said the imports would resume under new rules proritising the public's health, but the opposition decried the move and thousands of people protested later Thursday.

"The government has fixed new sanitary conditions for importing beef," Chung said in a speech covered live on television. "The government will prioritise public health and safety in carrying out its policies."

He said the US beef imports would be thoroughly inspected and apologised for failing to prevent the spread of anxiety over mad cow disease. Seoul and Washington have previously said US beef is totally safe.

The government sent 1,200 riot policemen to guard a dozen cold storage areas that were apparently already filled with U.S. beef.    Moving it from those lockers to Korean tables might be difficult as union truckers are being urged not to haul American beef.

Seoul saw another night of protests with about 7,000 toting  candles through the streets.  For the AFT wrap-up on the re-entry of American beef,  go here.

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Something happened this year between Feb. 29 and May 20 to change Ed Schafer's mind about "downer" cows.  In a span of just 13 weeks, the Secretary of Agriculture went from holding the United States Department of Agriculture line about veterinarians-on-duty being able to clear some "downer" cows for a trip to the "knock box" to a total ban.

The Humane Society of the United States is taking the victory lap for the ban.   It was their video taken inside the Chino, CA slaughter house that led to the largest beef recall in U.S. history.  

We're not buying it.   All of that was known when Schafer did his original "downer" defense as was reported under this headline in the Seattle Times: Ag secretary resists banning downer cattle.
Like we said, that was 13 weeks ago on this leap year's bonus day.

Today, the Seattle Times put Schafer's new policy under this headline: Ban on slaughter of downer cows announced

To give the man his due, here from the Seattle Times, is the closest the Ag Secretary comes to explaining his policy switch.

Schafer said no such violations have been found at other slaughterhouses. He said the rule change was not being done for public-health reasons but should increase consumer confidence by eliminating confusion about the handling of downers.

"I don't think we can justify the confusion that takes place in the consumer's mind," Schafer said.

He also said the change should improve handling of cows by cattle producers and slaughterhouses "as there will no longer be any market for cattle that are too weak to rise or walk on their own."

The change would affect a small number of cows. Of 34 million cows slaughtered in 2007, about 2,700 fell down after the initial veterinary inspection and were reinspected, Schafer said.

Of those, less than 1,000 were approved to go to slaughter, he said.

Here's what we really think.  

The only thing big enough to turn this crank at USDA in the span of the last 13 weeks is South Korea.   The re-entry of U.S. beef to South Korea will increase sales by at least 15 percent.   The consumers that Ed Schafer is really worried about are the ones in South Korea who fear U.S. beef will bring Mad Cow disease to the Asian country.  Those protests have held up the deal, and USDA is far more worried about that than a few hundred "downer" cows.

UPDATE:  Our opinion would not surprise anyone reading Asian news tonight.  Consider this from  DongA.com

Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said the new rule is an example of how high U.S. standards have grown to protect beef consumers in and outside the United States.

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United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Ed Schafer just issued a long statement that includes this: "...today I am announcing that USDA will begin working on a proposed rule to prohibit the slaughter of all disabled non-ambulatory cattle, also know as "downer cattle." In other words, I am calling for the end of the exceptions in the so called "downer rule."

We'll provide more details when we have them.

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South Korea’s Agriculture Ministry is delaying the resumption of beef imports from the United States to consider the many protest petitions it has received from its “Mad Cow-phobic” population.

The delay isn’t going over very well in Washington, D.C. where Congressmen say the Free Trade Agreement with South Korea won’t be approved unless the government in Seoul fully opens its market to American beef.

Prior to being locked out of South Korea in 2003 when a cow from Canada immigrated to Washington State where it was found to be contaminated with Mad Cow disease, the Asian nation was the third largest foreign market for American beef. The industry badly wants back in.

Standing in the way are the protest rallies that have been held every day since the pact was announced. More than 1,700 civic groups are involved in the street protests, and 1.3 million have signed a petition against the re-entry of U.S. beef to their country. Korean ranchers, who have enjoyed not having competition from Americans, and opposition political parties are keeping the pot well stirred.

For an American view of what this all means, may I suggest you check out Martha Rosenberg who gives all of this her own special viewpoint in the May 15th issue of CounterPunch.

Rosenberg, a rare editorial cartoonist who writes, caught our attention by including a list of people who’ve died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the U.S. during the past nine months. Like Mad Cow, C-J is a prion disease.

Rosenberg writes:

Seven people have died from probable Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the U.S. in the last nine months including Connie Albert of Lincoln IL and Roger Leon Dalton of Willis, VA in Aug. 2007; Roland Lacey and Ray Norris--who lived within three miles of each other near Stanton, DE--and a 79-year-old woman in Milwaukee, WI all in Dec 2007; a 53-year-old man in Colby, KS in Jan. 2008, a former meat worker, and Aretha Vinson of Portsmouth VA in April.

While public health officials are quick to rule CJD "sporadic," not meat-caused--even before brain biopsies or when it's in clusters (hello)--to forestall panic about food and hospital safety, Aretha Vinson presented a perfect storm for U.S. trade officials:

 

Not only was she young at 22 and her family outspoken--"She has not traveled overseas. She's not even been to the Midwest," said her mother, adding she "wasn't the only one who ate this food,"--the news broke in the middle of the Bush/Lee summit.

Rosenberg's point is that concern about Mad Cow disease in the U.S. beef supply is not unfounded.   We agree.  Nor do we think the South Korean public is acting in a sane and rational manner.

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Creekstone Farms Premium Beef is finding out how difficult life can be when your opponent in court is the U.S. government. One thing is certain, the government is not worried about running up legal bills.

Here's what we are talking about.  Your government wants to stop Creekstone from using its own money to test each and every one of its Black Angus beef cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease.

Last March, Creekstone beat the government at the trial court level.  U.S. Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. said the United States Department of Agriculture's prohibition of private tests was "unlawful."

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments in the case. USDA, which currently tests only one percent of slaughtered cows for BSE, brought the appeal. 

With near riots in 30 locations in South Korea over the re-entry of U.S. beef cattle to the Asian country, Creekstone's plan to test for BSE are looking more than savvy. Its testing facility, a state-of-the-art laboratory, is ready to go at its Arkansas City, Kansas plant. All that stands in the way of its ability to respond to customer demand in Korea, Japan and other countries concerned about Mad Cow Disease is Uncle Sam.

USDA says more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers. They said Creekstone wants to "create false assurances."

Creekstone said USDA's regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. The company insists USDA no authority to prevent the private sector from using the test to reassure customers. Creekstone says USDA wants to keep information from consumers.

Appeals courts generally issue their rulings some weeks after hearing the case.

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The return of U.S. beef to the South Korean market is encountering severe turbulence.   Thousands of South Koreans have "hit the bricks" to protest the decision by its government to let U.S. beef back in the country for the first time since 2003.

The Korea Times has this report on what's happening:

More than 10,000 people participated in a candlelight vigil in Seoul, according to police, which was organized by a coalition of 1,500 civic groups and Internet-based communities in what was the biggest gathering since the government announced plans to relax the import restrictions on U.S. beef. Organizers of the rally claimed that the crowd numbered closer to 30,000.

Protestors urged the Lee Myung-bak government to take a harder look at the health concerns on U.S. beef from cattle older than 30 months, which is believed to be more at risk from BSE, commonly called ``mad cow" disease.

Similar rallies were also held in more than 10 towns and cities across the country, including Incheon, Suwon, Daejeon, Busan and Jeonju

[So far,none of the protest rallies have turned into one of those famous South Korean riots as shown here.]

Last weekend, Dr. Richard Raymond, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety, issued the complete text of his statement to the South Korea trade delegation.  Dr. Raymond told the group that "the U.S. beef supply is among the safest in the world."   The complete text can be found here.

South Korea has agreed to open itself up to U.S. beef for the first time since 2003 when a "mad cow" was found in Washington State.  

Whether the public protests will impact the government remain to be seen.   However, the Korea  Times makes it clear, some opponents won't be giving up.  The newspaper reports:

Internet cafe members, professors' groups and some doctors said that they will fight against the government until the beef deal between the two countries is scrapped.

Go here for the rest of the Korea Times story.

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The wall to keep Mad Cow Disease out of America was erected somewhat higher last week.  This week, the debate is whether that action resulted from a true concern by the soon-to-be outgoing Bush Administration about health or was it the required cave-in to get South Korea to once again import American beef.

The blog, OMB Watch, put it this way:

FDA's announcement came as a bit of a surprise since OMB seemed content to allow the rule to languish under its review while the cattle industry continued to avoid further regulation. The turning point came at a meeting between U.S. and South Korean officials on trade. According to the Wall Street Journal,  "South Korea last week agreed to lift restrictions on U.S. beef and, according to one U.S. government official, the country did so on the condition that the U.S. strengthen its livestock feed rules."

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) said the regulation first proposed in 2005, barring certain cattle materials from all animal feed, including pet food, protects animals and consumers against bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as "mad cow disease").

Some details from FDA:

The new measure builds on FDA's 1997 feed regulation, which prohibited the use of certain mammalian proteins in ruminant feed.

The materials that can no longer be used in animal feed are the tissues that have the highest risk for carrying the agent thought to cause BSE. These high risk cattle materials are the brains and spinal cords from cattle 30 months of age and older. The entire carcass of cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption is also prohibited, unless the cattle are less than 30 months of age, or the brains and spinal cords have been removed. The risk of BSE in cattle less than 30 months of age is considered to be exceedingly low.

The removal of high-risk materials from all animal feed will further protect against inadvertent transmission of the agent thought to cause BSE, which could occur through cross-contamination of ruminant feed (intended for animals with four-chambered stomachs, such as cattle) with non-ruminant feed or feed ingredients during manufacture and transport, or through misfeeding of non-ruminant feed to ruminants on the farm. The added measure of excluding high-risk materials from all animal feeds prevents any accidental feeding of such ingredients to cattle.

Today's regulation finalizes a proposed rule that the FDA issued for public comment in October 2005. The final rule is effective 12 months from today to allow the livestock, meat, rendering, and feed industries time to adapt their practices to comply with the new regulation. Under the new requirements of the final rule, renderers that process cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption must make available for FDA inspection their written protocols for determining the age of cattle and demonstrating that the brain and spinal cords of cattle have been effectively removed

OMB Watch's Matt Madia summed it up this way:

Nonetheless, it's a sad commentary that the Bush White House is more responsive to the concerns of the South Korean government (and the domestic producers who will benefit from increased exports) than to its own food safety agency or considerations of public health. The rule is fairly typical of Bush's cronyism approach to regulation: "Fight tooth-and-nail against government intervention, unless it would help out my buddies."

But bottom line, new policies are now in place that could prevent an outbreak of mad cow disease. The rule takes effect in April 2009

The FDA news release is  here.

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Food industry lobbyists are crawling about the Executive Office of Management & Budget to stop approval of new regulations that would give consumers the right to know which retail outlets were supplied tainted meat that’s subject to recall.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) first sent the right to know regulations over to OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in February 2005. They’ve been hung-up there ever since.

USDA renewed its call for the new regulations after the 143 million pounds of beef was recalled when its became known that at least some “downer” cows were processed by the Chino slaughterhouse.

Once “downer” cows reach the food supply, experts say there is a much greater risk of humans contracting “Mad Cow” disease.

About a third of the Hallmark/Westland beef went to school lunch programs, but the other two thirds went into the overall retail chain. Consumers were left clueless by the federal government and the food industry.

OMB Watch, an independent blog, is down and dirty with what’s going on:

While the rule would be a step in the right direction, the devil is in the details (as it so often is with the Bush administration). Insiders say the new rule may only apply to Class I recalls. USDA classifies recalls based on the potential risk to public health; Class I recalls are for products which pose the highest risk, Class II and III recalls are for products which pose lower risks.

Most meat recalls are Class I (50 of 58 in 2007), but consumers have a right — and a need — to know about Class II and III recalls as well. For example, USDA classified an April 2007 recall of more than 5,000 pounds of salami as a Class II recall but also called the health risk "high."

For more on the behind-the-scenes rule making, go here

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The  Virginian-Pilot has reported on the death of a 22 year old woman that may be related to a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, known as vCJD, a rare degenerative brain disorder that has been linked to consumption of contaminated beef.

The V-P reports:

A 22-year-old woman who may have had a rare degenerative brain disorder that has been linked to eating beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease has died.

The story can be found here.

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We could really gross you out with this one.   Elkhorn Valley Packing in Harper, KS is  voluntarily recalling 406,000 pounds of frozen cattle heads because the tonsils were not completely removed.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service requires that tonsils from cattle of all ages be removed as a specified risk material that may possibly be an infectious agent for mad cow disease.

The product recall from Elkhorn Valley Packing is for various weight bulk boxes labeled "Beef Whole Heads, Keep Refrigerated." Each shipping package bears the establishment numbers EST 19549A inside the USDA mark of inspection as well as a package code of 91700 or 93700.

The other cow parts that are banned from the human food chain include the skull and brain, eyes, small intestine, and vertabrat and spinal cord.  (See illustration from USDA)

The problem was discovered at a state-inspected processing company that received some of the products, which were packed before March 28, and verified that there had been incomplete removal of the tonsils.

There have been no reports of illness from the product and the recall is being listed as "low risk."

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We always get a little discomfort whenever someone in the media gives themselves the title of "Watchdog."

Maybe its because we always think of the late Marvin Zindler, the Texas TV consumer reporter who during one ratings period decided to force the shutdown of a rural brothel.  It was the story that musical "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" was based upon.   Since he died last August 1st, I won't say more about Marvin.  But here's his picture.

At the Kansas City Star, its Watchdog was recently asked about the death of Milton Eugene Rebarchek, specifically whether it was "related to Mad Cow."  Here's how the Watchdog replied:

The man’s death was not related to “mad cow.” Instead, it was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, says Joe Blubaugh, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

And Blubaugh says that you can breathe easy because Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, is far different than mad cow.

Blubaugh says about three people die of CJD each year in Kansas.

The Watchdog says, fortunately, you probably have more to fear from mad dogs than mad cows

We do not think that is a very good answer.  Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) are both prion diseases.  We reported Mr. Rebarchek's death as being a case of confirmed CJD.   We said CJD is related to BSE because they are both prion dieases.  

Here's what the Centers for Disease Control has to say about Prion Diseases:

Prion diseases or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans and animals. They are distinguished by long incubation periods, characteristic spongiform changes associated with neuronal loss, and a failure to induce inflammatory response.

The causative agent of TSEs is believed to be a prion. A prion is an abnormal, transmissible agent that is able to induce abnormal folding of normal cellular prion proteins in the brain, leading to brain damage and the characteristics signs and symptoms of the disease. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.

As our readers know, we've followed news and developments involving all kinds of Prion Disease and the investments being made in Prion research.   So don't make this subject too cute and simple, no matter how many mad dogs there are in Kansas City.

 

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A suspected victim of  Mad Cow Disease has been identified and his death by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease confirmed.

Milton Eugene Rebarchek of Monument, Kansas died in January and now the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center confirms he died of C-J, which is related to Mad Cow Disease, and  turns the brain tissue spongy.

Mr. Rebarchek's identity and National Prion's findings were made public by his brother, Frank Rebarchek of Scott City,  Kansas.   The victim worked in a packing plant 15 or 20 years ago, according to the brother.

Where the victim was exposed remains unkown.   The incubation period for C-J disease can run to decades and the diagnosis requires testing brain tissue.  It is always fatal.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob can come from blood transfusions and can be hereditary in very rare cases. On average, 250 to 300 cases are reported in the United States

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The largest beef recall in United States history occurred largely because of video evidence that at least a couple "downer cows" made it into the food supply.

Now comes word from the Animal Welfare Institute, a 57-year old non-profit that wants to abolish so-called "factory" farming and achieve humane slaughter practices, that it has records from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) of 501 humane-handling or slaughter violations involving "downer cows."

The violations apparently occurred in the 18 months prior to March 2004.    The records tell of a downed cow being pushed 15 feet with a forklift. Other companies were cited for dragging downed but conscious animals, letting downed cattle be trampled and stood on by others and, in one case, using "excessive force" with a rope and an electric prod to get a downed cow to stand.

The USDA records indicate that more than 10 percent of the humane-slaughter violations issued by the department involved animals, mostly cattle, that could not walk.

"Downer cows" are much more likely to be carrying diseases like Mad Cow, E. coli, and salmonella.   Since an undercover video tape surfaced of a Chino, CA slaughterhouse that was forcing "downer cows" into the "knock" or kill box, USDA has been under pressure to stop such animals from entering the human food supply.

For more, check out the USA Today story here.

 

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From reading the newspapers today, you would think that Steve Mendell, who owns Westland and managed Hallmark, who were partners in the Chino slaughterhouse, was given a rough time on Capitol Hill yesterday.

Mendell gave the impression that he is not a very curious man.   He had not looked at a second Humane Society video tape that actually showed "downer" cows being forced into the "knock" box at the Chino slaughterhouse.   That narrated video was the "smoking" gun that caused the United States Department of Agriculture to demand Mendell make the largest recall of beef in US history.

USDA was suppose to send him a copy.  It never did.  He never bothered to go looking for it on the Humane Society website where it was available to anyone.  After it was shown to him by the House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations, Mendell amended his testimony to acknowledge that at least two "downer" cows had made it into the food supply in violation of USDA policies.

Sure, Mendell went through some discomfort before the Subcommittee.  He clearly does not like watching the Humane Society video tapes.  He wanted to say the tapes showed there was an animal welfare problem, not a food  safety issue.  After the second tape, he had to admit to both.

For the most part, however, Mendell came across as a victim.  A  CEO who could produce documents, training manuals, and numerous government and third party audits.   But, he was personally clueless as to what was going on in the pens and on the floor of the slaughterhouse.  "Obviously, my system broke down," he said.

Best places to go for stories are: The Chicago  Tribune; The New York Times; and the Los Angeles Times.

 

 

 

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Mad cow disease is an awful way to die. Contracting it is a little like coming down with Alzheimer’s, with the body and brain both deteriorating — except that it affects people of any age, not just the elderly. It is terrifying even to think about.

Enough time has passed on the breaking news that was the Chino slaughterhouse that writers are weighing in with analysis pieces.   The quote above was from the New York Times story that ran over the weekend by Joe Nocera.  It ran the business section and can be found here.

Nocera does a good job of logging all the events that followed the secret video taping of extreme cruelty to "downer" cows inside the Chino meat processing plant that is owned by Hallark/Westland.   He then gets into the controversy, writing that:

You see, downer cows — animals that are not standing on their feet when they are slaughtered — are said to have an increased risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (B.S.E.), the dreaded mad cow disease

Today there is another analytical story out on "downer cows" by the Chicago Tribune's Stephen J. Hedges.  It ran in the Buffalo News and can be found here.  Hedges notes that:

But the video also has focused new light on a practice that some animal welfare and food safety experts contend is an old problem: the use in beef production of dairy cows that are spent and barely able to stand, due to calcium depletion from being milked intensively for years.

If we put aside concerns about the nation's school lunch program and all the problems surrounding the biggest beef recall in history, we still cannot help be being struck by the fact that all of this is occurring without causing anyone illness nor even being considered much of a health risk. 

But the potential threat from "downer" cows and Mad Cow Disease has sure captured everyone's attention.  So read on and remember, the pictures with some of these stories are graphic.  We've decided not to put anymore of them here.  At least for now.

 

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Edward T. Schafer, Secretary of Agriculture, this week was defending the status quo when it comes to "downer" cows.  USDA's current policy is that if a cow on the way to slaughter goes down,  there should be additional inspection by a veterinarian, who might rule the animal is healthy enough to get whacked.

The Humane Society of America wants a complete ban against putting "downer" cows in the human food supply, and the organization that is responsible for the undercover video of the now closed Chino slaughter house went to court this week to get its way.  The same suggestion was given to Schafer by Democrat Senators.  Example:

"We cannot allow a single downer cow to enter our food supply under any circumstances," said Herb Kohl, D-Wisconsin.

Kohl called for installing cameras in slaughterhouses.  Today, Stephen J. Hedges, who works out of the  Washington Bureau of the Chicago Tribune, published a piece that really does an excellent job of making sense out of all of this "downer" cow business.  Hedges writes:

USDA and beef industry officials were quick to acknowledge, then discount, an obvious health concern presented by the videotape of downer cows at the Chino plant: mad cow disease.

The inability of a cow to stand is considered a symptom of mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), though cattle may go down for a number of reasons, including ailing or broken limbs, exhaustion and lack of water.

BSE deteriorates a cow's nervous system and brain, and can similarly afflict humans who eat meat infected with BSE.

The rest of the Chicago Tribune story can be found here.

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Ever since the arrest warrants were issued for Daniel Navarro of Pomona, and Luis Sanchez of Chino on multiple charges of animal cruelty at the Chino slaughterhouse, we've said these individuals were perhaps guilty, but probably not the  ultimate decision-makers.

Navarro and Sanchez are the guys seen in the Humane Society video that led to closure of the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse and shortly thereafter to the largest beef recall in U.S. history.

They are the guys fired by the Hallmark/Westland owners, and charged by the county prosecuting attorney under California law.  Is anybody looking any higher up the food  chain?

Yes, the Riverside-based Press Enterprise is on the case.  Reporters Ben Goad and Janet Zimmerman today wrote this:

Irene Zamora, who said she worked as a Hallmark quality assurance inspector in 2004, blamed the problems on a manager at the plant. She spoke to a reporter Tuesday at her home in Riverside and was not part of the congressional hearing.

Zamora said the two men charged with animal abuse in the case, pen manager Daniel Ugarte Navarro, 48, and his assistant, Jose Luis Sanchez, 32, were acting on the other manager's orders.

According to Zamora, she was fired after six months because she was zealous about cleaning up the plant, making sure workers had new boots and gloves and were following procedures for cleanliness and safety.

Zamora, 41, said she went to Stan Mendell, the operations manager and brother of owner Steve Mendell, and complained about the manager, but Stan Mendell told her there was nothing he could do.

The plant's owners and top executives only visited the area called the kill floor once or twice a week, she said.

"I feel bad for Stan and the bosses. There's a lot of things Irene Zamora, who said she worked as a Hallmark quality assurance inspector in 2004, blamed the problems on a manager at the plant. She spoke to a reporter Tuesday at her home in Riverside and was not part of the congressional hearing.

Zamora said the two men charged with animal abuse in the case, pen manager Daniel Ugarte Navarro, 48, and his assistant, Jose Luis Sanchez, 32, were acting on the other manager's orders.

According to Zamora, she was fired after six months because she was zealous about cleaning up the plant, making sure workers had new boots and gloves and were following procedures for cleanliness and safety.

Zamora, 41, said she went to Stan Mendell, the operations manager and brother of owner Steve Mendell, and complained about the manager, but Stan Mendell told her there was nothing he could do.

The plant's owners and top executives only visited the area called the kill floor once or twice a week, she said.

"I feel bad for Stan and the bosses. There's a lot of things that man (the manager) did without anybody knowing. If you did not do what he said, you were out the door," said Zamora, who went to work for the city of Riverside's recreation program and also stocked shelves at a Food 4 Less after leaving Hallmark.

The Press-Enterprise is not naming the manager because he has not been formally accused of criminal wrongdoing or charged with any crimes.

that man (the manager) did without anybody knowing. If you did not do what he said, you were out the door," said Zamora, who went to work for the city of Riverside's recreation program and also stocked shelves at a Food 4 Less after leaving Hallmark.

The Press-Enterprise is not naming the manager because he has not been formally accused of criminal wrongdoing or charged with any crimes.

If true, the Westland/Hallmark empire was destroyed by not by the owners, but someone they hired to run their operations.  And, they did not listen to warnings about it.   This isn't all The Press Enterprise has to say.  Check it out here.

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While we've all been focused on "downer" cows in the United States, Canada has actually found its 12th case of Mad Cow disease.   The International Herald Tribune today (2/26/08) reports that:

"Canada confirmed a new case of mad cow disease on Tuesday, marking the country's 12th such case since the disease was first discovered there in 2003.

"The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said no part of the cow's carcass entered the human food or animal feed chains.

"The animal is a six-year-old cow from Alberta, born after the implementation of Canada's feed ban in 1997.

"The national monitoring program targets cattle most at risk for the disease, which is also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

"The food inspections agency said it expects to detect a small number of cases over the next 10 years as Canada moves toward its goal of eliminating the disease from its herds."

Two cases of mad cow disease have been found in the U.S. since 2003.  U.S. agricultural officials says the finding of a 12th cow with the diease in Canada is "no cause for concern" and will not impact cross border trade.   The Herald Tribune story can be found here.

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Editorial writers at The Arizona Republic Sunday gave their readers a lot to think about when it comes to food safety and preventing Mad Cow disease.

They said our belief that food is safe and our assumption that animals are treated humanely were both dashed by the Chino slaughterhouse scandal that led to the largest beef recall in U.S. history.

The fact that all of this came to light, not from our Federal food inspectors, but from the Humane Society of the United States caused the AR to call for  " a sustained effort to structure a food-safety inspection system that is up to the challenges presented by modern factory farming and emerging food-borne health threats."

The AR editorial speaks specifically to the issue of "downer" animals and the risk of Mad Cow disease.  It says:

The animal-protection group's surreptitiously filmed video shows workers abusing non-ambulatory animals in an effort to get them onto their feet for slaughter. Cows too weak to stand were kicked, smacked in the eye with a paddle and shocked repeatedly. Some were taken to slaughter by forklift.

Federal regulations ban most "downer" cows from the food supply because an animal that is too sick to walk is more likely to carry mad-cow disease or other contamination. Inspectors should have excluded these animals from the slaughter. But, according to society investigators, inspections were done on a set schedule. That meant violations could take place when no one was watching.

What's more, the federal law banning downer cattle has huge loopholes, says Wayne Pacelle, president of the society. It does not even cover downer pigs, sheep or goats, although two proposals in Congress, S 394 and HR 661, cover these animals.

The full AR editorial can be found here.

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A federal judge in South Dakota soon will making a ruling that could again close the United States to the import of all cattle from Canada.   American cattlemen, who say they just want to keep bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) out of the USA , are trying to shutdown the program that allows cattle older than 30 months to come south of the border.

The Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, also known as R-CALF, leads the coalition of groups to keep older Canadian cattle out of the United States.  R-CALF makes several points in its campaign against Canada, including:

• Allowing over 30 month cattle from Canada will make it more difficult for US cattlemen to regain foreign market share.  American cattle were shut out of foreign markets after an animal from Canada was discovered in Washington State with mad cow disease.
• The US should not relax its import standards until there is scientific evidence that Canada has eliminated BSE from its feed and that conclusion is accepted worldwide.

• The US should wait until there is country or origin labeling.

• Since its now known that BSE has continued to be a problem in Canada after the feed ban, the US has reason to be suspicious of high risk animals.
• Both the US and Canada need to let more time pass since the feed ban.  Canada needs more testing.

• And, there should be health and safety risk and economic studies done before the border is open to cattle traders.

R-CALF wants the federal judge to issue an order stopping the United States Department of Agriculture  from keeping the border open to older cows.  USDA says its rules and procedures already protect the public.

There's an Associated Press story on the case here.

 

 

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After the nation's school districts have been stuck holding their illegal meat in public freezers for more than two weeks, the Chino slaughterhouse has finally done the obvious and issued a recall.

The Food Safety & Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture announced  on Sunday afternoon that 143,383,823 pounds of raw and frozen beef products from Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company of Chino, CA were being "voluntarily recalled."

FSIS said the meat did not receive the "complete and proper inspection"  in situations when non-ambulatory cattle were involved.  In other words, the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse in Chino was processing "downer" cows and selling the meat from them to America's school lunch program.

Only a "pen manager" and his assistant have been charged in the slaughterhouse scandal.  Their images being cruel to the "downer" cows were captured on video taken by an undercover operative from the Humane Society of America.

The FSIS statement on the recall can be found here.

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Meet Michael A. Ramos,  San Bernardino County District Attorney.  He has just filed criminal charges in the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company's mistreatment of downer cows.

We are not, at least at this point, going to see Westland/Hallmark President Steve Mendell being taken away in handcuffs.   No, neither Mendell or any other Westland/Hallmark corporate officials being "frog-marched" passed the media.

No, but according to the Los Angeles Times "Daniel Ugarte Navarro of Pomona faces up to eight years and eight months in prison if convicted of five felony counts of animal cruelty and three misdemeanor counts of illegal movement of a non-ambulatory animal. Navarro, who was a head pen manager at Hallmark Meat Packing, was fired last month after the release of the video by the Humane Society of the United States.

A pen manager?  The LA Times also reports "authorities today also filed three misdemeanor counts against 32-year-old Luis Sanchez of Chino, who worked directly under Navarro and was also fired last month. Sanchez faces up to three years in prison if convicted.

We guess Sanchez was trying to work his way up to "pen manager."   He was probably the other guy fired immediately by Westland/Hallmark after the Humane Society went public with its video tape.

"Downer" cows, which are many more times more likely to spread Mad Cow disease,were being routinely mistreated at the Westland/Hallmark Chino slaughterhouse.  Are we to believe that responsibility for these practices stop with a "pen manager" and his trusty companion?

Schools nationwide have been forced to pull beef from their menus and leave it stacked in their freezers until this mess is cleaned up.  On one hand, we have to give D.A. Ramos credit for filing at least some criminal charges in this matter.   However, one has to wonder where is the U.S. Justice Department?

Or how about Homeland Security?   What's more important than protecting the security of the food supply going into every school lunch program in the country.   

Maybe if the feds would put their considerable resources to work they could find away to charge someone higher up than a "pen manager."  D.A. Ramos says "We want to send the message that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated."

That message Mr. Ramos would be better sent by charging those in charge.

Go here for the whole LA Times story.

 

 

 

 

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Suffolk & Essex online today reports that Guy Massey, a 53-year old Suffolk businessman,  died on Jaunary 28, 2008 from the human form of mad cow's disease.  He died just ten weeks after he was told he had the rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and eight months before he was due to marry later this year.

Suffolk & Essex online reports that:

Variant CJD (vCID), believed to be the human form of mad cow's disease, is extremely rare and affects only a handful of people each year.

Family members are unsure whether a cornea graft operation he had seven years ago at West Suffolk Hospital might have been connected with the disease.

But hospital chiefs last night said cases of the disease were extremely rare and encouraged the family to get in touch with any concerns they might have.

Mr. Massey was clearly a man who enjoyed life and was greatly loved.   His story can be found here.

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The Humane Society caught the Chino, CA slaughterhouse processing "downer" cows; breaking a bunch of federal laws.   It was more than an embarrassment to the United States Department of Agriculture as not only was its Food Safety & Inspection Service (FSIS) at Chino not on the job; but federal food buyers were busy buying all the beef produced by the plant for the school lunch program.

Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.  Or maybe it did.

Anyway, more than a few people are watching and wondering about how USDA is handling this smelly little situation.   Oh, the Chino plant has been shut down and school districts across the nation have been ordered to sit on the beef in their freezers, but what next?

Blogger Martha Rosenberg is among the watchers and she's been keeping an eye on Ed Schafer, who is serving as the lameduck's last Secretary of Agriculture.  She writes:

"For the new Agriculture Secretary, Ed Schafer, the Hallmark/Westland Meat Company recall has been the perfect storm...

..".With his predecessor Mike Johanns running for the Senate in Nebraska and ex Secretary Ann Veneman safely at UNICEF, Schafer, former North Dakota Governor, no doubt resents the mess he's inherited and has resorted to swiftboating.

"The Humane Society, since late October, has been willing to let animals suffer out there," rather than notify USDA he said in front of a cattle group in Reno last week, ignoring the fact that eight inspectors were on-site.

"But the Los Angeles Times isn't buying it.

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has 7,800 pairs of eyes scrutinizing 6,200 slaughterhouses and food processors across the nation. But in the end, it took an undercover operation by an animal rights group to reveal that beef from ill and abused cattle had entered the human food supply," it wrote.

Everything Rosenberg had to say can be found here.

"Downer" cattle are many more times likely to contain Mad Cow disease, which is why federal law bans the processing of animals that cannot get up on their own.

 

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Schools across America were left pulling beef from their lunch menus after Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing was caught mistreating "downer" cows.  In doing their reports on the local school districts, most television stations showed some images from the Humane Society video that was taken by an undercover operative.

After a week of that, enough was enough for the United States Department of Agriculture, which announced the Chino, CA slaughter house was going from being suspended to shut down. Dr. Richard Raymond, USDA's undersecretary for food safety, said:

"On Feb. 4, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) suspended inspection at Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company based on the establishment's clear violation of Federal regulations and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. This Notice of Suspension is a regulatory course of action available when FSIS finds egregious violations of humane handling regulations.

At the time allegations were revealed on Jan. 30, the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company voluntarily stopped operations on Feb. 1. The USDA suspension will remain in effect and the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company will not be allowed to operate until written corrective actions are submitted and verified by FSIS   to ensure that animals are humanely handled.

When USDA meat inspectors leave the building with their purple stamps, you are pretty much out of the meat business until they come back.  Previously, USDA put a hold on products from the Chino plant and stopped its involvement with the school lunch program.   The "hold," however, is not a recall and state and local school districts  at this point are wondering what to do with the beef from Chino that is now held in their freezers.

A good wrap up of the situation can be found in today's Los Angeles Times here.

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Westland Meat Company/Hallmark Meat Packing own and operate a slaughterhouse in Chino, CA that they say has operated “under the strictest possible standards for animal welfare, occupational health and safety and food safety precautions for 10 years.”

Today, however, that Chino slaughterhouse is shut down because the Humane Society of the United States went public with a powerful video tape that shows downed animals being brutally forced through the packing house.

“The video appears to show employees jabbing downed cows in the eyes, using repeated electric shocks, dragging them with forklifts and tormenting them with water in efforts to move them into the slaughter chutes,” reports the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

“Downer Cows,” meaning animals that are not able to rise off the ground on their own, cannot be slaughtered for human use out of control for controlling diseases like Mad Cow.

One thing is certain; the video was powerful enough to rattle the United States Department of Agriculture. USDA was not only one of Westland’s regulators; it was one of its biggest customers. The government agency bought 27 million pounds of beef from Westland last year for the school lunch program.

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer promised an investigation by USDA’s various arms.
"We are confident in our inspection system and the food safety regulations that ensure the safety and wholesomeness of the food supply. Among the federal safeguards in place, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) prohibits non-ambulatory disabled cattle and cattle tissue identified as specified risk materials for use in human food,” Schafer said a prepared statement.

Someone from the Humane Society took the video while working undercover inside the packing plant last fall. Two employees identified in the video by the company were immediately fired.

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If cattle in the United States ever started showing up with Mad Cow disease in any significant numbers, the outcry for locating and tracking histories on the impacted animals would probably be over-whelming.

After 9-11, we all recall the sharp elbows that were exchanged over who did and who did not “connect the dots.”

So it’s not surprising that government and industry have been working on a solution for tracking animals. It’s called the National Animal Identification System or just NAIS for short.

At this point, NAIS has managed to work itself into a gray area as a program that is not mandatory, but one that might require you to volunteer for it. For example, if your kid’s 4H animal is going to get into the fair or if you want to sell to certain feedlots.

So now opposition is developing to NAIS. Its being called everything from “the Agriculture Gestapo” to “the Barnyard Big Brother.”

The LA Times last week published a long article on all of this. It reported that:

A Bush administration initiative, the National Animal Identification System is meant to provide a modern tool for tracking disease outbreaks within 48 hours, whether natural or the work of a bio-terrorist. Most farm animals, even exotic ones such as llamas, will eventually be registered. Information will be kept on every farm, ranch or stable. And databases will record every animal movement from birth to slaughterhouse, including trips to the vet and county fairs.

But the system is spawning a grass-roots revolt.

To read the entire story, go here.

We wanted to more fully understand the objections to NAIS. The Farm & Ranch Freedom Alliance lists “the problems with NAIS” including:

[] Massive intrusion into people’s lives: individuals will have to provide detailed information about their property, businesses, and their own movements to government and private databases; 

[]  Burden on property rights: the premises registration number will attach to the land forever, and people’s rights to manage their land and animals will be restricted; 
[] High costs: registration, tagging, and reporting all carry costs in both time and money;   Loss of small farmers and ranchers: many will be unable to afford the program, or unwilling to accept the government intrusion; 
[]  Damage to the economy: businesses that rely on small farmers, such as sales barns, supply stores, and even tourism, will be harmed; 
[]  Reduced choices and increased costs for consumers; 
[]  Violation of many Americans’ religious beliefs; and 
[]  Increased government bureaucracy and waste of taxpayer dollars.

We think  the Alliance's list of "problems" can be taken apart pretty easily.  If costs to the small farmer or rancher are an issue,  that can and should be addressed.  But NAIS in some form or another is probably needed in the world in which we live.

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If you want to catch the world's attention,  there's probably not a better place to do it than the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.   The death last week of a Kansas man due to the rare brain disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease caught  the Exchange's attention.  Today, it was celebrating the fact that it appears there is no relation to this man's demise and Mad Cow disease.

Here's what  Reuters is reporting out of Chicago:

Preliminary tests indicate that a 53-year-old Kansas man, who died on Friday, had the rare brain disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which is not related to mad cow disease, health officials said on Wednesday.

However, it will be several weeks before final tests are completed to positively identify the disease.  A physician who treated the man had said the brain disease was "not the mad cow version," said a spokesman for the Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, where the man was treated.

Reuters said the cattle market early on Wednesday was filled with speculation  that the man might have died from variant CJD, which scientists believe can be contracted by eating contaminated parts from cattle with mad cow disease.  Reuters calmed the waters, saying:

Normal CJD is naturally occurring and the Kansas Department of Health said the state averages about three cases a year. "We have no reason to believe it is not anything but CJD," said Joe Blubaugh, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Health.

The United States has had three cases of mad cow disease in cattle.

 

 

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Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease has taken the life of a 53-year old Colby, Kansas man.  He died Friday, Jan. 11, 2008 at  the Wesley Medical Center in Wichita where he where he had been a patient since December. .

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is a rare disease that affects the central nervous system and turns brain tissue spongy. 

Karen Shideler reported on the death today in the Wichita Eagle.   She says:

One variation of the disease is the so-called mad cow disease but the human form of that has never been seen in the United States in someone who hadn't had exposure elsewhere.

Because the incubation period for the disease is years or even decades, health officials don't know how or when the Kansas man got the disease, nor what its source may have been.

They won't know for several weeks, until testing is complete, which form of the disease he had.

The diagnosis at this time is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD, said Wesley spokesman Paul Petitte. The only way to confirm CJD is through testing of brain tissue, which will be done through the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center.

Kansas has an average of three CJD cases a year, according to Joe Blubaugh, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one to two people per million have a spontaneous case of CJD each year. On average, 250 to 300 cases of CJD are reported annually.

In addition to the spontaneous cases, a certain form of CJD can come from consumption of beef that has been infected with mad cow disease, as happened in Great Britain in the mid-1990s. The United States and other countries implemented various measures in response, to prevent the disease and better track infected cattle.

CJD can also come from blood transfusions, and it can be hereditary in very rare cases.

Richard Liepins, who was the attending physician in the local case, said, "We have no idea of how he possibly contracted this."

Go here for the rest of the story.

 

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Nebraska game officials have found 18 deer with chronic wasting disease out of  3,310 tested. 

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a transmissible neurological disease of deer and elk that produces small lesions in brains of infected animals. It is characterized by loss of body condition, behavioral abnormalities and death. CWD is classified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), and is similar to mad cow disease in cattle and scrapie in sheep, according to the Chronic Wasting Disease Alliance.

One of the diseased deer was found in Hall County, Nebraska and that caused a long look at the situation by Mark Coddington at the Grand Island Independent.   He notes that most CWD-infected deer in Nebraska are found in the Panhandle, but there were cases scattered about the state as far as 200 miles away from the enemic area.

The CWD Alliance notes that:

"Infectious agents of CWD are neither bacteria nor viruses, but are hypothesized to be prions. Prions are infectious proteins without associated nucleic acids.

"Although CWD is a contagious fatal disease among deer and elk, research suggests that humans, cattle and other domestic livestock are resistant to natural transmission. While the possibility of human infection remains a concern, it is important to note there have been no verified cases of humans contracting CWD. "

Coddington reports that the rate of CWD in Nebraska at about 1 percent is far from the 5 percent rate in Colorado and Wyoming.  "The red flag for us is that it has spread,: says Bruce Trindle, who heads up big game research for Nebraska.

 

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     The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)  is going with a rule-change that makes it more likely that a "mad cow" could make its way into the United States, but two powerful Western Senators are trying to block it.   Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Republican Mike Enzi  of Wyoming explained why they are seeking U.S. Senate action to block the USDA rule-change in the this guest editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  It ran on New Year's Day.

 

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The National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University is getting $27.5 million from the Centers for Disease Control--enough to continue its work for another five years.   The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Sarah Jane Tribble wrote that:

"The center became a national hot spot when mad cow disease, which is the newest strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, hit global headlines several years ago. Hospitals nationwide send suspected cases to Cleveland to be tested. And earlier this year the center was part of an international study that announced a new prion protein that may provide insight into how the brain functions with the disease.

"Mad cow disease is the best known of several brain-wasting diseases for humans and animals thought to be associated with malformed proteins called prions. Another disorder in this family includes chronic wasting disease, which has infected Wisconsin deer.

"Since 1997, neurologists and pathologists have sent brain tissue and spinal specimens from nearly 3,000 individuals to Case, which confirmed about 1,500 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Pierluigi Gambetti, center director,  said.

"To date, Gambetti said the center has not found any cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from eating contaminated beef, elk or deer meat in the United States. "But we have to keep looking because otherwise we may indeed miss it," he said. "

Having the Cleveland center to call upon may be timely for Japan, which just discovered its 34th case of mad cow disease, and Canada, which turned up its 11th case of BSE since 2003.

The National Prion center was founded in 1997 and is the only one of its kind in the United States.

 

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Canada's new Prime Minister Stephen Harper wanted to put food safety front and center this week, but he probably did not want help from an aged Alberta cow who showed up with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

Here's how it played out.  On Monday, the PM announced the Government of Canada would be taking preventive measures in 2008 to ensure food safety.  On Tuesday, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed the 13-year old beef cow from Alberta did suffer from BSE. The animal's carcass was said to be under CFIA control and no part of it entered either the human or animal food systems.

The discovery will not change Canada's risk status for BSE under World Organization for Animal Health guidelines.  That is because the aged cow was born before Canada's feed ban went into effect in 1997.

The PM meanwhile is promising to "transform the government’s approach to regulating product safety. For the first time in Canada, instead of merely reacting to problems, the regulations will be designed to prevent them."

New measures will include:

Mandatory product recalls when companies fail to act on legitimate safety concerns.

Making importers responsible for the safety of goods they bring into Canada.

Increasing maximum fines under the Food and Drug Act from $5,000 up to current international standards.

Better safety information for consumers and guidance to industries on building safety throughout their supply chains.

Because of the date of the feed ban, Canada expects it will continue to identify a small number of BSE infected animals over the next decade or so.  The detection program has tested about 190,000 of the animals considerd most at risk.  The government says the surveillance results reflect an extremely low incidence of BSE in Canada.

Harper food safety remarks were delivered in Ottawa at a Salvation Army Toy Depot.   The aged Mad Cow was found on a farm near Red Deer, Alberta.

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Utah's ranchers got a stern warning yesterday from the state veterinarian: feeding cattle with pet food could cause Mad Cow Disease.   Dawn House at the Salt Lake Tribune reported  that high hay costs and burned out ranges could tempt some ranchers into using pet food linked to Mad Cow.

Some pet foods contain animal byproducts that if fed to beef or dairy cows pose the threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, says state veterinarian Earl Rogers.
"It is possible that some pet food manufacturers who have heard of the depletion of feed sources in Utah because of drought and fire may offer their scrap material to Utah ranchers," said Rogers. "Both buyers and sellers must know that any pet food containing cattle or other ruminant material cannot be fed to other cattle."
Feeding pet food to cattle, which is banned under state and federal law, could result in the slaughter of an entire herd, he said.

The Tribune went on to report that Utah officials are worried that some ranchers may be tempted to supplement cattle feed with banned material because often pet food is fed to swine and poultry.  Feed for cattle isn't suppose to contain certain ruminant protein from beef.

Mad Cow Disease, known in science as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, has struck 140 people in the United Kingdom and one person in the United States.  That person, however, was probably living in the UK when stricken.

Ranchers in the West this winter are dealing with some of the highest feed prices in history.  Drought and fire have also impacted their own productive capacities for the near future.

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Phyllis Entis isn't buying the single milk substitute theory as the reason why 33 cows in Japan came down with bovine spongiform encephalopathy ten years ago.
The Japanese Agricultural Ministry released an investigative report Friday (12/14/07) that blamed Dutch-produced animal fat powder that was used as a milk substitute for the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease in Hokkaido and Kanto.
Entis, a food safety microbiologist, who writes for eFoodAlertcom says the theory that Japanese cows got Mad Cow Disease from Dutch animal fat is an old one. CNN offered it up in 2001. 
"There are other possible explantions for the Japanese mad cow outbreak, " she wrote. "The     milk substitute was actually processed in Japan, using animal fat from the Netherlands as one ingredient. The powder might have been contaminated by meat and bone meal--a high risk material for mad cow transmission ---during mixing. Another source might have been dried cattle blood, which is sometimes used as an ingredient in milk substitute for feeding cattle"

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We’re coming up on the 5th anniversary of the discovery of Mad Cow disease in the United States. It came here with an unfortunate little cow from Canada that found its way to Washington State.
It ended, for a long time, U.S beef exports. The cost to the U.S. economy? $6 billion a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Somewhat less, according to Kansas State University.

Now U.S. beef is getting back in the overseas pipeline. Last May, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) cleared U.S. beef from animals of any age as a “controlled BSE risk” and therefore safe for export.

BSE, of course, is Bovine spongiform encephalopathy---science’s name for Mad Cow Disease. Other countries with controlled BSE risk include Brazil, Canada, Chile, Switzerland, and Taiwan.
If you are looking for countries with less BSE risk, you might want to look at beef from Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Singapore, and Uruguay. Those countries have “negligible” BSE risk, according to the OIE.

Russia, however, is looking to cut a deal for genuine U.S. beef. With its pockets filled with dollars from selling us oil at near $100 per barrel, Russia wants some pricey cuts of U.S. beef, according to a Dec. 3, 2007 report in the Wall Street Journal. (“From Mad Cow to Cash Cow).

WSJ reported that before it banned U.S. beef, Russians mostly consumed cheaper cuts, livers, hearts, and kidneys. Now, Russia in the market for more expensive beef cuts.

One thing is for certain, however. It will be a long time before U.S. beef makes up for the mistake it made when it brought that little cow over the Canadian border.

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TOKYO (AP) - Japan and the U.S. today (Wednesday) began a 2-day meeting on U.S. beef imports as the U.S. calls for an easing of Japan's tough import restrictions.

Japan only allows imports of U.S. beef from cattle 20 months old or younger, because mad cow disease has not been detected in meat from young cattle.

American representatives are expected to provide Japan with a report showing U.S. beef is safe, regardless of the age of the cattle.

Keep reading here.

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One of Japan's top supermarket chains, Ito-Yokado Co., said Thursday it would resume sales of US beef at stores in Tokyo after taking it off the shelves due to a mad cow disease scare.

Ito-Yokado will start selling US beef at its 20 outlets in and around the capital from Friday following its own investigation into the safety of US beef, it said in a statement.

keep reading here

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Japan and the United States will begin talks this week on easing Tokyo's strict import restrictions on American beef.

The Japanese government announced on Monday that experts from the two countries will meet on Wednesday and Thursday in Tokyo to discuss the safety of American beef. If progress is made this week, further talks will be held between high-level government officials

Keep reading here

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Washington - The World Organization for Animal Health voted Tuesday to grant the U.S. and Canada a favorable "controlled" risk status for mad-cow disease, something the countries hope to use as a new negotiating tool to open up beef markets still closed or partially closed to beef exports.

Glaieul Mamaghani, a spokeswoman for organization, known commonly by the French acronym OIE, said the vote was "unanimous" by the organization's members for both the U.S. and Canada.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a prepared statement: "We will use this international validation to urge our trading partners to reopen export markets to the full spectrum of U.S. cattle and beef products."

Most major beef-importing countries banned U.S. beef in December 2003 after the first case of mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was discovered here. The disease can be transmitted to humans by eating tainted meat. Barriers to U.S. beef have loosened or been removed since then as the U.S. implemented new surveillance and food-safety measures, but countries such as Japan and South Korea still maintain costly restrictions on U.S. exports that the U.S. would like to see removed.

Keep reading here

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CALGARY (CP) - Canada's mad cow protection measures have earned the second-highest safety designation from the world's leading animal health organization, a stamp which the cattle industry hopes will translate into more exports.

"It's a very significant step," Hugh Lynch-Staunton, president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, said Tuesday after the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health officially categorized Canada as a controlled-risk country for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

"It gives an independent, scientific assessment of the BSE situtation in Canada," he said.

keep reading here

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South Korea and the United States agreed Friday to discuss bone-in beef and other import quarantine issues after a world animal health organization's general assembly slated for late May. The decision was reached in a two-day-long beef technical consultation meeting in Seoul. No exact date for the meeting has been set, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said.

The World Organization for Animal Health is to convene a meeting of its members in Paris on May 20-25. It is expected to give the United States a mad cow disease "controlled risk" classification that technically allows the country to export beef without limitations, reports Yonhap News.

Keep reading here.

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Short elements within a prion protein's sequence can cause it to activate and even cross the species barrier to spread neurodegenerative disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to humans

Prions, the maddening, infectious proteins, and the diseases they trigger, such as the fatal neurodegenerative disorder in humans, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—as well as its bovine counterpart, mad cow disease—have baffled scientists for decades. Although researchers know what they are (abnormally folded proteins) and the illnesses that they cause, how they form and multiply has remained elusive.

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VICTORIA – The discovery of a dairy cow infected with mad cow disease has prompted the quarantine of a Surrey-area farm.

Agriculture Minister Pat Bell said the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) was discovered last week, and confirmed with additional test results revealed Wednesday. It's the second case for B.C., following the discovery of an infected cow on a Chilliwack-area farm in April 2006.

BSE is not transmitted from one animal to another, but rather through feed containing protein from an infected animal. The use of animal proteins in feed was banned in 1998, following a widespread outbreak of the illness in cattle in the United Kingdom.

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SEOUL, April 19 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's import of beef from the United States is highly likely to resume next week, three years and five months after imports were originally banned over a mad cow disease scare, agricultural officials said Thursday.

"It was confirmed that the U.S. authorities are scheduled to issue a quarantine certificate for the export of 10 tons of beef around tomorrow," said an official at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. "If things go as scheduled, the beef shipment will arrive in South Korea by plane around Monday."
South Korea's quarantine authorities said they plan to conduct an X-ray inspection to see if the shipment is of boneless beef from cattle under 30 months old, a condition for imports agreed upon between the two countries in January 2006.

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The United States Administration is stepping up pressure on Japan to ease age restrictions on its beef.

The move comes ahead of an international panel's findings, that the US is largely free of mad cow disease.

US Trade representative's office spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel denies a Japan Times story that the US has asked Tokyo to set a concrete deadline to fully reopen its market - now largely controlled by Australia.

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WHEAT RIDGE, CO -- (MARKET WIRE) -- April 16, 2007 -- GeneThera, Inc. (OTCBB: GTHA) announced today it has begun preliminary talks with ranchers to test their cattle for the Mad Cow disease.

Commenting on the talks Dr. Tony Milici stated, "These preliminary talks are an important first step to establish our commercial platform once private companies will be allowed to test for Mad Cow disease in the US. We believe that allowing private companies to test for Mad Cow will have a very positive impact on the US beef industry domestically and internationally."

The USDA has previously not allowed private companies to test their cattle for Mad Cow. However, a federal judge ruled that the federal government must allow meatpackers to test their animals for Mad Cow Disease. The judge put his order on hold until the government can appeal. If the government does not appeal by June 1, 2007, he stated the ruling would take effect.

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PULLMAN, Wash. The only mad cow testing laboratory in the Pacific Northwest will remain open for at least another six months, but officials insist it isn't because of increased fears of the chronic brain-wasting disease in the region.

The U-S Department of Agriculture says it extended the contract with Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine to test for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease.

The USDA has extended the contract through Sept. 30, with the option for further extensions.

The lab had been closed March first after USDA reduced its mad cow testing program nationwide.

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LJUBLJANA (Reuters) - Slovenia on Monday confirmed a new case of mad cow disease in a six-year-old animal slaughtered last week.

The Veterinary Administration said last week it suspected bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the cow at a farm near the city of Celje, some 70 km (43.5 miles) east of the capital Ljubljana.

"BSE in the cow was confirmed. This is the eighth case of BSE in Slovenia," the administration said in a statement.

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WASHINGTON - The federal government must allow meatpackers to test their animals for mad cow disease, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, a meatpacker based in Arkansas City, Kan., wants to test all of its cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat the tainted beef. Larger meat companies feared that move because if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and administers it to less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows. The department threatened Creekstone with prosecution if it tested all its animals.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the government does not have the authority to regulate the test. Robertson put his order on hold until the government can appeal. If the government does not appeal by June 1, he said the ruling would take effect.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

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The threat of a foreign animal disease infecting the livestock herds of east central Wisconsin is certainly not keeping anyone I know awake at night.

Diseases like Foot and Mouth disease or hog cholera are someone else's worry — after all, they are a continent away.

Even Mad Cow disease only affected Wisconsin producers indirectly by reducing the slaughter price of cattle and eliminating down cow kill facilities. But the threat is very real, and disease control experts' main focus is on when a foreign animal disease will strike, not if it will strike.

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TOKYO, March 23 (Reuters) - Japan has asked the U.S. Agriculture Department to remove a Tyson Foods Inc. (TSN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) facility in Nebraska from a list of suppliers eligible to ship beef to Japan after it failed to supply proper documents.

Japan suspended imports from the facility operated by Tyson, the largest U.S. meat firm, in February after it exported a cargo to Japan that did not include documents providing the age of the cattle.

In a statement issued late on Thursday, Japan's farm and health ministries said they decided to take the step after studying a USDA report on the incident.

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Science Daily — Burying prion-infected carcasses of cattle, deer and other animals in lime may actually enhance the spread of those infectious proteins through soil, a new study suggests. Placing quicklime on carcasses once was thought to be the best way to foster quick decay of bodies and to prevent the spread of disease.

The study is scheduled for the April 15 issue of ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

In the study, Joel A. Pedersen and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin cite the need for safe methods of disposing of prion-infected carcasses, noting that prions can resist harsh conditions such as strong disinfectants and dry-heat temperatures of 1,100°F that destroy other disease-causing agents and that prions can remain infectious in the soil for at least three years. Pedersen and colleagues investigated the effect of different conditions (pH, salinity) on the adsorption, or attachment, of prions to sand particles.

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According to Canadian Press reports -- Alberta's latest case of mad cow disease involved a six-and-a-half year-old animal that was born and raised on the same farm where it died.  It's the province's ninth case overall and it was confirmed last month.  The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has issued a news release on the case, explaining that its investigation is nearing completion.

The release says the agency has directed "all necessary resources'' toward the tracing of cattle that may have been exposed to the same feed during the early part of their lives.  The bull was born in 2000 and died in early February.  It was detected as an "animal of interest'' through a national farm surveillance program.  Provincial and federal tests then confirmed it had BSE.  A ban on using cattle remains in feed in Canada went into effect in 1997 to guard against the spread of the disease.  The food inspection agency has said the animal did not enter the food chain.

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According to Consumer Reports:

Consumers who want to eat beef can limit their risk for mad cow disease by avoiding the foods most likely to carry it: brains and processed beef products that may contain nervous-system tissue, such as hamburger, hotdogs, and sausage. Organic, biodynamic, or 100 percent grass-fed beef carries the least risk, since the cattle are not fed any animal remains. Steak and hamburger ground while you watch are also lower risk.

The USDA should test all cattle over 20 months old and require testing for any animals shipped to the U.S. from countries with mad cow disease. Until these safeguards are in place, the USDA should not weaken import regulations on Canadian cattle.
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SEOUL, Feb. 28 (Yonhap) -- South Korea is ready to tackle renewed beef market liberalization pressure after the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) announces U.S. mad cow disease risk levels in May, a senior official said Wednesday.

In a news conference, Vice Agriculture Minister Park Hae-sang said Seoul set up a special task force earlier in the month to examine the fallout from the OIE's planned announcement of the mad cow disease risk status for American beef.

"The team is closely watching the latest developments and examining in detail how Seoul can scientifically respond to demands by Washington for broader market liberalization," the official said.

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Health authorities believe they have detected Portugal’s second case of vCJD - the fatal brain disorder believed to be contracted by eating meat contaminated with mad cow disease.

Laboratory tests indicated a young woman had contracted the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, Portugal’s general health directorate said in a brief statement on its website.

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Downes-O'Neill dairy economist Bill Brooks said we're producing more cheese, butter and nonfat dry milk than needed, now that the Super Bowl is behind us and we've finished up our extended holiday season. While there is concern where milk production will be later this year, he believes the recent cattle report allayed some of those fears and stocks are building, which is causing downward pressure on prices. He doesn't expect a great deal more price slippage, nothing like last year's spring price fall.

He looks for January milk production to show a similar increase to November and December, up about 2.5 percent from a year ago. The weather in California was apparently very good, according to Brooks, and temperatures weren't bad for animals. They weren't good for fruits and vegetables, he said, but were good for cows, so "we're probably looking at a decent production level out there and that will allow us to see continued milk production growth at an increasing rate similar to what we have seen ever since the heat wave there last summer."

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A number of brain diseases caused by mutant prion proteins, such as mad cow disease or scrapie in sheep, might be averted if normal prion proteins can be depleted, researchers report.

Prion disease, which includes the human form of mad cow disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is thought to be caused when prion protein in the brain becomes misfolded, and this causes normal prion protein to follow suit. The accumulation of mutant prions is toxic to brain cells, eventually turning the brain to mush.

Now UK researchers report that in mice that have been infected with disease-related prions, early depletion of naturally occurring normal prion protein in neurons leads to repair of sponge-like brain damage.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A day after Canada announced its ninth case of mad cow disease, the United States on Thursday said beef trade with its northern neighbor would be unaffected with regulators promising to press ahead with a draft rule to allow older Canadian cattle back in the country.

"Based on what is known at this time, I would not expect this Canadian detection to impact our trade with Canada," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

Tests released on Wednesday confirmed mad cow disease in a mature bull in Alberta. A senior veterinary official with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said the animal appears to have been born in 2000. No meat from the animal entered the food chain.

Canada has reported nine cases of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), in its domestic herd since May 2003. All the animals are believed to have contracted the disease from contaminated feed, a primary way mad cow can spread.

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Tests have confirmed mad cow disease in a mature bull in Alberta, but none of the animal entered the food chain, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said on Wednesday.

"The animal's carcass is under CFIA control, and no part of it entered the human food or animal feed systems," the agency said in a statement.

The agency did not say how old the animal was, but said that based on preliminary information it was "within the age range" of other Canadian cattle found to have have been infected with the disease.

"This signifies that the animal was exposed to a very small amount of infective material, most likely during its first year of life," CFIA said in a statement.

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SCHLIEREN, Switzerland, Feb. 5 (UPI) -- Swiss firm Alicon said Monday it detected prion proteins in cow milk, raising the possibility mad cow disease could be transmitted via milk.

The findings mark the first time prions have been found in homogenized and pasteurized milk from supermarket shelves. Alicon said it was not clear if the prions were the normal, harmless variety or the abnormal type associated with mad cow disease and related disorders.

"In the case of the prion proteins detected, it is highly likely that they were of the normal variety posing no danger to health," the company said in a statement. "However, the occurrence of the normal variety could mean that the milk of cows already infected with (mad cow disease) also contains infectious prion proteins (i.e., prions) of the disease-causing variety."

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JAPAN'S top health authority said today it confirmed the country's 32nd case of mad cow disease, Xinhua news agency reported.

A 5 and a half year old female cow tested positive for mad cow disease last week in northern Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said today.

The body and organs of the cow have been burned.

This is the 32nd case of confirmed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Japan, according to the ministry.

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Scientists have reversed "mad cow disease" symptoms in mice, raising hopes of similar treatments for humans.

The Medical Research Council (MRC) team managed to rid the rodents of memory and behavioural problems associated with the cattle disease BSE and its human equivalent, variant CJD.

VCJD and other "spongiform encephalopathy" diseases are associated with rogue prion proteins in the brain, which change shape and start to accumulate.

Rogue prions appear to cause serious damage to the brain, creating holes and turning it "spongy".

As the misshapen proteins convert more and more normal prions into the mutant form, the disease spreads.

The MRC scientists, led by Dr Giovanna Mallucci, halted this chain reaction of infection by genetically switching off production of normal prion protein.

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Mad cow disease and other related brain disorders may be caused by a virus and not the weird, misshapen proteins, known as prions, that scientists think are responsible, according to a study released Monday.

Researchers reported that they found virus-like particles in mouse nerve cells infected with two brain-wasting diseases similar to mad cow disease, but found no traces of the particles in uninfected cells.

Lead author Dr. Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale University, said the finding suggested that prions in infected brains were the result of a viral infection and not the cause of the disease.

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Researchers have found more evidence that a virus may cause mad cow disease and a related brain disorder in humans, threatening to overturn 25 years of research focusing on malformed proteins called prions.

Nerve cells infected with the human form of mad cow disease contained a virus-sized particle that doesn't appear in uninfected cells, said Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Conn. Cells infected with scrapie, a sheep disorder related to mad cow disease, contained the same germ.

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Researchers have found more evidence that a virus may cause mad cow disease and a related brain disorder in humans, threatening to overturn 25 years of research focusing on malformed proteins called prions.

Nerve cells infected with the human form of mad cow disease contained a virus-sized particle that doesn't appear in uninfected cells, said Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Conn. Cells infected with scrapie, a sheep disorder related to mad cow disease, contained the same germ.

The findings raise the possibility of vaccines against the diseases and challenge research showing the disorders are spread by prions, abnormal proteins that have also been detected in the brains of infected humans and animals. Few other scientists have questioned the research performed by Stanley Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco since he won the Nobel Prize in 1997, Manuelidis said.

"If you don't look for something, you're not going to find it," she said in a telephone interview. "If everyone believes the world is flat, no one will go out and try go find the end."

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Science Daily — A single protein plays a major role in deadly prion diseases by smashing up clusters of these infectious proteins, creating the “seeds” that allow fatal brain illnesses to quickly spread, new Brown University research shows.

The findings are exciting, researchers say, because they might reveal a way to control the spread of prions through drug intervention. If a drug could be made that inhibits this fragmentation process, it could substantially slow the spread of prions, which cause mad cow disease and scrapie in animals and, in rare cases, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease and kuru in humans.

Because similar protein replication occurs in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, such a drug could also slow progression of these diseases as well.

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Do genes affect bovine spongiform encephalopathy--also known as BSE, or "mad cow" disease? Are some cattle more susceptible than others?


To address these and other questions, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, Neb., have sequenced the bovine prion gene (PRNP) in 192 cattle that represent 16 beef and five dairy breeds common in the United States.

This work, partially funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, is expanding the understanding of how the disease works.

BSE is a fatal neurological disorder characterized by prions--proteins that occur naturally in mammals--that fold irregularly. Molecular biologist Mike Clawson and his Clay Center colleagues are examining PRNP variation in order to learn if and how prions correlate with BSE susceptibility

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The Centers for Disease Control and state health workers are trying to figure out if a man in Melbourne has a brain disorder, or the human form of mad cow disease.

Gary Dinges, 56, has been in a coma at Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne for more than a week.

Health workers say it's possible he has mad cow disease, however they say it's unlikely because he didn't travel to high risk areas where he could have gotten the disease.

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Now your steak comes with a tattoo of the naked woman silhouette and the Grim Reaper

Somark Innovations, a small firm based out of St. Loius, successfully tested a new system of cattle branding using radio frequency identification, or RFID. The company already tested this new method on cows, cats and rats and are able to identify an animal from almost 4 feet away.

This "tattoo" uses a special RFID ink that can be invisible or colored. The "tattoo" is injected by a set of needles in a dot shape patterns which change with each injection. The tags can be read through fur and hair and have been biocompatibly tested so even humans can ingest the ink.

According to Somark, the initial use of the technology is to track cattle to "mitigate export trade loss scares from Mad Cow Disease". With this being their primary target, their secondary market includes pets, prime cuts of meat, and possibly military soldiers.

Ramos Mays, Chief Scientist on the project, says he is excited with the produced results. “This is a true proof-of-principle and mitigates most of the technological risk. This proves the ability to create a synthetic biometric or fake fingerprint with Biocompatible Chipless RFID Ink and read it through hair.”

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Mad Cow Disease, also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), affects the central nervous system of the cows. The brain loses control and the animal ultimately dies. Prion proteins are believed to cause the disease.

A mad cow’s milk may contain these prion proteins and the disease might be transmitted from the mad cow to humans who happen to drink its milk, according to a new study.

It has been proved by earlier studies that body fluids such as blood may carry these infectious proteins. But it was not clear whether milk could carry prions, until the study.

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Despite a recent rash of food-borne illnesses in the U.S., and heightened concerns about food safety in general, the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service wants to lift the ban on imports from Canada.

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said the proposal protects U.S. consumers but implements "science-based trade relations with countries that have appropriate safeguards in place to prevent BSE."

"We previously recognized Canada's comprehensive set of safeguards and we have now completed a risk assessment confirming that additional animals and products can be safely traded," Johanns said. "Our approach is consistent with science-based international guidelines."

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1. Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page
Contains thousands of articles on mad cow and other diseases.
www.mad-cow.org

2. Food and Drug Administration Mad Cow Information
Web site offers various resources on mad cow disease including a general background, consumer information, recent FDA actions, veterinarian information
www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/bse.html

3. Mad Cow Disease: Is the USDA covering up an Epidemic?
Information from the Organic Consumers' Association related to mad cow/deer/pig/elk disease in the USA.
www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm

4. New mad cow woes - new worries about mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, chronic wasting disease in Europe and United States.
www.whyfiles.org/012mad_cow

5. NOVA Online | The Brain Eater - About the scientific research that linked "mad cow disease" to a related brain disease in humans.
www.pbs.org/nova/madcow

6. Howstuffworks "How Mad Cow Disease Works"
Mad cow disease is in the news again, with tests confirming the second case in the United States since December 2003.
www.science.howstuffworks.com/mad-cow-disease.htm

7. www.madcowblog.com - News on Mad Cow.

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SASKATCHEWAN (CBC) - Canadian farmers could soon be shipping older cattle across the border, thanks to the U.S. government's proposal to lift some of the last remaining import bans in place since the 2003 mad cow outbreak.

The U.S. Agriculture Department announced Thursday that it is looking to lift bans on live cattle born on or after March 1, 1999. The government also wants to allow bovine blood and blood products, small intestines and casings to cross the border.

In addition, the government is bringing back plans to allow imports of meat and meat products from animals of any age. These plans were introduced in January 2005, but were delayed.

The proposed changes are under review until March 12. The U.S. government is asking its citizens to provide feedback.

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WASHINGTON – The Bush administration said Thursday it will seek to increase cattle and beef imports from Canada despite questions about Canadian safeguards against mad cow disease.

Canada discovered five new cases of the disease last year. One in particular was disturbing because the cow was born years after Canada adopted safeguards to keep the disease from spreading.

The United States banned Canadian cattle and beef after Canada found its first case of mad cow disease in May 2003. Later that year, an imported Canadian cow in Washington state became the first U.S. case of mad cow disease.

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Scientists have genetically engineered a dozen cows to be free from the proteins that cause mad cow disease, a breakthrough that may make the animals immune to the brain-wasting disease.

An international team of researchers from the U.S. and Japan reported Sunday that they had "knocked out" the gene responsible for making the proteins, called prions. The disease didn't take hold when brain tissue from two of the genetically engineered cows was exposed to bad prions in the laboratory, they said.

Experts said the work may offer another layer of security to people concerned about eating infected beef, although though any food derived from genetically engineered animals must first be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

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WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say they have developed cattle that may be biologically incapable of getting mad cow disease, the Washington Post reported.

As a result of genetic engineering, the animals lack a gene that is crucial to the progression of the disease. The cattle were not designed for use as food -- rather, they were developed so human pharmaceuticals can be made in their blood without the risk that the products might get contaminated by the infectious agent that causes mad cow, the newspaper said.

The agent -- a protein known as a prion -- can cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which can be fatal to humans.

Scientists said the animals will facilitate studies of prions, and similar techniques might be used in subsequent development of animals with more nutritious meats. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said it will set more stringent standards for engineered food animals than it recently set for clones.

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A NEW blood filter device could in future prevent people being infected with the human form of mad cow disease through transfusions, it was revealed yesterday.

The technique can effectively remove the rogue prion proteins responsible for transmitting brain diseases such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

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LONDON (Reuters) - Tests on hamsters may have revealed a way to block the transmission through blood transfusions of the human form of mad cow disease, a study in the medical journal the Lancet said on Friday.

The discovery is important because there is no way of testing blood for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and people can carry the infection for decades without showing symptoms.

Three people have died in Britain after receiving infected transfusions.

"This is a significant breakthrough in our quest to prevent the transmission of the prion responsible for vCJD," said Pierre Laurin, president of Montreal-based ProMetic, one of the companies in a joint venture which developed the resin that filters vCJD.

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OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's most recent case of mad cow disease was most likely caused by contaminated feed, a senior expert at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency told Reuters on Tuesday.

An official report into the country's eighth case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) since May 2003 said investigators had been unable to trace the animal's farm of origin and therefore could not probe what feed it had eaten.

The animal in question -- a commercial beef cow between eight and 10 years old -- died on August 9 on a farm in northern Alberta.

George Luterbach, a senior veterinarian at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said the animal had been born at around the time when Ottawa banned cattle feed containing rendered protein from cattle and other ruminants.

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Japanese restaurants are feeling a serious supply crunch, according to reports from the Associated Press. The restaurants are set to urge the government to ease restriction on U.S. beef imports, officials said Tuesday.

Although Tokyo eased a 2 ½ year blanket ban on U.S. beef in July, U.S. beef has only trickled into the country because of lingering trade restrictions caused by mad cow fears.

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WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Despite the return of U.S. beef to some foreign markets after mad-cow disease was found in the U.S. three years ago, many borders remain closed, and the Bush administration is hoping an international beef safety status will shake loose remaining barriers.

U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Trade Representative negotiators are counting on the weight of the approval of the World Organization for Animal Health, known commonly by the French acronym OIE, behind them come May. They are letting foreign governments know that after May they won’t just be turning away U.S. beef, they’ll be spurning international sanction.

Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview that the OIE offers third-party authority on what beef products can or cannot be traded safely when the producer country has found mad-cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in its herds.

“We want to have discussions based on the science and having a science-based OIE categorization of the U.S. bolsters significantly our position in having those discussions,“ DeHaven said.

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The Virginia Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced the recent confirmation of a vCJD case in a U.S. resident. This latest case occurred in a young adult who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and has lived in the United States since late 2005. The patient occasionally stayed in the United States for up to 3 months at a time since 2001 and there was a shorter visit in 1989.

In late November 2006, the Clinical Prion Research Team at the University of California San Francisco Memory and Aging Center confirmed the vCJD clinical diagnosis by pathologic study of adenoid and brain biopsy tissues. The two previously reported vCJD case-patients in U.S. residents were each born and raised in the United Kingdom (U.K.), where they were believed to have been infected by the agent responsible for their disease. There is strong scientific evidence that the agent causing vCJD is the same agent that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease).

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MIDDLEBORO — While local farmers object to the cost of the program, state officials say the pending federal tracking system for farms is meant to prevent the outbreak of disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will soon require the state to turn over information on all registered farms, unless farmers lodge a complaint with Department of Agriculture Resources.

Michael A. Cahill, coordinator of the Bureau of Animal Health for the Department of Agricultural Resources, said mad cow disease is already in the United States. The disease has been found in animals three times since 2003, and the USDA has spent $85 million on the National Animal Identification System to prevent the disease from spreading.

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Scientists believe they could slow the progress of "mad cow disease" by genetically "revamping" the brain.

Tests in mice with scrapie - a disease similar to CJD in humans and BSE in cattle - showed the life-extending treatment works.

The method used by the German team involves molecules called special RNAs (siRNAs), Journal of Clinical Investigation reports.

These shut down the production of proteins that go awry in prion disease.

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Washington, Dec 2 (ANI): In a new study boffins at the University of Bonn, Germany have found a new target, they hope can cure Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.

The study, led by Alexander Pfeifer was conducted on a mouse model.

BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which is a related disease in humans that can occur spontaneously, be inherited, or be acquired (in some cases probably from cows with BSE) are fatal neurodegenerative diseases.

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Silencing the genes that produce prion proteins can dramatically slow the progression of mad cow disease, suggests a new study in mice.

Researchers say that the approach might one day work to treat human prion illnesses, such as variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD).

People can contract vCJD after eating meat contaminated with mad cow disease. Though the illness is extremely rare, it can lead to schizophrenia-like psychosis and typically causes death within a year of diagnosis.

While doctors can prescribe drugs to temporarily treat some of the symptoms of prion disease, which include seizures, they still have no way to stop the progression of the illness.

Alexander Pfeifer at the University of Bonn in Germany, and colleagues, explored the possibility of fighting prion disease in mice using a method of gene silencing known as RNA interference (RNAi).


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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After a four-month pause to re-examine Canada's safeguards against mad cow disease, the United States may open the door to imports of older cattle and beef from its northern neighbor, U.S. and Canadian officials said on Tuesday.

A U.S. Agriculture Department spokesman confirmed the White House budget office was reviewing a proposed rule to allow imports of cattle over 30 months of age and beef from Canada. If approved by the White House, it would be open for public comment, one of the last steps before taking effect.

Canada said the White House review "indicates that normalizing trade remains a priority and a shared objective of our two governments." Canada is the U.S.' largest trading partner.

Currently, Canadian ranchers can send cattle under 30 months of age to the U.S. for slaughter and imports are allowed of beef from the younger cattle.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Patients with hemophilia and other blood-clotting disorders face an uncertain though probably very low risk of contracting the human form of mad cow disease from medicines made using donated plasma, health officials said Monday.


There are no known cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, as the human form of the disease is known, in patients who have received human plasma derivatives, the Food and Drug Administration said. But there have been three cases, all in the United Kingdom, of people developing the disease after they had received red blood cells from infected donors.

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PRAGUE, Czech Republic: A new case of mad cow disease has been reported in the Czech Republic, bringing the country's total to 25, an official said Monday.

A 6-year-old cow from a farm in Semily, 100 kilometer (62 miles) northeast of Prague, tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, said Josef Duben, a spokesman for the state veterinary authority.

The Czech Republic's first case of BSE was reported in June 2001. Over one million cows have been tested in the country for the disease since early 2001.

From http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/27/europe/EU_GEN_Czech_Mad_Cow.php

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Spain hopes to eliminate mad cow disease from the country by 2010, the country's top veterinary officer announced last Friday.

With 668 cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, known popularly as Mad Cow Disease, reported in the country since 2000, Spain is currently ranked No. 4 in terms of BSE "prevalence" in Europe, said Juan Jose Badiola, president of the College of Veterinarians.

The vet added that although since 2003 the number of cases had been dropping, with only 55 reported so far this year that he wants it to be "totally eradicated in four or five years."

A third of incidences of BSE in Spain occur in the rainy lush pastures of Galicia, in the northwest.

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REGINA — For the first time since mad cow disease was found in Canada, cattle from the United States will be shown this week at the country's largest agricultural marketplace.

Two U.S. producers are bringing animals across the border for the Canadian Western Agribition in Regina.

Two exhibitors out of more than 400 may not sound like much, said Agribition general manager Leon Brinn, but it's still significant.

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A Dutch teenager had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human variant of mad cow disease, the local Expatica news service reported on Thursday.

The 16-year-old schoolboy was admitted to hospital in July and died at the end of October, the report said.

But the Health Ministry refused to confirm the report due to its agreements with the victim's family, the report added.

It remains unknown how the boy contracted the disease.

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Japan's Agriculture Ministry said Monday it confirmed the country's 30th case of mad cow disease.

Tests on the 5-year-old dairy cow performed at the National Institute of Animal Health confirmed that the cow, which died at a ranch on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, was infected with the fatal illness.

The animal will be destroyed and incinerated so its parts will not be circulated for consumption or used as feed, the ministry said.

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A MAD cow scare cleared tons of beef from the shelves of two supermarket chains last night.

Asda and the Co-op acted after a slaughtered cow was passed fit without being tested for BSE - the disease that crippled the British beef industry in the 1990s. Customers who bought steak, mince and joints from more than 2,000 stores in the UK in the last fortnight were warned not to eat the meat and to return it.

The recall was ordered after meat from an untested cow over 54 months old was sold to the supermarkets, breaking safety rules that demand screening for all animals over 30 months.

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SEOUL, South Korea — The first shipment of U.S. beef in nearly three years arrived in South Korea on Monday after the country lifted an import ban triggered by fears of mad cow disease, the Agriculture Ministry said.

The nine-ton shipment of American beef was processed at a Kansas slaughterhouse and arrived on a Monday morning flight, said Lee Sang-kil, a director-general at the ministry.

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WOULD you want to know if you were carrying human mad cow disease? Maybe not, but what if you'd given blood and maybe passed vCJD on to other people. Should they be tested?

No routine test is available yet, but that hasn't stopped the UK Health Protection Agency thrashing out the ethical issues before one comes along. On 19 October it launched a public consultation to gauge how people feel about the prospect of testing.

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MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(CCNMatthews - Oct. 25, 2006) - BSafE Innovations Inc. (BSafE), a joint venture company owned by ProMetic Life Sciences Inc. (TSX:PLI) and Top Meadow Farms, dedicated to veterinary applications of prion research, is delighted to announce preliminary findings from its most recent testing.

BSafE has in-licensed some veterinary applications of proprietary technologies developed by Pathogen Removal and Diagnostic Technologies Inc. ("PRDT"), a joint venture between the American Red Cross and ProMetic Life Sciences Inc. (ProMetic).

BSafE relies on the same PRDT platform technology and core competency used to develop the first human prion blood filter which just received European regulatory approval and which will be launched on a commercial scale by MacoPharma over the coming months.

Encouraged by the performance of the technology with human prions, PRDT scientists have been working on behalf of BSafE to demonstrate that the technology can be adapted to target specifically the bovine form of prions. Recent experiments have confirmed the ability of the proprietary technology to greatly enhance the sensitivity of post mortem testing for Mad Cow Disease.

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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will inspect about 910 tons of U.S. beef that has been stored in Japanese warehouses for more than eight months because of worries about mad cow disease, and will allow it to be sold if it meets Japan's safety requirements

Inspections will begin on Friday and will take about a month, a Health Ministry official said on Wednesday.

The ministry will ask importers of the product to open all the boxes containing the beef to see if they include banned material or meat from old cattle, he said.

The farm and health ministries will also conduct inspections of the beef separately for any violations of safety requirements, he added.

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A case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease has been discovered in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania, the Federal Control Service for Consumer Rights said.
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"A case of mad cow disease was detected in the town of Razdolnoye in the Nesterovski region," near the Lithuanian border, it said in a press release.
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"The two people who had contact with the animal have received vaccinations," it added, saying that authorities are "taking measures designed to eliminate the source of the disease."

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NSW health authorities are conducting tests to confirm if a hospital patient died as the result of a brain disease that may have infected other patients.

Doctors at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle began to suspect on Tuesday that a middle-aged man who died on Wednesday had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - the human form of mad cow disease.

The man was admitted to hospital 10 weeks ago, suffering neurological symptoms including severe headaches and involuntary muscle movements, and underwent several operations.

Hunter New England Health director of clinical operations, Nigel Lyons, said the likelihood that the patient had CJD was "very remote".

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www.todayonline.com/articles/147812.asp

A nine-year-old cow in eastern France has tested positive for mad cow disease, the sixth case detected in the country this year, officials have said.

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The animal was tested after slaughter in September. It had been raised in Gresin, in the Savoie region.

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The number of French cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has been declining steadily, from a peak of 274 in 2001 to 31 last year.

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France has recorded a total of 15 cases of the human form of the disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, since it first appeared in 1996.

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There were more than 150 such human cases in Britain, which was at the epicentre of the mad cow phenomenon. — AFP

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NEW YORK, Oct. 10, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- Genesis Bioventures, Inc. (GBI) (OTCBB:GBIW) announced today that Prion Developmental Laboratories ("PDL"), its minority owned subsidiary company, entered into a contract manufacturing agreement with InBios International, Inc. ("InBios"), a leading biotechnology company in Seattle, Washington, to manufacture PDL's Mad Cow Disease ("BSE") and other TSE Rapid Diagnostic Tests.

Under the terms of the agreement InBios will manufacture PDL's BSE Rapid Diagnostic Tests to PDL's design specifications and quality control acceptance criteria. InBios will validate the manufactured BSE Rapid Assay tests meet or exceed PDL's performance criteria. Immediately following manufacture validation InBios will produce BSE Rapid Diagnostic Tests for PDL's customer evaluations, regulatory approvals, and customer sales.

"This is an important step in our commercialization of PDL's BSE Rapid Assay, and completes our search with PDL to identify a top manufacturing company to produce our quality product for us," said Douglas C. Lane, CEO and President of Genesis Bioventures. "InBios is an outstanding biotechnology company comprised of experienced scientists, professionals and executives. They were selected because of their experience and ability to manufacture the diagnostic test strips and because of their experience with the FDA and USDA in test approval. With this manufacturing agreement in place we are on track to initiate sales in 2007 under our worldwide exclusive distribution and sales license with PDL."

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26.sep.06

Associated Press

TOKYO -- A cow in northern Japan is suspected of having the country's 29th case of mad cow disease, an official said Tuesday.

Preliminary tests on the animal at the Ishikari Livestock Hygiene Service Center in Hokkaido prefecture on Japan's northernmost main island were positive, said Hokkaido official Hiroyuki Takeuchi. Final test results could be known by the end of this week, he said.

The cow died at a ranch and was brought to the hygiene center for initial testing.

To date, Japan has confirmed 28 animals infected with the fatal illness -- known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE -- since the first case in Japan was defected in 2001. Since then, Tokyo has begun taking steps to check every cow that is slaughtered or dies at ranches before it enters the food supply.

Japan banned imports of American beef in December 2003 after the first case of mad cow disease in the United States. That ban was eased in December 2005, but was re-imposed after prohibited spinal bones were found in a shipment of veal in January.

In July, Japan eased the ban, with U.S. beef hitting some retailers' shelves the following month. Earlier this month, Yoshinoya D&C Co., a major Japanese fast-food chain, returned a popular rice dish topped with U.S. beef that was off the menu for more than two years due to mad cow scares.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has no plans to permanently scrap a rule that would allow the import of older cattle from Canada after an Alberta cow was found to have contracted mad cow disease from contaminated feed, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said on Wednesday. "I don't see anything that indicates to me that this would stop that rule dead in its tracks, prohibit it from going forward," Johanns told reporters after meeting with Canadian Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl in Washington. USDA halted work on a proposal in July that would have allowed for imports of cattle over 30 months of age after a 50-year old Canadian cow was found with the fatal disease. Continue Reading...

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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), referred to as "mad cow disease," is a chronic degenerative nervous system disease affecting cattle. The disease was first diagnosed in 1986 in Great Britain. BSE is so named because of the spongy appearance of the brain tissue of infected cattle when sections are examined under a microscope.

Affected animals may display changes in temperament, such as nervousness or aggression, abnormal posture and difficulty in rising, decreased milk production, or loss of body weight despite continued appetite. Affected cattle die or are killed.

The incubation period (the time from when an animal becomes infected until it first shows signs of disease) is from 2 to 8 years. Following the onset of clinical signs, the animal's condition deteriorates until it dies. This process usually takes from 2 weeks to 6 months.

Currently, there is no test to detect the disease in a live animal; veterinary pathologists confirm BSE by postmortem microscopic examination of brain tissue or by the detection of the abnormal form of the prion protein.

Since November 1986, over 178,000 head of cattle have been diagnosed with BSE in Great Britain. The epidemic peaked in January 1993 at approximately 1,000 new cases reported per week. Agricultural officials in Great Britain have taken a series of actions to eradicate BSE, including making BSE a notifiable disease, prohibiting the inclusion of mammalian meat-and-bone meal in feed for all food-producing animals, prohibiting the inclusion of animals more than 30 months of age in the animal and human food chains, and destroying all animals showing signs of BSE and other animals at high risk of developing the disease.

The identification in 2003 of a BSE case in Canada, and the subsequent identification later that year of a BSE case in the United States that had been imported from Canada led to the concern that indigenous transmission of BSE may be occurring in North America. In response, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) implemented additional safeguards to minimize the risk for human exposure to BSE and on July 1, 2004, initiated a 12- to 18-month-long intensive testing program for BSE among cattle at relatively high risk for the disease (e.g., non-ambulatory cattle). A US-bred cow was found to be BSE-positive in June 2005 in Texas.

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This is a section of a human brain showing spongiform pathology characteristic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

This is a picture of a "downer cow" with neurologic disease from bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow").

This is a picture of an 18 year old victim of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD).

Prion diseases are a group of rare, brain disorders which occur both in humans and certain animals. They first came to public attention in the mid 1980s in the form of the BSE epidemic in the United Kingdom. BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is a prion disease in cattle. Tissue from infected animals may have contaminated cattle feed, leading to the silent spread of the BSE epidemic. There is also a theory that BSE came from feed contaminated with scrapie, the long established sheep prion disease. Inevitably, concern over whether BSE could pass to humans mounted.

In humans the best known of the prion diseases is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), which reportedly affects around one person per million per year. In the United States this translates to 250-300 new cases per year. It is well known that CJD is very difficult to diagnose leading to speculation that the one case per million report may be incorrect. Most of the cases are "classical" or "sporadic" CJD (sCJD), occurring for no, as yet, known reason. The sporadic form accounts for approximately 85% of the cases, the familial form approximately 15%. There have also been a few cases which have occurred from contamination via medical procedures; this type is known as iatrogenic or Acquired CJD. Finally over the last few years, another type of Acquired CJD called variant (vCJD) has been identified in young people. vCJD has been linked to ingestion of beef tainted with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), most cases have occurred in the United Kingdom

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The Associated Press/
By MARCUS KABEL
AP Business Writer

SEP. 8 4:07 P.M. ET Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat processor, hopes to resume beef sales to South Korea now that the Asian nation has finalized plans to lift a 2003 ban imposed over mad cow disease fears.

South Korea had been Tyson's third-largest foreign beef market.

South Korea on Friday approved resuming imports of U.S. beef after repeated delays in implementing an earlier decision to lift the ban.

"We're encouraged by South Korea's decision to resume U.S. beef imports," said Gary Mickelson, a spokesman for Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson.

"While we hope to begin sending beef there soon, we must first receive additional clarification from USDA on the requirements involved," Mickelson said in a reference to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

South Korea's Agriculture Ministry said 36 U.S. slaughterhouses designated to handle meat for export to South Korea met required safety measures, clearing the last hurdle to the resumption of imports.

South Korea will notify the slaughterhouses of the approval Monday, and the beef can start to be sold in the South Korean market some 25 days later, the ministry said in a statement.

Tyson's beef plants are among those 36 slaughterhouses, Mickelson said. The company currently operates nine U.S. beef plants, although it recently announced that one plant in Boise, Idaho, will be closed this fall.

South Korea shut its doors to U.S. beef imports in December 2003 after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease.

Scientists believe the illness -- formally called bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- spreads when farmers feed cattle recycled meat and bones from infected animals, and it is linked to a rare, fatal human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

In July, Japan lifted its own ban on American beef. Before the ban, Japan was a top destination for U.S. beef, importing $1.4 billion worth a year.

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South Korea to Lift a 2003 Ban on U.S. Beef Imports Imposed Because of Mad Cow Fears

SEOUL, South Korea - (AP) - South Korea on Friday approved resuming imports of U.S. beef after repeated delays in implementing an earlier decision to lift a 2003 ban imposed because of mad cow fears.

South Korea's Agriculture Ministry said 36 U.S. slaughterhouses designated to handle meat for export to South Korea met required safety measures, clearing the last hurdle to the resumption of imports. The country had previously been the third-largest market for U.S. beef.

South Korea will notify the slaughterhouses of the approval Monday, and the beef can start to be sold in the South Korean market some 25 days later, the ministry said in a statement.
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Employees of Yoshinoya D&C Co., serve the rice dish topped with American beef for media, after Yoshinoya President Shuji Abe announced the "beef bowl" returns Wednesday. After a two-year hiatus caused by a mad-cow scare, the fast-food chain will have just a million servings on the return day, which are likely to sell out before the day is over. Continue Reading...

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August 30, 2006 - 2:09PM

A 23-year-old British man visiting Hong Kong is in critical condition with a suspected case of the human variation of mad cow disease, hospital officials says.

The patient, who was not identified, sought medical treatment in Hong Kong on April 6, when he appeared mentally deranged and showed other psychiatric symptoms, Hong Kong's Hospital Authority said in a statement.

He had since received intestinal surgery and was now critically ill, the statement said.
Tests were inconclusive, but doctors suspect the patient has contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - believed to be contracted by eating animals infected with mad cow disease - based on clinical symptoms, the authority said.

The mass-market Apple Daily newspaper reported that the man was ethnic Chinese.

But Hospital Authority spokeswoman May Chan declined to disclose the man's ethnicity.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a degenerative nerve disease in cattle.
Eating contaminated meat products has been linked to the rare but fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in more than 150 deaths. The outbreak, mostly in Britain, peaked in the 1990s.

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University of Guelph
Prof Gordon Hayward
http://www.uoguelph.ca/mediarel/2006/09/guelph_engineer.html
Two University of Guelph engineers have received substantial research funding to continue developing a simple, inexpensive sensor for quick detection of brain-wasting infections related to mad-cow disease.
Profs. Gordon Hayward and Warren Stiver, School of Engineering, will use almost $200,000 in federal funding to further develop a device intended to pinpoint cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad-cow disease in cattle, and related forms of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or prion diseases.
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Aug 25, 2006 (CIDRAP News) ñ A procedural error at a feed mill might have resulted in contamination of cattle feed with banned materials and caused Canada's seventh case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, the Canadian government said yesterday.

The government also said the cow involved died of mastitis, not BSE. The animal was showing no outward signs of BSE at the time of death, but was tested because it met other criteria for BSE testing, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) reported.

The case, reported Jul 13, was in an Alberta dairy cow born in April 2002, years after Canada's 1997 ban on feeding of cattle parts to cattle and other ruminant animals. Because of this, the CFIA had said the cow's feed history would be the main focus of its investigation of the case.

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By Greg Quinn

Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Canada is investigating a possible eighth case of mad-cow disease, after a provincial laboratory's test was inconclusive.

The government received a sample that came from ``a mature animal'' and a federal lab will test to confirm if it has the disease, Alain Charette, a spokesman for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in Ottawa, said today in a telephone interview. Charette said he didn't know which province sent the sample.

Canada confirmed the seventh case of the disease July 13 in a 50-month-old dairy cow born after feed restrictions were imposed in 1997. The country's food inspection agency in June tightened its animal feed restrictions to speed up domestic eradication of mad-cow disease, or BSE, which stands for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

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24.aug.06
Reuters
Marcy Nicholson

WINNIPEG, Manitoba - Canada's seventh mad cow case since 2003 most likely contracted the brain-wasting disease from contaminated feed, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said on Thursday.

The 50-month-old cow was born years after 1997, when Canada instituted a ban on protein from cattle and other ruminants, such as sheep and goats, in cattle feed. The ban aimed to prevent the disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, which is believed to be caused by contaminated feed.

The federal food safety agency confirmed the animal had mad cow disease in July, making it the youngest animal in Canada to test positive for the disease since the first native-born case was discovered in 2003.

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23.aug.06
Canadian Food Inspection Agency

OTTAWA - Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) was today confirmed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) in a mature beef cow from Alberta. No part of the animal's carcass entered the human food or animal feed systems.

Preliminary information provided by the owner and an examination conducted by a private veterinarian estimate the animal's age was between eight and ten years of age. Based on this range, exposure to the BSE agent likely occurred either before the feed ban's introduction or during its early implementation. The estimated age of this animal is consistent with those of previous Canadian cases and exposure to a very low level of BSE infectivity.

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13.aug.06
Tulsa World, Okla.
McClatchy-Tribune Business News
John Dobberstein

ARKANSAS CITY, Kan. -- After another futile visit to the nation's capital, John Stewart faced a tough decision.
Give up, or let the courts decide.

So Stewart, founder and CEO of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to test every animal slaughtered at his plant for mad cow disease.

The lawsuit has placed Creekstone -- a cutting-edge meat packer 25 miles north of Ponca City -- in the national spotlight. Stewart has appeared on National Public Radio to plead his case. Other media have interviewed him, and interest groups and lawmakers have joined the fray with their opinions.

The USDA says it has legal jurisdiction over mad cow testing. But Stewart says the agency isn't taking the mad cow threat seriously enough.

In fact, Stewart said he plans to form a worldwide panel of experts this year to study the disease and make judgments about its risks and prevalence in the U.S. He said he would share the results with the USDA.

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By JOHN DOBBERSTEIN World Staff Writer
8/12/2006

View in Print (PDF) Format

Creekstone Farms, which wants to test all its animals, is at odds with the USDA.

ARKANSAS CITY, Kan. -- After another futile visit to the nation's capital, John Stewart faced a tough decision.
Give up, or let the courts decide.

So Stewart, founder and CEO of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to test every animal slaughtered at his plant for mad cow disease.

The lawsuit has placed Creekstone -- a cutting-edge meat packer 25 miles north of Ponca City -- in the national spotlight. Stewart has appeared on National Public Radio to plead his case. Other media have interviewed him, and interest groups and lawmakers have joined the fray with their opinions.

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Survey finds 80% reluctant to eat the beef despite lifting of mad cow ban.
August 12 2006: 9:41 AM EDT

TOKYO (Reuters) -- Most Japanese are extremely reluctant to eat U.S. beef, despite the ending of import bans imposed after outbreaks of mad cow disease in the United States, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Saturday.

Sales of U.S. beef resumed in Japan this week after the lifting of the latest ban, imposed in January when Japanese inspectors found prohibited material in a shipment of veal.

Eighty percent of those surveyed by the newspaper said they were concerned about the safety of U.S. beef.

Of 1,741 people quizzed for the survey last weekend, 45 percent said they did not want to eat U.S. beef and 43 percent said they wanted to think about the issue before deciding.

Only 10 percent said they wanted to eat U.S. beef, the Yomiuri reported.

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USDA eases rules on bovine imports from Canada
Wed Aug 9, 2006 4:35pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Agriculture Department proposed on Wednesday to allow imports of Canadian poultry and pork processed at plants that also handle cattle, in a sign of declining fears of mad cow disease.

USDA now requires that Canadian meat products derived from nonruminant poultry and pigs come from facilities separate from those processing ruminant animals such as cattle, which are susceptible to mad cow disease.

Ruminant animals collect swallowed food in a part of their stomachs for further chewing.

The department said because products derived from nonruminant animals pose a small risk of getting mad cow disease from contaminated products, it was "inconsistent" to have them processed in a separate facility.

Canada was the only country categorized as a bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) "minimal-risk" region in USDA's final rule published in January 2005. The proposed changes to this rule issued on Wednesday were published in the U.S. government's Federal Register.

The changes also would allow bovines, sheep and goats imported from Canada to be identified by other ways such as tattoos in addition to an ear tag. The earlier rule specified an ear tag because that is the required means of identification under Canada's national livestock identification program.

Lastly, the new measure would expand imports to include gelatin derived from bovine hides in addition to bones, which was currently allowed.

"We do not believe these restrictions are necessary to prevent the introduction of BSE into the United States," USDA said in its report.

The public has until October 10 to comment on the new rule.

The changes come two weeks after USDA halted a proposal to allow imports of older Canadian cattle after a dairy cow contracted mad cow disease years after Canada implemented safeguards.

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09.aug.06

National Post

Reuters

WINNIPEG - The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said yesterday it could not confirm the birth farm of Canada's sixth mad cow case since 2003 due to a lack of information on the animal's history. The mature cross-bred beef cow was "at least 16 years old" when it died on a Manitoba farm earlier this summer, the federal food safety agency said in a release as it wrapped up its investigation. The brain wasting disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, is believed to be transmitted through contaminated feed. The affected animal was born well before the 1997 feed ban on cattle feed containing protein from rendered cattle and other ruminants. Since cattle are most likely to contract the disease in their first year of life, the CFIA said the cow was most likely exposed to the BSE agent in 1989 or 1990, when the inclusion of meat and bone meal in cattle feed was both accepted and legal. The cow, which was confirmed to have BSE on July 4, was purchased by its owner in 1992. No part of the animal's carcass entered the human food or animal feed supply, the agency said. Investigators traced the location of the 21 herdmates that had been purchased with the affected animal. Only one was still alive and tested negative for BSE, the agency said. The CFIA confirmed a 50-month-old dairy cow from Alberta tested positive for mad cow disease later in July, making it Canada's seventh case since 2003. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been observing the Canadian investigation, which is nearly complete.

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Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Japan will today inspect the first shipment of U.S. beef to arrive since the country ended a six- month ban imposed over mad cow disease concern.

Costco Wholesale Japan Inc., the Japanese unit of the U.S. discount warehouse retailer, imported the 5.1-ton shipment, processed by Cargill Inc., in Colorado state, Japan's Ministry of Agricultural, Forestry and Fisheries said in a statement.

Japan and more than 60 nations banned U.S. beef after mad- cow disease was found in Washington state in December 2003, causing losses at U.S. meatpackers such as Cargill and Tyson Foods Inc., the world's biggest beef producer. Japan halted imports of U.S. beef again on Jan. 20, after banned material was found in a shipment of veal just weeks after it lifted the two- year embargo.

Before the ban, Japan was the biggest buyer of U.S. beef, purchasing $1.4 billion of the $3.8 billion exported in 2003.

The first shipment since the ban was ended on July 28 arrived yesterday at Narita International Airport, east of Tokyo, the farm ministry's statement said.

Japanese inspectors checked U.S. meatpackers and approved 34 as exporters to Japan after the U.S. pressed Japan to re-open its market.

Mad-cow disease, which is also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is spread in cattle by tainted feed. The human form of the disease, contracted when people eat meat from infected animals, has been blamed for more than 150 deaths, mostly in the U.K. where the disease was first reported in the 1980s.

To contact the reporter for this story:
Megumi Yamanaka in Tokyo at myamanaka@bloomberg.net.

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Shipment of U.S. Beef Arrives in Japan

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Associated Press Writer
Published August 7, 2006

The first shipment of U.S. beef since Japan lifted its import ban has arrived in Japan on Monday, virtually ending its absence from market for more than two and half years. The shipment of 5.1 tons of American chilled beef arrived on a cargo flight at the airport and its importer and government officials are expected inspect the contents on Tuesday.

Japan imported its first shipment of American beef since January on Monday, resuming a once-booming business that has been crippled for nearly three years over fears of mad cow disease.

The 5.1 tons of American chilled beef arrived on a cargo flight at Tokyo's Narita airport, and its importer and government officials were expected to inspect it on Tuesday, said Health Ministry official Masanori Imagawa.

Japan banned American beef in December 2003 after the first case of mad cow disease in the United States. That ban was eased in December 2005, but was re-imposed after forbidden spine bones were found in an import shipment of veal in January.

Monday's shipment, which follows the latest lifting of the beef ban on July 27, came from U.S. beef giant Cargill Inc. and was imported by Costco Wholesale Japan, the Japanese unit of the American retailer.

Costco employees, airport inspectors and Health Ministry officials were to scrutinize the entire shipment in a three-tiered process to make sure no banned products slip through, said Imagawa, who is in charge of customs and quarantine.

Previously, officials inspected only part of the shipments.

"We'll go through all boxes to make sure there is no problem, so inspection will probably take all day," Imagawa said.

Japan the U.S. beef industry's most lucrative overseas market before December 2003, importing some $1.4 billion worth of meat. However, concerns over mad cow disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, have severely damaged Japanese faith in the safety of the imports. Those fears were compounded by the faulty shipment in January.

Recent public polls have showed the majority of Japanese consumers are planning to stay away from U.S. beef, and major restaurants and supermarkets have said they have no immediate plans to sell it.

The reopening of the market followed a rigorous series of meetings, public hearings and inspections of American beef processing plants.

Japan so far has approved 33 of 35 such plants visited by government officials. One of the remaining two was deemed eligible for export, but only with follow-up surveillance. The approval for the other was pending.

Under the current agreement, all U.S. beef shipped to Japan must come from cattle aged 20 months or less, and no brain or spinal material can be included because it is considered at risk of carrying the disease.

U.S. officials have expressed interest in expanding the category of eligible beef to cattle aged 30 months or younger, since no cases of BSE have been discovered in cows that old, but Japan officials have rejected that for now.

BSE is a brain degenerative disease in cattle. In humans, eating meat contaminated with BSE is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a rare and deadly nerve disease.

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From USA Today Opinion

Updated 8/3/2006 8:44 PM ET

Creekstone Farms, a Kansas beef producer, wants to reassure customers that its cattle are safe to eat by testing them all for mad cow disease. Sounds like a smart business move, but there's one problem: The federal government won't let the company do it.

OPPOSING VIEW: Our safeguards are working

The U.S. Department of Agriculture ó invoking an obscure 1913 law intended to thwart con artists from peddling bogus hog cholera serum to pig farmers ó is blocking companies from selling the testing kits to Creekstone.

USDA is doing the bidding of large cattle barons afraid that Creekstone's marketing will force them to do the same tests to stay competitive. It's true that the incidence of mad cow disease is quite low. But there's little logic in stopping a company from exceeding regulations to meet the demands of its customers, or protecting its rivals from legitimate competition.

Not only is USDA blocking Creekstone, the department said last month that it's reducing its mad cow testing program by 90%. The industry and its sympathetic regulators seem to believe that the problem isn't mad cow disease. It's tests that find mad cow.

The department tests only 1% of the roughly 100,000 cattle slaughtered daily. The new plan will test only 110 cows a day.

By cutting back on testing, USDA will save about $35 million a year. That's a pittance compared with the devastation the cattle industry could face if just one human case of mad cow disease is linked to domestic beef.

The brain-wasting disease ó known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE ó is extremely rare but extremely deadly. Since 1986, it has killed more than 150 people worldwide, mostly in Britain, who ate infected meat.

Scientists don't know the exact cause of BSE but think it's spread when cows are fed ground-up parts of cattle and other cud-chewing animals. The government has tightened cattle-feed rules, but loopholes still permit cattle blood as a milk substitute and chicken waste as a protein supplement.

Canada has found four cows with BSE this year, and at least one was born after similar cattle feed rules were imposed that should have prevented the animal from being infected. Acting out of an abundance of caution, U.S. plans to increase Canadian beef and cattle imports have been put on hold until the new cases are investigated. That makes sense, but it's hard to justify cutbacks on U.S. testing at the same time we demand other nations provide greater assurances.

Sixty-five nations have full or partial restrictions on importing U.S. beef products because of fears that the testing isn't rigorous enough. As a result, U.S. beef product exports declined from $3.8 billion in 2003, before the first mad cow was detected in the USA, to $1.4 billion last year. Foreign buyers are demanding that USDA do more.

"In a nation dedicated to free market competition," says John Stewart, CEO of Creekstone, which is suing USDA, "a company that wants to do more than is required to ensure the quality of its product and to satisfy customer demand should be allowed to do so."

When regulators disagree with reasoning like that, you know the game is rigged.

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