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

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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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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