U.S. authorities give up investigation of mad cow case in Alabama
WASHINGTON (AP)
Wed, 3 May 2006 16:41:00 CST E-mail this to a friend
The government has given up trying to track the origins of an Alabama cow infected with madcow disease.
The trail went cold after seven weeks of investigation of more than three dozen farms, the Agriculture Department said in a report issued quietly late Tuesday. Meantime, in a separate investigation, the U.S. is tracing 15 cattle imported from Canada that ate the same feed as an infected cow discovered last month in British Columbia. So far, the government has found one cow and intends to kill and test it, the Agriculture Department said.
While the Alabama traceback didn't pan out, John Clifford, the USDA's chief veterinarian, said it's important to remember that people and animals are protected by a series of safeguards in the United States.
The red crossbreed cow was a "downer," meaning she couldn't walk, when an Alabama veterinarian examined her in late February. Downers are banned from the food supply because they are thought to have a higher risk of being infected with mad cow disease.
The vet killed the cow and removed brain samples for testing, and the cow became the country's third case of mad cow disease.
Investigators looked at the farm where the cow died and the farm where she was sold in December 2004.
They tracked down 35 other farms she might have come from and did some DNA testing to see if she was related to other cows on those farms. In the end, they tracked down two of her calves, one that died last year at a stockyard and went to a landfill, and one born this year that is under observation at the department's laboratory in Ames, Iowa.
Authorities also couldn't find records that would confirm the cow's age. Experts checked the Alabama cow's teeth and determined she was 10 or older, but that is an approximation that grows less reliable after a cow is five or six years old.
The cow's age is important because it indicates she could have been infected before steps were taken to safeguard cattle feed.
Nine years ago, the U.S. essentially banned ground-up cattle remains from use in cattle feed. Meat and bone meal from cattle was commonly fed to speed growth until it was implicated in the massive outbreak of mad cow disease in the United Kingdom that peaked in 1993. The disease was blamed for the deaths of 180,000 cattle and more than 150 people.
As part of the Alabama investigation, the Food and Drug Administration reviewed local feed mills and said they had complied with the ban on cattle remains. :lol:
Mad cow disease is the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. In people, eating meat contaminated with BSE is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a rare and deadly nerve disease.
The first American case of BSE appeared in 2003 in Washington state in a Canadian-born cow. The disease was found again last June in a Texas cow.
The US doesn't need MID?