MAD COW NEWS

Why mad cow scare won't sap U.S. economy

Prices for live cattle futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were down the maximum limit (1.5 cents per pound) Wednesday to 89.175 cents. After trading limit-down for two consecutive days, the limit will be increased to 3 cents. If they trade limit-down for another two days, the limit will be increased again to 5 cents per pound.

Assuming the worst -- that all exports of U.S. beef will stop -- suggests that a drop in demand of 9 percent is the immediate effect. This would push cattle futures prices down by roughly 8 cents per pound, and would mean just four days of limit-down trading.

But because we will see an additional drop in demand due to a decline in domestic consumption, the price is likely to fall by even more. We suspect that price declines could reach roughly 30 percent, and that cattle futures prices may fall to as low as 60 cents per pound -- eight days down the limit.

But there's an intereseting aspect to recent trading in live cattle futures on the Merc. On Dec. 9, the same day the cow in question was slaughtered, the live cattle future traded limit-down. It then fell sharply again on Dec. 10. It appears that someone knew something. In the following two weeks, cattle prices rose again, and by last Tuesday, were almost back to their Dec. 8 level.

Someone, somewhere, is breathing a huge sigh of relief that the USDA finally made this information public late Tuesday...

Canada won't widen mad cow clampdown

It came as no surprise yesterday when U.S. authorities said they had received early confirmation that a Holstein cow in Washington state was infected with the disease, said Dr. Brian Evans, Canada's chief veterinarian. American authorities are now awaiting the final results of independent tests from world specialists in England, expected by the end of the week.

It's not likely even that will lead Ottawa to change its decision to restrict just a few beef products, rather than close the border entirely as some other countries have done, said Evans, chief veterinary officer with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. "It doesn't change our response to the U.S. circumstance as it currently is and ... (the finding) is what was expected," Evans said in an interview.

Meanwhile, a top U.S. official and a veterinarian familiar with the probe into where the animal came from said the infected cow may have brought in the disease from outside the state or country.

They both mentioned Canada as one place from which cattle have been imported...

Mad cow scare likely to tighten meat screening

As the American beef industry struggles with its first case of mad cow disease, the Department of Agriculture is debating whether to do far more screening of meat and change the way meat from suspect animals is used, department officials say.

The officials would not say exactly what they would recommend but acknowledged that European and Japanese regulators screen millions of animals using tests that take only three hours, fast enough to stop diseased carcasses from being cut up for food.

American inspectors have tested fewer than 30,000 of the roughly 300 million animals slaughtered in the last nine years, and get results days or weeks later...

BSE blame flows north

Anguish voiced by Canadian beef producers last May is being eerily echoed by Washington State cattlemen living near the latest ground zero for mad cow disease.

And a common suspicion emerges in their expressions of fear and loathing -- that Canada could well be the source of their impending misery.

"There are a lot of rumours that cow came from Canada and if it's true, they'll never open the border again," said Rod Vandegraff, whose family operates a large cattle feedlot in Sunnyside, about 10 km from Mabton, Wash., where the sick cow was found...

Experts debate possible effects of disease on USA's food supply

Now that agriculture officials are certain that a 4-year-old Holstein cow in Washington state is the USA's first case of mad cow disease, millions of Americans are left to wonder: Should beef still be, as the ad campaign says, "what's for dinner"?

Experts say many common cuts of beef pose no risk -- boneless steaks and roasts, for instance. But critics of the USA's multibillion-dollar cattle-feeding industry say loopholes in rules meant to prevent the disease still allow ground-up cow parts to be fed to cattle, a known way to transmit the fatal disease.

Consumer advocates also question meat-processing methods that scrape every bit from the bone. A federal survey last year found 35% of such meat contains spinal and nervous system tissue, the most infectious material in a diseased animal.

But some researchers think it could have occurred by chance when a normal protein in the cow mutated into a prion. Fred Cohen, a pharmacologist at University of California at San Francisco and Prusiner's colleague, believes that happened in the case this week and one last spring in Canada. If so, such occurrences are likely to be rare. Scientists at a federal lab in Ames, Iowa, have examined the brains of tens of thousands of suspicious-looking cows over the past several years and identified the disease only once.

The cattle industry downplays the possibility of a spontaneous occurrence. Gary Weber, executive director of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, calls it "a theory that most, if not all (mad cow) experts that I talk to dismiss. ... There is no evidence."...

Denver Post Editorial: Restore confidence in beef

One case of mad cow disease in the United States isn't cause for public panic - but it's also not an excuse for official complacency. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, state officials and the beef industry must take additional steps beyond those already announced.

Mad cow disease - also known as bovine spongiform encephelopathy, or BSE - doesn't seem to jump directly from animal to animal. Instead, it appears to spread when cattle eat feed that contains ground-up bits of infected animals. So the USDA needs to do more than just trace where meat from the infected animal was shipped. The agency also should find out what the infected animal had eaten, what other cattle consumed the same products, and where meat from those animals went.

The health risks to humans are likely very low - but they're not zero. The top priority must be protecting human health, even if that means imposing short-term hardship on the beef business...

Officials insist woman's death not related to mad cow disease

Doctors don't know how a Lucas woman contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but they're sure it didn't come from eating tainted beef.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob is a rare disease that afflicts about 3,600 people each year in the United States, including two or three in Kansas officials said. On Sunday, 62-year-old Linda Foulke died of the disease.

Doctors insist the type of CJD that killed Foulke was not the kind that results from eating beef from cattle with mad cow disease. The variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, known as vCJD, has been confirmed in only 153 cases around the world - 143 of them in Britain...

Beef groups seek to close borders to imports

South Dakota Stockgrowers Association and its national affiliate, R-CALF USA, have called on the United States to close its borders to all imports of live cattle, beef and livestock feed until the suspected case of mad cow disease in Washington state is more fully investigated.

"There are a number of investigations taking place to answer questions about this cow," Stockgrowers president Ken Knuppe said in a news release. "Until we know more about this situation, we believe the safest move is to halt imports. We know that certain types of feed can cause this disease, and although those feed products are outlawed here in the U.S., they may not be in other countries."

An R-CALF news release said the rationale for closing the border is based on the likelihood that if BSE were found in the United States, it would most likely have entered through imported ruminants or ruminant products. The news release also said the border closure would prevent the buildup of excess supplies of beef and cattle, thus lessening the harmful impact of the case on the U.S. cattle market...

Washington Post: Origin of Sick Cow Sought

In tracking records from the Sunny Dene Ranch in Mabton, which acquired the cow in October 2001, Agriculture Department officials had initially said that one of two herds in Washington state was the birth herd. Identifying this herd is crucial, because the cow was probably infected before it got to Mabton.

It now appears that the cow has had another previous home, which may even have been out of the state or out of the country. Each step back that investigators go to find the birth farm increases the number of ways the infection might have spread elsewhere.

"While we initially went from the index herd where we found two locations, we are tracing back further from there," W. Ron DeHaven, USDA's deputy administrator and chief veterinary officer, said last evening. "It gets to be a spider web of possibilities from there."

Regulators want to find the birth herd and the sources of the infected Holstein's feed to predict which other cattle may have eaten the same feed and are at risk. Every extra step in their search dramatically complicates efforts to clamp down on the source of the disease.

A veterinarian in the Yakima Valley familiar with the investigation but who asked not to be identified said he had learned that the "cow didn't spend her whole life in the state of Washington." In recent years, a large number of cattle have been imported into the Yakima Valley, primarily from Canada, following a rapid expansion of local dairy herds, according to another veterinarian, Ernie Munck. "I have several clients that have brought in cows from Canada," said Munck, a large-animal veterinarian from Prosser, Wash. "One client brought in a few truckloads from Ontario."...

Japan to increase NZ beef exports

The Japanese government would try to increase imports from New Zealand and Australia by sending officials there as early as January, officials at its Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries told the Japan Today newspaper.

Only New Zealand and Australia now remain as sources of Japan's beef imports, with the rest of the world's top 10 suppliers all being hit by either foot-and-mouth disease or BSE, the farm ministry official said...