MAD COW NEWS

Four More Cows Located From Canadian Herd The government has now located 23 of the 81 head of Canadian cattle in the herd that included the Holstein discovered in the United States with mad cow disease, the Agriculture Department said Monday. Four animals were recently located in Washington state, three at a facility in Tenino and one in Connell. No additional cases of the disease have been found, the department said....Food-Labeling Supporters: 82 Percent Favor Program Congressional proponents of a law mandating country-of-origin labels on food will try this week to block delay of the program by citing a new private poll claiming 82 percent of American consumers want the labels. The poll, which was paid for by the National Farmers Union, sampled about 900 people on Jan. 13-14, with an error margin of 3 percent. The farm group is a vocal advocate of country-of-origin labels on meat, fruits, vegetables and other foods. The poll also found that 85 percent of those polled would be more inclined to buy food produced in the United States and that 81 percent said they were willing to pay slightly higher prices for U.S.-grown food....Stick with BSE tests of high-risk, older cattle say experts Purdue University experts say it's not necessary or economically feasible to test each cow that goes to slaughter in the US for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease), even though some have called for complete testing in the weeks following the discovery of the disease in the US. Instead they propose testing animals over 30 months of age as well as high-risk and disabled cattle. High-risk and disabled cattle already are tested in the US. "We're looking at a disease that typically has an incubation period of five to six years — most of the cattle that go to market are 24 months old or less," said Leon Thacker, a Purdue veterinary pathologist and head of the Indiana Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. Of the 36 million cattle processed, around 6.3 million are cows or bulls, according the 2002 National Agricultural Statistics Service slaughter report. These are likely to be more than 30 months of age....Canada feed companies question FDA import alerts Canadian feed companies said on Friday they are frustrated with U.S. tests that they believe have unfairly stopped some feed exports because of heightened fears surrounding mad cow disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has used the sensitive microscopy tests on Canadian feed since May 20, when Canada found its first home-grown case of the disease. "If they find even a presumption of contaminants -- that's not a confirmation -- if they think there might be contaminants, the shipment gets turned back," said Radean Carter, a spokeswoman for Agricore United , Canada's largest grain company. But feed industry sources said tests in place since May are detecting amounts of animal proteins as minute as a filament from a feather in feed shipments from Canada, which exports some 10 percent of the 15 million tonnes to 17 million tonnes of commercial mixed feed it produces each year....North American Officials Fail To Agree On Beef Trade Restart Top agriculture officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico met Friday to discuss mad cow disease in North America, but failed to reach agreement on re-opening their borders to beef products and live cattle. The U.S. has been pressing Mexico, a large market for U.S. beef, to lift its total ban on U.S. beef and cattle that was imposed last month after scientists diagnosed a Holstein in Washington with mad cow disease. Canada wants both the United States, its biggest trading partner in cattle and beef, and Mexico to lift restrictions that took effect after the Canadian mad cow case in May. Mexican Agriculture Secretary Javier Usabiaga said his country would re-open its borders once Mexican officials and consumers were confident that beef from the north was safe....Los Alamos physicist working on new diagnosis for mad cow disease A Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist is trying to developing a way to diagnose mad cow disease in blood or urine samples before symptoms appear in a sick cow. Perry Gray is working with a group of scientists headed by New York’s Institute for Basic Research and funded by the National Institutes of Health on the project. Gray and his group are looking to develop a screening test that can detect the disease agent—called prion protein—in human or cow blood....Meat Stripper Gets Third Degree That's the basic concept behind advanced meat recovery. The technology squeezes cow bones to force out any meat still clinging to them after the animal is slaughtered. It's a job once done less efficiently and more dangerously by laborers wielding automatic knives. With advanced meat recovery, or AMR, a human doesn't have to touch the bones except to stuff them into the machine, which chops them into six-inch pieces that fit into the hydraulic compression chamber. There, the chunks are pressed between two rotating cylinders. One cylinder squeezes meat through like a sieve, leaving the bone and connective tissues on the other side. The meat is fed through one last, finer filter to remove any remaining bone or cartilage....