Mad Cow Discovery Downplayed By Government, Industry

An initial test of one animal has failed to rule out mad cow disease, but people who eat U.S. beef should not be alarmed because the animal never entered the food chain, agriculture officials say.

The Agriculture Department said the result was "inconclusive" for the brain-wasting disease. The carcass was being sent to the USDA National Veterinary Laboratory in Ames, Iowa; results were expected in four days to seven days.

"No matter how the confirmatory testing comes back, USDA remains confident in the safety of the U.S. beef supply," John Clifford, deputy administrator of USDA veterinary services, said in announcing the finding late Friday. "This animal did not enter the human food chain or feed chain."

Clifford declined to identify the animal or its location until testing is complete. It is "very likely" final testing could turn up negative, he said.

Norman Schwartz, president of Bio-Rad Laboratories in Hercules, Calif., said the initial test was performed at one of his labs. "They are designed to catch everything. You are catching every possible suspicious sample," Schwartz said Saturday.

In the first case of mad cow discovered in the United States, a Holstein on a Washington state farm was found to have the disease in December, leading more than 50 countries to ban imports of U.S. beef. Japan and South Korea, two of the biggest export markets, have their bans in effect.

The department this month expanded national testing for the disease in response to that mad cow scare. More than 7,000 cattle have been tested under the program, which seeks to check about 220,000 animals over the next year to 18 months.

Agriculture officials and representatives of the U.S. beef cattle industry quickly sought to play down a potential threat to consumers.

"This is not at all unexpected," Clifford said. "Inconclusive results are a normal component of most screening tests, which are designed to be extremely sensitive so they will detect any sample that could possibly be positive."

At the American Meat Institute, a trade group, spokeswoman Janet Riley said: "Regardless of the test outcome, beef is safe because the infectious agent is not contained in beef and the tissues that can contain the infectious agent are removed, and do not enter the food supply. Consumers can continue to enjoy beef in safety."

Bill Bullard, chief executive officer of R-CALF USA, a cattlemen's group, urged calm in the live cattle markets, which dropped 20 percent after U.S. officials reported the first mad cow case in December.

Mad cow disease, known also as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, eats holes in the brains of cattle. It sprang up in Britain in 1986 and spread through countries in Europe and Asia, prompting massive destruction of herds and devastating the European beef industry.

A form of mad cow disease can be contracted by humans if they eat infected beef or nerve tissue, and possibly through blood transfusions. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease, so far has killed 100 people in Britain and elsewhere, including a Florida woman this week who was believed to have contracted the disease in England.

The government last year conducted mad cow tests on tissues from 20,543 animals, virtually all of them cattle that could not stand or walk and had to be dragged to slaughter. After the December case, the government initially doubled the number of animals to be tested this year to 40,000.

With many foreign governments still reluctant to ease bans on U.S. beef, the testing program was expanded at a cost of $70 million to include as many as 220,000 slaughtered animals, following recommendations from an international scientific review panel. About 35 million cattle are slaughtered each year in the United States.