MAD COW DISEASE

World Health Body Backs Beef Trade From BSE Countries The World Organization of Animal Health said countries with mad-cow disease should be allowed to export certain cuts of beef, allowing for a lifting of bans on U.S. and European Union meat. Red-muscle meat without bones is safe if the animal isn't suspected of having the brain-wasting disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, Alex Thiermann, an official from the organization, said at a press conference in Paris today. The body is responsible for setting animal health standards. ``It applies to all countries in all categories of risk,'' said Thiermann, who heads the unit governing animal health trade. ``I would hope that the bans would be minimized.'' The change, from previous rules allowing beef to be banned after just one case of mad-cow disease is found, may help the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Beef exports in all three nations plunged after the illness was diagnosed in their herds. World Trade Organization rules state that standards set at the 167-nation animal-health group must be followed unless scientific evidence is produced to justify otherwise. ``Many of the bans as they exist today are not based on'' the organization's standards, Thiermann said. For the first year, only meat from cattle younger than 30 months will benefit from the new rule. The age limit will be reconsidered next year....
Statement By Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns Regarding The OIE'S Adoption Of Changes To The International Animal Health Code Chapter On BSE "I applaud the leadership of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in modernizing the international approach to the safe trade of beef products by updating the BSE guidelines to reflect current science. "The United States and several other countries have advocated for guidelines that reflect science, the low risk associated with BSE, and the effectiveness of risk mitigation measures. I applaud the OIE for developing guidelines that incorporate all such factors. The international standard for to BSE is now based on the same information that has guided the United States' current practices and the proposed minimal risk rule. "Among other items, the OIE has now officially recognized additions to the list of non-risk products-most significantly to include boneless beef that can be traded without regard to a country's BSE status. "The OIE has also adopted a new, streamlined system for classifying countries according to relative risk for BSE in a manner that reflects the steps they have implemented to manage and reduce that risk....
Economic impact of BSE still playing out, says economist Two years after the North American beef industry was rocked by BSE's arrival, the economic impact continues to play out, University of Nebraska-Lincoln specialists say. The discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in a cow in Canada in May 2003 led the US to shut down imports of Canadian cattle. Seven months later, a BSE case was discovered in Washington state, which led to a loss of most US beef export markets. Different sectors of the US beef industry have been affected very differently by the discoveries of mad cow disease. US meatpackers that rely on Canadian imports to meet their processing capacity have been hard hit. A Kansas State University estimate is that 5,000 American meatpackers lost their jobs in the last two years as Canadian imports dried up. Some US cow-calf producers may see Canada's woes as helping their situation. In the short term, that may be so, but the long-term outlook is less certain, said Dillon Feuz, UNL agriculture marketing specialist at the Panhandle Research and Extension Center at Scottsbluff. The bottom line, Feuz said, is that all sectors in the beef industry are best served by a robust, open trade environment. From 1998 to 2002, the last full year before BSE was discovered on this continent, open trade benefitted the U.S. economy significantly, as the nation annually imported $3.7 billion in cattle, beef and byproducts and exported $5.1 billion. That's a $1.4 billion annual trade balance in the black....
First Technology to Remove Prions that Cause vCJD From Blood Launched The risk of receiving blood contaminated with variant Cruetzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) prions may no longer be a concern for the thousands of people who require a transfusion. Pall Corporation (NYSE: PLL) announced today the Council of Europe (CE) marking of its Leukotrap® Affinity Prion Reduction Filter System. It is the first and only technology that removes infectious prions that may be the causative agent of vCJD from red cells, the most commonly transfused blood component. Variant CJD, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, is the human form of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease. The CE mark means the new prion reduction filter meets pan-European essential requirements for safety of medical devices. "The availability of our prion reduction filter is a seminal event heralding a new era in blood safety," says Eric Krasnoff, Chairman and CEO of Pall Corporation. "We are working very closely with health authorities, starting with the nations hardest hit by vCJD, to help protect the safety of the blood supply and prevent the spread of this insidious disease."....
Agents of brain-wasting disease observed Scientists for the first time have watched agents of brain-wasting diseases, called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), as they invade a nerve cell and then travel along wire-like circuits to points of contact with other cells. These findings will help scientists better understand TSE diseases and may lead to ways to prevent or minimize their effects. TSE, or prion, diseases include scrapie in sheep and goats; chronic wasting disease in deer and elk; mad cow disease in cattle; and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans." These findings offer intriguing leads toward developing therapies to stop the spread of TSE and possibly other degenerative brain diseases," says NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. "Potentially, it may be possible to block the pathways that prions use to invade cells, their exit to other cells or their replication within the cells."....

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