MAD COW DISEASE

For Months, Agriculture Department Delayed Announcing Result of Mad Cow Test Although the Agriculture Department confirmed Friday that a cow that died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease. The result was never publicly disclosed. The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow. Indeed, the lengthy delay occurred despite the intense national interest in the disease and the fact that many countries have banned shipments of beef from the United States because of what they consider to be lax testing policies. Until Friday, it was not public knowledge that an "experimental" test had been performed last November by an Agriculture Department laboratory on the brain of a cow suspected of having mad cow disease, and that the test had come up positive. For seven months, all that was known was that a test on the same cow done at the same laboratory at roughly the same time had come up negative. The negative result was obtained using a test that the Agriculture Department refers to as its "gold standard." The explanation that the department gave late Friday, when the positive test result came to light, was that there was no bad intention or cover-up, and that the test in question was only experimental....
Months-Long Delay in Mad Cow Announcement Stirs Debate Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are facing harsh criticism over a seven-month delay in announcing test results indicating that a suspect animal was infected with mad cow disease, the second such case yet documented in the country. The test in question, described by USDA officials as "experimental," was ordered after two previous faster "Elisa" tests had come up negative for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the formal name for mad cow disease. The animal also tested negative on a slower immunohistochemistry test, considered the agency's "gold standard" at the time. Those tests were all conducted by USDA last November. Then, just two weeks ago, and for reasons that remain unclear, agency inspector general Phyllis K. Fong ordered that tissue samples from the cow be sent to a well-respected lab in England for further testing using the Western blot method. Several tests were run, all of which came up positive for BSE. When asked why news of the first positive result from the "experimental" test last November had not been publicized, Agriculture Department spokesman Ed Loyd blamed the delay on a breakdown in internal agency communications. "The laboratory folks just never mentioned it to anyone higher up," he said. "They didn't know if it was valid or not, so they didn't report it."....
U.S. Refused Extra Mad-Cow Test A third and more sophisticated test on the beef cow suspected of having mad cow disease would have helped resolve conflicting results from two initial screenings, but the U.S. refused to perform it in November. That additional test, ordered up by the Agriculture Department's internal watchdog, ended up detecting mad cow — a finding that was confirmed on Friday by the world's pre-eminent lab, in England. Only 18 months ago, the department had used the Western blot test to help uncover the first American case of the brain-wasting illness in cows. The department is pledging that, from now on, it will conduct such testing on suspicious animals. U.S. officials in November had declared the cow free of the disease even though one of two tests — an initial screening known as a rapid test — indicated the presence of the disease. A more sophisticated follow-up — immunohistochemistry, or IHC — came back negative. "They had two diametrically opposed results which begged to be resolved," said Paul W. Brown, a former scientist at the National Institutes of Health who spent his career working on mad cow-related issues....
Beef scare tests US on cow-feed policies The new case of mad cow disease in the United States points to the US Department of Agriculture's two basic and - critics say - potentially conflicting mandates. The agency is charged with ensuring the safety of US agricultural products. But it's also meant to promote those products domestically and abroad. Bad news in the first area can harm the second. Seeking to lessen any concern beef-eaters may have about the recently discovered cow infected with the disease, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns speaks of "interlocking safeguards" and "the firewalls we have in place." He points to the vastly increased number of cows that now are screened for the deadly infection - more than 388,000 in the past 18 months. Before the first US case of mad cow disease was discovered in December 2003, just a few thousand cows were tested annually. But the388,000 are still less than 2 percent of the approximately 35 million cattle slaughtered in the US each year, far lower than the percentage tested in Europe or Japan. And the most recent episode also shows how that system of checking - even with its improvements - is not foolproof. The latest episode "underscores the need for federal regulations on BSE to be tightened immediately," says Wenonah Hauter, who heads Public Citizen's food program. Ms. Hauter says federal agencies "must eliminate loopholes in the current feed ban which still allow the use of cattle blood, waste from the floors of poultry houses, and processed restaurant and food waste to be fed to cattle." "The use of rendered cattle remains is allowed in feed for hogs and poultry, and in turn, hog and poultry remains can be put back into cattle feed," she says. "All of these loopholes provide pathways for cattle to eat potentially infective tissue from other cattle and create the potential for the disease to spread."....
DNA testing may help lead to source of new case of mad cow The government hopes DNA analysis can pinpoint the herd of the cow that tested positive for mad cow disease and lead investigators to the source of the animal's brain-wasting illness, the Agriculture Department's chief veterinarian said Saturday. Genetic testing is needed because of mistakes in how the beef cow was labeled and how its tissues were stored, John Clifford told The Associated Press in an interview. The cow, a "downer" that could not walk, was delivered last November to a plant where animals unfit for human consumption are killed. The department has not identified the owner or the plant. The cow's type of breed was mislabeled, possibly because the animal had been soiled heavily with manure, and its tissues were mixed with tissues from other cows, Clifford said. "When we went back to this particular owner, the breed we identified, he indicated he did not sell that breed. He sold another breed," Clifford said. "In addition to that, we found that after the tissues were processed, there was some mixing."....
Beef industry circles wagons Colorado, the nation's fourth-largest beef producer and home to three of the industry's largest trade groups, has been hit especially hard by the import ban and likely will endure another round of significant losses, said Steve Gabel, chairman of the Colorado Beef Council and owner of Magnum Feed Yard in Wiggins. Gabel said his company has watched the value of each of its head of cattle drop by $50 - amounting to losses of about $43,000 a week - since June 10. That was when it was announced that British researchers would retest the recently found infected cow. Given that the nation slaughters about 96,000 head of "feed cattle" a day - typically high-quality beef sold to consumers - Gabel estimates that the industry has lost about $4.8 million a day since mid-June. "And that's just a glimpse at the financial pressure our industry feels way before any confirmation is complete," he said....
Canadian border to remain open to U.S. beef Canada, which two years ago was prohibited from exporting its cattle to the United States after a mad cow scare, has no intention of closing its borders to U.S. beef after Washington announced that a cow tested positive there, Canada's agriculture minister said. The comments from Canadian Agriculture Minister Andy Mitchell came as Taiwan reimposed the ban on U.S. beef that it lifted just two months ago. Also, a Japanese government food safety panel expressed concern Saturday about the second confirmed American case, raising speculation that Tokyo may delay a planned resumption of U.S. beef imports. The U.S. ban on Canadian cattle was imposed in May 2003 when an Albertan-born cow was found ill with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE....

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