MAD COW DISEASE

US cow may have rare BSE strain

A rare and puzzling form of mad cow disease that some believe arises spontaneously may have afflicted the U.S. animal that tested positive for the ailment last week, a senior Agriculture Department scientist told Reuters. The USDA has sent a sample of the suspect animal's brain to an internationally recognized laboratory in England to pinpoint if the animal has bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The USDA said it could take another week to complete final tests. Juergen Richt, a member of the USDA team in Ames, Iowa that already tested the animal, said the unusual test results could point to a relatively new strain of BSE that infects cattle sporadically, instead of from eating contaminated food. But he said it was too early to draw a conclusion about the aging, beef animal was slaughtered last November and incinerated because it was a "downer" unable to walk, and banned from the human food supply. "Nobody knows for sure yet, but the theory is it could be a spontaneous bovine disease," said the veterinarian medical officer. "There are some hallmark signs that this could be an atypical case." Since then, scientists in France, Italy, Japan and Belgium have discovered at least two new BSE strains that differ from the outbreak that swept European herds in the 1980s. Cattle brains infected with the two new strains resemble brains of humans diagnosed with classical Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal form of dementia that infects one in a million people worldwide, researchers said. Some experts believe the new BSE strains could arise naturally within cattle, for reasons that remain unknown. "The jury is still out on this," Richt said. "Is it infectious? That's the $100,000 question." Experts expressed concern about the possibility of an animal developing BSE spontaneously. Richt said a naturally occurring BSE strain would probably infect other cattle. "Sporadic BSE in cattle would most likely be infectious for other cattle, but no one can tell you yet if it's infectious for humans," he said. Scientists were years away from answering these questions, Richt added. But he said any carcasses infected with a new strain should be treated as any other BSE-infected animal and segregated from human and animal feed supplies. Richt considered the current suspect animal a good candidate for the atypical strain, with conflicting test results similar to cases in Japan and Belgium....

World's First Live Cattle Diagnostic Test for BSE

Vacci-Test(TM) Corporation today announced that a simple, reliable and economical diagnostic tool for the detection in "live" cattle of infectious Brain Diseases ("BD"), including Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), will soon be available for use on farms and ranches in Canada and around the world. Designed for the measurement of immunity and the presence of infectious diseases in both humans and animals, patented Vacci-Test(TM) allows for the precise evaluation of the immune status very quickly through a simple blood test. Vacci-Test(TM) BD can determine the presence of a protein marker which identifies brain infections such as BSE in cattle. "A single drop of blood will identify the presence of Protein 14-3-3, the marker for brain infections, including BSE," says Bill Hogan, President and CEO. "This will facilitate affordable mass testing of live cattle in the field with results readable in less than 30 minutes. Furthermore, Vacci-Test(TM)platform can diagnose any kind of bacteria-viruses based infectious diseases in livestock and humans. To this end, we now have 6 additional Vacci-Test(TM)In Vitro diagnostic products ready for commercialization," said Hogan....

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