MAD COW DISEASE

Plants Cited For Mad Cow Offenses

Inspectors have found more than 1,000 violations of rules aimed at preventing mad cow disease from reaching humans, the Agriculture Department said. No contaminated meat reached consumers, the agency said. The rules were created in response to the nation's first case of mad cow disease in December 2003. They require that brains, spinal cords and other nerve parts — which can carry mad cow disease — be removed when older cows are slaughtered. The at-risk tissues are removed from cows older than 30 months because infection levels are believed to rise with age. The Agriculture Department said Monday it had cited beef slaughterhouses or processing plants 1,036 times for failing to comply with rules on removing those tissues, which are commonly called specified risk materials or SRMs. The violations occurred over 17 months, ending in May. The number of violations amounts to less than 1 percent of all citations at those plants, said USDA spokeswoman Lisa Wallenda Picard....

Consumer Group Calls the Thousand Meat Plant Violations Another Example of Flaws in Federal Mad Cow Response

Responding to information released by the US Department of Agriculture that over 1,000 meat packers had been cited for failing to take required steps to protect consumers from Mad Cow Disease, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT) called for increased front-end Mad Cow protections, steps to be taken before the meat is processed. "This new USDA data illustrates that we cannot rely only on end-product steps to protect the American public," stated Richard Wood, FACT's Executive Director. "Front-end protections must be increased, focusing on cattle feed and cattle surveillance," he stated. On August 15th, USDA made public information that showed it had cited meat packers for failing to take steps to adequately remove brains and spinal cords from older cattle to reduce the risk to consumers from Mad Cow Disease. USDA enacted this new rule in January 2004, after an infected cow was detected in Washington State. The brain and spinal cord ban is necessary because these tissues are most likely to contain prions, the protein that leads to Mad Cow and the related human disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease. These high-risk tissues are called specified risk materials (SRMs). The over 1000 citations were given because of: failures to have plans in place to adequately remove the high-risk tissues; cross-contamination between high-risk and edible meat; poor-record keeping; and inadequate age determination. Age determination is important because infectivity builds up in cattle over time....

Cattle tracked with radio tags to trace disease

Metal bars inside a Cullman Stockyard cattle chute squeeze around a black cow as a worker clamps a quarter-sized medallion onto its left ear. The bovine jewelry will be used to track cattle during their journey into the nation's food supply, part of a pilot project to devise a system to make the nation's meat safer. The tracking system is designed to help federal agriculture officials identify the source of a cattle disease outbreak. Diseases such as foot and mouth and bovine spongiform encephalopathy - mad cow disease - can spread quickly, contaminating herds and the food supply. Outbreaks of such diseases have been reported in other countries in recent years, and two cases of mad cow disease have been confirmed in the United States since 2003. The federal government is mandating that, by 2009, the nation have a system in place to track infected animals to their farm of origin. "The whole thing is to try to give confidence to consumers as to where their food came from - that it can be traced, and it's safe," said Lisa Kriese-Anderson, extension animal scientist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System....

Britain to Revise Mad Cow Measures in Autumn

Britain's farm ministry said on Tuesday it would decide in the autumn whether or not to lift one of the last remaining mad cow disease control measures, which would give a major boost to UK beef exporters. Britain's beef export industry collapsed in 1995 following an outbreak of mad cow in British herds. An estimated 141 British people are thought to have died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), while up to 7.3 million animals had been slaughtered under disease control measures by the end of June 2004. The restriction that the ministry proposes to lift is called the Over Thirty Months (OTM) rule, and its effect is to stop older cows entering the food chain. Lifting the OTM restriction would pave the way for a resumption of full beef exports....

Brain-disease deaths investigated

In late May, Marjorie Skinner played golf well enough to place fourth in a Memorial Day weekend tournament. Yet within weeks, the previously vibrant retiree started losing her ability to speak. By the time her family buried her Friday, she was the fifth suspected victim in the same sparsely populated area of Idaho of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare brain-wasting disease that typically afflicts only one in a million people. As word of the latest death spread yesterday, local and federal health specialists sifted through clues about an illness different from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease. ''Five [cases] in one valley is pretty serious," said Sue Skinner, Marjorie's daughter-in-law. ''It's a grave concern in our family." The mystery has deepened in recent weeks. At the end of May, another elderly woman died of the incurable disease involving a malformed protein, or prion, that kills brain cells. After that, health officials learned of three other suspected cases, including one CJD death in February that was reported only last month. ''Is what is happening in Idaho an anomaly, a statistical fluke? That is possible," said Ermias Belay, a top CJD expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta who is helping advise officials in Idaho. ''But once it exceeds 1.5 or 2 per million, you start asking questions." ''If they are all confirmed, it could be odd," he said....