MAD COW DISEASE

U.S. Regulators to Widen Mad-Cow Animal Feed Rules

A ban on cattle parts suspected in the transmission of mad-cow disease will be extended beyond cattle feed to all animal feed, according to rules proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Animal-feed makers will have to eliminate the brains and spinal cords of cows older than 30 months from their products under the FDA's proposal, released today. The plan falls short of an earlier proposal to ban use of tissue from all mammals and poultry as sources of animal feed. Under the proposal announced today, makers of feed for all animals, including pets, cannot use the brains and spinal cords of older cattle in their products. Since 1997, the FDA has banned the direct feeding of cattle remnants from animals of any age to other cattle. The FDA has allowed exceptions for table scraps for restaurants, poultry litter and cows' blood. Producers will be allowed to continue using these materials in feed under today's proposal. If the most infectious tissues -- brains and spinal cords -- are kept out of chicken feed and other animal food, then it is safe use poultry litter and table scraps in animal feed, the FDA said....

Japan Moves Closer to Lifting U.S. Beef Ban

Japan moved a step closer to lifting its ban on U.S. beef imports after a food safety panel said there was little risk of mad cow disease from American beef if appropriate precautions are taken, the government's top spokesman said Wednesday. Japan's food safety panel, charged with reviewing the ban, released a preliminary report late Tuesday saying that the risk of mad cow disease entering Japan in American beef is extremely low if proper precautions are followed. "It is not that we've reached a full agreement, but it gave us direction," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said during a news conference. "Yesterday's discussions gave us a bright outlook." The Japanese food safety panel is expected to finish its report and make a recommendation about the ban later this year. Hosoda said Wednesday that it was too early to say when imports might resume and added that a verdict on trade should be based on sound science. Domestic press reports have said imports may resume as early as December....

T-bone steaks to make triumphant return to EU menus

The European Union agreed on Wednesday to allow T-bone steaks, including Italy's famous Fiorentina, back into Europe's restaurants, lifting a four-year ban imposed over mad cow disease fears, the EU executive said. Sales of beef containing the backbone of animals aged over 12 months were banned in 2001 in many European countries to reduce the risk of catching the human equivalent of BSE, mad cow disease. This low age limit effectively outlawed T-bone steaks. EU veterinary experts meeting in Brussels have now raised that limit to 24 months, meaning that T-bones are likely be back on sale in butchers' shops across Europe by the end of the year. The decision will delight lovers of Italy's phonebook-thick Tuscan Fiorentina steak, traditionally cut from cattle aged between 17 and 22 months and including a big piece of backbone, believed to harbour the agent causing the brain-wasting disease....

Mad cow crusader

Janet Skarbek's life was forever altered when she read the obituary of an acquaintance in June 2003. A 56-year-old woman who had worked with Skarbek's mother at the Garden State Park racetrack near Philadelphia had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob brain disease, the human version of mad cow disease. Barely three years earlier, a 29-year-old accountant at the Cherry Hill track had died of the same rare, always fatal disease. Skarbek wondered: How could two of just 100 administrative employees at the track be felled by a neurological disease health officials say kills just one in a million people each year, usually after age 60? "That's the day it started," she recalled. Almost overnight, Skarbek changed from suburban mother of two, tax manager and Sunday school teacher into an Erin Brockovich-like crusader fighting to keep mad cow disease from spreading through the U.S. food supply. Skarbek, 37, began combing obituaries and over time identified 18 people she believes died of CJD from 1993 to 2004 and had eaten regularly at the same restaurant at the now-closed racetrack. She also spotted possible clusters elsewhere or learned of them from loved ones of people whose deaths were classified as sporadic CJD. Sporadic, or naturally occurring, cases of CJD have no known cause but are not due to eating mad-cow-tainted beef - which has killed at least 180 people in the United Kingdom and continental Europe since the 1990s. Beef-related cases are classified as variant CJD....


Biology professor may have chronic wasting puzzle licked

The mystery of how deer and elk spread chronic wasting disease from one animal to another may be solved: Their tongues are infectious. When the animals lick or slobber on each other — a fairly common occurrence, especially among elk — the agent that causes the fatal disease may be shed from their tongues via saliva. When they graze, leaving sloughed-off tongue cells and saliva in grass and soil, the disease could be widely transmitted. Richard Bessen, an associate professor of veterinary molecular biology at Montana State University in Bozeman, discovered the infectious agent, called a prion, in deer and elk tongues. Details of disease transmission still need to be worked out, he said, but he believes the prions in saliva are significant in the growing national epidemic of the disease. A leading expert in Colorado, however, thinks that the jury is still out on how the deadly disease is spread. Mo Salman, a professor of epidemiology at Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said Monday that Bessen injected prions into the brain of a test animal and later found they had traveled to the tongue. That, he said, suggests the agent that causes chronic wasting disease can spread from brain to tongue — but nothing more....