June 3, 2004

US Reps Want Task Force To Coordinate Mad Cow Research

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson was asked Wednesday to create a task force to coordinate research now performed by several U.S. agencies and universities into diseases such as mad cow.

Thirteen House of Representative members, all but one of them Democrats, said their request was triggered by the first U.S. case in December of mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

A rare but invariably fatal human variant of prion disease, Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease, has been linked to the consumption of BSE-tainted beef. Another variant is scrapie in sheep.

"We are concerned that there is limited coordination among the crucial components of a national research program around the prevention, surveillance and study of prion disease," the lawmakers wrote Thompson. "And there appears to be no coordinated action plan to ensure that these efforts build on one another."

More than $97 million is spent annually on research on prion disease by several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration, the lawmakers said.