July 19, 2004

 

 

More Mad Cow Cases Predicted In U.S.

 

Computer models predict that more cases of mad cow disease will be found in the United States. But veterinary experts say they don't expect the sort of devastating epidemic of the brain-wasting disease that hit Europe in the past decade.

 

Will Hueston of the University of Minnesota's Center for Animal Health and Food Safety said precautions the U.S. government took by ordering brains and spinal cords removed from the animal food supply in 1997 have dramatically lowered the chances of a major epidemic of mad cow disease in the United States.

 

"There will be more cases, but not many," Hueston told a convention of the Institute of Food Technologists, meeting here this week. "Our situation clearly is different than the United Kingdom and Japan because of that feed ban six years ago."

 

At the peak of the epidemic in England in 1993, about 1,000 cattle were diagnosed as carrying the agent causing the disease, known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. England has also reported 147 deaths between 1996 and 2004 of a human brain-wasting disorder that scientists link to eating contaminated meat. There has been one death from this disorder in the United States, involving a woman who died in Florida this year after moving from England.

 

Caroline Smith DeWaal, a food-safety specialist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington interest group, said the feed ban and different slaughtering practices adopted by the industry in recent years were wise steps, but she said the U.S. government needs to do more.

 

After the first case of mad cow disease was detected in a Holstein cow in Washington state last December, the Bush administration promised new directives banning feeding of cattle blood to calves, and prohibiting feeding wasted restaurant food to pigs and chickens.

 

But while issuing new regulations banning bovine material from cosmetics last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it needs more time to judge if those regulations are now necessary.

 

DeWaal said further restrictions on feeding animal products to other animals is needed. "We need additional regulations, and a feed ban expanded," he said.

 

DeWaal also urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand its testing program to cover all cattle showing signs of central nervous stress, and prohibit the meat industry from using advanced recovery technique machines to extract meat from the neck bones of cattle -- a process that can result in meat recovered for hot dogs and ground meat to be contaminated with spinal cord.

 

He said the government should expand its tests involving 268,000 older cattle to include all animals showing signs of distress of the central nervous system.

 

Hueston, a veterinary expert on the disease, said testing younger cattle for the disease would mislead the public about the safety of the meat supply, and waste resources that could be spent fighting other food-borne diseases that have greater fatality rates.

 

He said that cattle infected with the agent that causes the disease continue to test negative for more than a year after infection, and expanding tests to include cattle that are likely to test negative would distort the data and mislead the public about the disease's prevalence.

 

Hueston said experiments feeding infected blood to cattle have not found any case of cattle getting the disease that way.

 

Hueston said the disease does not easily jump from cattle to humans. A recent British study estimated that people there ate 54 million doses of infected cattle from 1980 to 2003.