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The U.S. government has confirmed the first case of mad cow disease in six years, but the government is stressing there is no threat to human health. NBC's Robert Bazell reports.
Although the U.S. reported the fourth confirmed case of mad cow in six years this week, the government is stressing there is no threat to human health and no danger of the meat entering the food chain. Officials are still investigating how the dairy cow contracted the disease.
The cow had been picked up by a facility near Fresno, Calif., that takes dead livestock. The non-descript building in the heart of California's dairy country has become the focus of intense scrutiny as results of a random test on April 18 at the lab of the University of California, Davis showed positive results for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a disease that is fatal to cows and can cause a deadly human brain disease in people who eat tainted meat. It has been sent to the USDA lab in Iowa for further testing.
On Tuesday, federal agriculture officials announced the findings: the animal had atypical BSE. That means it didn't get the disease from eating infected cattle feed, said John Clifford, the Agriculture Department's chief veterinary officer.
It was "just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal," said Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University. "Random mutations go on in nature all the time."
In humans, experts say it can occur in one in 1 million people, causing sponge-like holes in the brain. But they say not enough is known about how and how often the disease strikes cattle.
How worried should we be about mad cow in the US?
Experts said the case was "atypical," meaning it was a rare occurrence in which a cow contracts the disease spontaneously, rather than through the feed supply.
The risk of transmission generally comes when the brain or spinal tissue of an animal with BSE, or mad cow disease, is consumed by humans or another animal, which did not occur in this case.
South Korea retailers stop selling US beef in wake of California mad cow
The disease cannot be transmitted by contact among cows, and experts say it's unclear whether this rare type of BSE ever has been transmitted from a cow to a human by eating meat.
The California Department of Public Health and the state Department of Food and Agriculture quickly worked to assure consumers that the food supply is safe — and that the cow hadn't been destined for human consumption. The building where the cow was selected to be tested sends animals to rendering plants, which process animal parts for products not going into the human food chain, such as animal food, soap, chemicals or other household products.
Among the unknowns about the current case are whether the animal died of the disease and whether other cattle in its herd are similarly infected. The name of the dairy where the cow died hasn't been released, and officials haven't said where the cow was born.
"It's appropriate to be cautious, it's appropriate to pay attention and it's appropriate to ask questions, but now let's watch and see what the researchers find out in the next couple of days," said James Cullor, director of the UC Davis dairy food safety laboratory and an authority on BSE.
Cullor said that in this case the food safety testing program worked and that this form of BSE so rarely occurs that consumers shouldn't be alarmed.
"Are you worried about all of the meteors that passed the earthlast night while you were sleeping? Of course not," Cullor said. "Would you pay 90 percent of your salaries to set up all of the observatories on earth to watch for them? Of course not. It's the same thing."
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association said in a statement that "U.S. regulatory controls are effective, and that U.S fresh beef and beef products from cattle of all ages are safe and can be safely traded due to our interlocking safeguards."
The infected cow was identified through an Agriculture Department surveillance program that tests about 40,000 cows a year for the fatal brain disease.
First discovered in Britain in 1986, the disease has killed more than 150 people and 184,000 cows globally, mainly in Britain and Europe, but strict controls have tempered its spread.
In the UK, 175 people, including Jonathan Sims, got a human form of the disease from eating meat from the infected animals. He was left blind, deaf and immobile from 2001 until his death last year. Health officials say milk does not transmit the disease, so an infected dairy cow does not pose a hazard.
There have been three confirmed cases of BSE in cows in the United States — in a Canadian-born cow in 2003 in Washington state, in 2005 in Texas and in 2006 in Alabama.
Both the 2005 and 2006 cases were also atypical varieties of the disease, USDA officials said.
"I would say this is an extremely isolated, atypical event," said Dr. Bruce Akey, professor of veterinary medicine and director of the Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell University, which tests for Mad Cow and Chronic Wasting diseases for New York state and several Northeastern states.
"There is still no evidence at all that BSE is anything but an extremely rare event in the United States and nothing that poses a threat to the human or animal food chain."
Import restrictions from major customers could deal a fresh blow to companies such as Tyson Foods Inc and Brazil-based JBS.
Korean retailer Lotte Mart, a unit of Lotte Shopping Co. , said it had suspended sales due to what it said was "customer concerns," as did Home Plus, a unit of Britain's Tesco PLC.
Not in the feed
The USDA has begun notifying authorities at the World Organization for Animal Health as well as U.S. trading partners, said John Clifford, its chief veterinary officer.
"The systems and safeguards in place to protect animal and human health worked as planned to identify this case quickly and will ensure that it presents no risk to the food supply or to human health," Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, said in a statement.
The USDA is still tracing the life of the infected animal, and the carcass of the cow is under quarantine and will be destroyed.
The Agriculture Department is sharing its lab results with international animal health officials in Canada and England who will review the test results, Clifford said. Federal and California officials will further investigate the case. He said he did not expect the latest discovery to affect beef exports.
State and federal agriculture officials plan to test other cows that lived in the same feeding herd as the infected bovine, said Michael Marsh, chief executive of Western United Dairymen, who was briefed on the plan. They also plan to test cows born at around the same time the diseased cow was.
"Our members have meticulous records on their animals, so they can tell when the animal was born, the parents, and they can trace other animals to the same facility," Marsh said.
For now, all of the other dead cows that arrived on the truck with the diseased one are still in cold storage at Baker's transfer station, which sits in the middle of a wheat field.
The Associated Press, Reuters and NBC's Robert Bazell contributed to this report
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Leave a Comment:
Maybe it's time to STOP feeding cows to cows completely not just stop feeding them cow brains and spinal columns... it's disgusting any way you look at it just like horse feed which contains horse. What is WRONG with farmers that they don't see any problem with this? Would you eat other people? Would you feed your dog dog food made from other dogs? The answer is NO! Normal people wouldn't do this. Feed cows grass and grain. Stop pumping them full of hormones and chemicals. Stop pumping them full of antibiotics (unless they ARE sick). CARE for the animals the way they should be cared for and there's no need for any of these shady and disgusting practices.
The ban on feeding animals parts back to animals was enacted in 1997. There has been NO ruminant feedback for 15 years and it was a rare occurrence even before that.
Repeat: THERE IS NO ANIMAL TO ANIMAL FEEDING IN THE UNITED STATES AND HAS BEEN THIS WAY FOR OVER 15 YEARS.
My guess...This Cow caught it from a human....Patient Zero was Pelosi
@Jake is correct! This was never much of a problem in this country. The reason it blossomed into such a problem in the UK was simple ignorance. They had an epidemic of scrapie in sheep. This is a variation of BSE and CWD that occurs in sheep. At the time prople knew very little about prions and they still do not understand how it is transmitted. I think the current thinking is that it is in urine and can persist in the environment indefinitely. The disease is as old as sheep farming. But the British, where feeds like corn and soybean meal are imported and expensive, decided to save a lot of money by heat- and ammonia-treating the ground-up dead sheep and using them as a protein supplement in cattle feed ionstead of soy meal. The really bad problem was that it spread the disease to huge numbers of cattle and a significant number (around 175) of people ate the infected beef and died. Bad news!
Here, it doesn't make sense to feed animal by-products to cattle because soy and corn are so cheap. But you always have cases of BSE and CWD and TSE and CJD because the irregular protein fold can occur spontaneously, possibly as a result of cosmic radiation. In the US there will always be at least one case of BSE a decade expected. When we're lucky, we catch it as we did this one. But otherwise we just have to consider it as in the same category as a maetor hitting you. Could happen, but not very likely.
Random mutation or not I'll skip it and stick to my veggies, thanks. Yes, cows should be eating grass and not pumped full of chemicals. They should be out munching grass.
My Poker bud, a perfectly healthy woman in her mid-fifties died last year from mad cow disease. I have an uncomfortable feeling that there's lots more human deaths from this disease that go unreported. I sure don't have any confidence that the beef industry is doing a good job of keeping infected cows out of the food supply.
If ever there was an industry that needs more oversight and regulation, this is it.
The disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and it can be contracted by ways other then eating infected bovine parts.
It could also be FFI (Fatal Familial Insomnis) which is a hereditary disease that can pass down from family member to family member. If a family member has this then you have a 50% chance of getting it. This is a very sad and rare disease and I know family members that have it.
@Kevin, you are mistaken. NO ONE died last year from Mad Cow Disease, BSE, or vCJD. Period. There were 152 deaths from regular CJD, but that is completely separate from the vCJD that comes from eating beef infected with BSE. Both BSE and CJD (and CWD and TSE) all arise spontaneously. That means that the cow or human body is chugging along producing a harmless protein in the brain. But, for reasons unknown, the protein becomes folded in a special way. Somehow (no one knows how) the folded protein can influence the body so that additional folded copies of the protein appear. That's it. The reason that there are so many unknown is that it is extremely rare. About one case per decade of BSE can be expected in this country. Scientists can examine slides from autopsies of cows or people and determine if the prion originated in humans or cows because the folds are slightly different.
It is a much more serious problem with Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, elk, and moose. While there are warnings about eating deer brains and breaking the spinal cord, most hunters ignore it. Eating infected game can cause vCJD right along with BSE.
I agree. They HIDE more then they tell purly for the sake of profit. They only test 40,000 cows out of millions. Just like feeding us PINK SLIME, PROFIT is what runs our country.
Kevin, are you sure that was not sporadic CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease)? It occurs in one of a million per year. This means 300 new cases in US per year.
Yeah Obama is just a random mutation too and USA kids will be paying and paying and paying for generations thanks to his ego maniac wasteful economic ways--$5.5 trillion more debt on his watch! Disgusting. All to pad his own narcissistic ego.
And what does this have to do with the article? Keep your Obama hate on articles that are relevant to him,please.
Are you an idiot?
I don't believe it. just like the last case that was reported got blamed on Canada.
Do you expect the beef industry to step up to the mike and say "we have a problem" not going to happen.
and morebits - there are political threads for that type of trolling
The scary thing is BSE is caused by a prion....and prions cannot be destroyed by incineration or chemicals. And can go on living in the ground. So unless they have found a chemical that kills prions lord knows how many are just floating around looking for hosts
Prions are proteins, so they are not actively looking for "hosts" and they can be destroyed with Temperatures of more than 1,100 degrees F sometimes up to 1,800 degrees, but they are also using (from another article on msnbc)
"Large vat-like machines known as alkaline hydrolysis tissue digesters, one of which Powers' lab operates, can essentially dissolve entire carcasses.
Infected material is placed in a solution of potassium hydroxide — also known as caustic potash — for at least six hours, at 300 degrees Fahrenheit and 60 psi, about four times ambient air pressure"
God forbid anything should negatively impact the Beef Industry. When hundreds of cattle and hundreds of people start to die, we'll deny there's any connection.
Just keep eating your veggies that are sprayed with what? oh chemicals And we need more government involvement that is really stupid b/c i haven't seen anything that they do well.
I don't think I've heard of a human in the United States contracting a prion disease from any animal for the better part of a decade. Most prion diseases in humans are spontaneous from a misfolded protein that goes rogue. Odds are your own body is more of a risk for causing prion diseases than anything you eat. The cow that was infected was most likely a victim of this spontaneous mechanism. There are countless things to be more worried about than "Mad cow disease". Listeria, for instance, or E coli, or a parasitic infection. Your brain is more likely to come under attack by cancer than by a rouge prion contracted from tainted meat.
I'll continue eating meat confident in its safety, if not its quality.
"The building where the cow was selected to be tested sends animals to rendering plants, which process animal parts for products not going into the human food chain, such as animal food, soap, chemicals or other household products." PET FOOD?????? Oh great can this kill our pets?
Not really. The most highly infectious tissues are brain and spinal tissues and those are prohibited in all feed stocks--human and animal. Moreover, there have only been something like 200 cases of humans contracting "mad-cow disease", ever! In the US it's less than ten! Ten people in... let's just say 250 years! That's less than a one in a one hundred million chance of contracting this disease! You are almost more likely to be killed by a stray meteor or an escaped tiger from the zoo mauling you! Not to mention how many hundreds of thousands of times more likely you are to develop a spontaneous prion disease from your own proteins going rogue.
@Terror Bird,
Badly wrong. There have only been 4 recorded cases of people contracting Mad Cow Disease. (It is properly called BSE in cows and the disease when transmitted from beef to humans is called vCJD.) Three were traced to the outbreak in the UK and 1 to Saudi Arabia. With the size of out dairy/beef cattle operations, one would expect about 1 case in cattle every 7-10 years and all cases in humans to be of the regular CJD variety (which is not related to eating beef) except for those contracted overseas. There has never been a reported case of a spontaneous vCJD, though it is somewhat remotely possible. There are structural and protein differences that allow the distinction to be made between TSEs, CWD, BSE, CJD, and vCJD.
I read an article stating the worldwide contraction of "mad-cow disease" to be something like 168 recorded cases as of 2006. The US had three or four. I rounded up considering that there could be undiagnosed instances, misdiagnosis, etc.
I stated it is more likely to develop "a spontaneous prion disease" than to get "mad-cow disease" from tainted beef. Nearly all prion diseases fall under "spontaneous prion disease". CJD, perhaps the most common spontaneous human prion disease, occurs in about one in a million. Maybe not hundreds of thousands as times more likely, but I'm guessing sarcasm escapes you.
YES!!! 1 step closer to Zombie apocalypse!!!!
So how much brain and spinal tissue ends up in "pink slime?"
@Erick,
Zero, it is forbidden. Period. There are literally accounting systems that account for all the skull contents and the entire unbroken spinal card. These are not even rendered (turned into non-food items such as fertilizers.) These rules have been in place since 1997 and have actually been reduced because of the success of the surveillance program, high compliance by meat packers, and, of course, budget cuts.
Sorry, but this just smacks of a cover up. They want to push the bad meat on consumers and make it disappear. Even without proof it's reasonable to assume there are other animals that are infected in that dairy at least.