Beef Is What's Safe for Dinner, Officials Say

Insist that mad cow disease found in Canada no threat

WEDNESDAY, May 21, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Officials say the risk to meat eaters of catching mad cow disease is remote despite Tuesday's revelation that one cow in Canada had the brain-wasting disease earlier this year.

The announcement has slammed shut America's borders to beef and beef products from Canada. Canadian agriculture officials say the sick Angus cow, from a herd in Alberta, was slaughtered in January and its remains did not enter the food supply. The rest of the 150-head herd has been quarantined and is set to be destroyed.

"We remain confident in our beef and cattle industry and we will support both [inspection agents] and our cattle industry in eliminating this disease from Canada," Shirley McClellan, Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, said in a statement.

"Information suggests that risk to human health and the possibility of transmission to animals in the United States is very low," echoed U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman.

"This is not a food safety, consumer concern at all," added Dan Murphy, a spokesman for the American Meat Institute.

Officials say they're investigating the origins of the sick cow and trying to determine how it contracted mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The case is the second in Canada. In 1993, a cow from another Alberta ranch was found to have BSE, officials said. That animal was born in Britain and was assumed to have acquired the disease overseas.

The practice of feeding ruminant proteins to other ruminants has been banned in the United States and Canada since the late 1990s. BSE has a long incubation period, and the Canadian cow was 8 years old when it tested positive after being condemned at slaughter. So it's possible that the animal ate contaminated feed prior to the ban.

Mad cow disease is a brain-wasting illness caused by small, deviant proteins known as prions. Cows can contract the infection by eating feed containing the ground-up remains of sick cattle. Humans who eat tainted beef products -- in particular brains and nervous tissue -- can develop a form of mad cow disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). The condition is always fatal.

Canada was home to 15.6 million cattle in 2001, according to an agriculture census of the provinces. Many of those are destined for meat packing plants in border states like Washington, Minnesota and areas of the Northeast. Many also spend time in the stockyards of North Dakota and Montana.

Ed Loyd, a USDA spokesman, says Canadian beef and cattle exports to this country totaled $2.2 billion in 2002. Murphy, the beef industry spokesman, said Canadian beef are not corn-fed like American cattle. As a result, they tend to be somewhat leaner, and are ideal for ground beef, he said.

"The beef supply is safe even if you were eating beef from a country where mad cow is prevalent," Murphy insisted.

Extensive testing of cattle in the United States has failed to turn up a case of mad cow so far, officials say. Even if one were to occur, a Harvard University analysis in 2001 found "little chance that the disease will be a serious threat either to the American cattle herd or to public health." George Gray, the researcher who led that study, says the latest case doesn't change that conclusion.

"The various safeguards in place would prevent it from spreading widely at all," says Gray. Foremost among the firewalls is the 1997 ban on feeding ruminant proteins to cattle, a policy in place both here and in Canada. Although Gray says some ranchers ignored the ban early on, it is much more closely adhered to now.

Another effective protection is the embargo on beef and beef products from Britain and other European countries where mad cow has appeared. "There are things in place to both stop its spread to animals and to people," Gray says.

Finally, the nation's eating habits also may help people avoid mad cow disease. The average American consumes about 65 pounds of beef each year, Murphy says. Yet that's almost entirely muscle meat, which scientists believe doesn't transmit the prions that cause mad cow. Brains and nervous tissue that do carry the particles are rarely eaten.

More information

Through early May of this year, British health authorities had recorded 129 confirmed or probable deaths from vCJD. For more on mad cow disease, try the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For more on the Canadian investigation, try the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

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