WEDNESDAY, Dec. 24, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Despite the furor over the first probable case of mad cow disease in the United States, health officials agree the risk to humans at this point is low.
"It's like an alert. We're not as safe as we thought we might be," said David Lineback, director of the Joint Institute of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, a cooperative venture between the University of Maryland and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Nonetheless, the Washington state slaughterhouse that processed the diseased cow's carcass along with 19 others on Dec. 9 has recalled all 10,410 pounds of raw beef it sent out that day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced Wednesday.
Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co. said it is conducting the voluntary recall "out of an abundance of caution," even though the meat "would not be expected to be infected or have an adverse public health impact," the Associated Press quoted the company as saying.
USDA officials said Wednesday that the diseased cow, a Holstein, joined a Mabton, Wash., farm herd of 4,000 in October 2001 and was culled from the other cows on Dec. 9 after becoming paralyzed, apparently as a result of calving. The cow was slaughtered that day, and its parts went to at least three processing plants, which officials haven't yet identified, the AP added. The rest of the herd is expected to be slaughtered now.
The New York Times reported late Wednesday that USDA officials also said that the cow, which was believed to be four years old, probably contracted the disease from feed as a young animal, but that they did not know where it was born or where the other animals in that herd are now.
Tissue samples from the cow have been sent to England for conclusive tests on the preliminary diagnosis, which are expected by Dec. 22.
The discovery of mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), in the United States was bound to happen sooner or later, scientists said.
"It was an inevitability," Lineback said. "There was a low probability, [but] when you have that many million cattle, that is still a finite risk of occurrence. It's just a matter of when."
The bottom line: Go ahead and eat hamburger, or steak if you prefer. "At this stage of the game, I do not see warning people to avoid or to minimize anything," Lineback said.
One reason why experts aren't sounding more alarm bells is the high-risk portions of a cow -- referred to as "specified risk material" (SRM), which includes the spinal column, brain, eyes and other central nervous system tissues -- are supposed to be removed during the slaughter process in the United States.
"Based on the best science that we have available worldwide, the infective agent, the prions that are thought to be responsible for BSE, are not found in the beef muscle meat that we consume in this country," said Dan Murphy, vice president for public affairs at the American Meat Institute, whose member companies produce about 95 percent of the beef in this country.
"That is in sharp contrast to the situation in the U.K. and in Europe in the 1990s," Murphy said. The European beef industry routinely added spinal cord and brain tissue to food products while consumers regularly ate brains.
Mad cow disease first surfaced in Great Britain in 1986. It infected 180,000 livestock, and prompted the United States and other countries to ban beef imports. It subsequently surfaced in other nations, including Canada, where one infected cow was discovered in the province of Alberta last spring. That discovery prompted a temporary U.S. ban on Canadian beef.
People can contract the human equivalent of mad cow disease -- called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- from eating infected nerve tissue and possibly through blood transfusions, U.S. health officials said. So far in Britain, 143 people have died from the disease and 10 have died elsewhere, though none in the United States.
"In this country, even though obviously people are concerned, they should understand we are not at risk because we do not consume brain, we do not add spinal cord to processed meats and sausages and so forth," Murphy said. "We are taking those high-risk central nervous system tissues out of the food supply."
The infected U.S. cow was known as a "downer," meaning it could not stand up or move on its own.
"Those are automatically considered a high risk-animal and therefore its brain was tested for the presence of BSE and that's how they discovered it," Murphy said. Testing is standard whenever a downer exhibits any neurological symptoms such as shaking or stumbling.
The fact that the BSE was discovered is "outstanding," Lineback said.
"The system works, surveillance did its job," Murphy said. "On the other hand, it is likely that the U.S. FDA [Food and Drug Administration] will revisit the protective firewalls. We have to protect our U.S. cattle herd from ever experiencing an epidemic of BSE the way it happened in Europe. And if science said we need to ramp up any of these protective measures, I'm sure those will be absolutely put on the fast track."
Meanwhile, the more immediate worry may be economic.
Shortly after U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced on Tuesday that tests had revealed the cow was infected, Japan, the world's top importer of U.S. beef, imposed an indefinite ban on American meat. South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico and Russia also have imposed various bans on U.S. meat.
"The big concern is the potential economic impact because we've seen what one cow did to Canada and the billions of dollars it cost them," Lineback said. "The occurrence of this one puts us at the same risk as Canada or anybody else, and all the other nations could ban imports from our total nation, not just from Washington state."
In reaction to the news, the U.S. and Tokyo stock markets dipped Wednesday, but not as much as expected. CBS Marketwatch reports livestock futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were down slightly, as were live cattle futures and feeder cattle futures.
And fast food restaurant stocks such as McDonalds and Wendy's, along with retail food producer stocks, also slid in the traditional half-day of trading on Christmas Eve.
More information
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has current updates on BSE, as does the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
