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USDA: Mad Cow Test Delayed

Posted on: Friday, 29 July 2005, 21:00 CDT

Jul. 29--A veterinarian waited three months to submit a brain-tissue sample to a government lab for mad cow testing, a sample that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is now characterizing as yielding a "nondefinitive" result for the disease.

If additional tests are positive, it would be the second time in as many months that the USDA has determined an animal had mad cow disease months after the initial sample was taken.

The latest case posed no risk to human or animal food supplies because the carcass was destroyed, said John Clifford, chief veterinarian for the USDA.

The latest suspect animal was a domestic cow at least 12 years old that experienced complications during calving last April and died on the farm, Clifford said. He declined to release more detailed information about the animal, its location or breed.

A private veterinarian collected a brain-stem sample from the animal to submit for testing but did not send the sample to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa, until last week.

"The veterinarian set aside the sample after preserving it, and simply forgot to send it in," Clifford said.

Also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease has been found in two U.S. cattle since December 2003, one a case reported last month from Texas and the other case in Washington state from a cow that originally came from Canada.

Clifford said the test was "nondefinitive" because the sample could not be definitively determined as either positive or negative.

The USDA's test results detected "staining," which suggests the detection of prions, said Michael Hansen, senior scientist with the advocacy group Consumers Union.

"This probably suggests it is BSE but a different strain," Hansen said.

The veterinarian in the case, who has not been named, treated the sample with a preservative that prevents rapid-screening tests or the Western blot testing protocols. The use of preservatives means the sample can be tested using only the immunohistochemistry test, the same test protocol that produced false results last fall in Ames.

USDA is conducting further testing at the Ames lab and also sending a sample to the lab in Weybridge, England, that confirmed the last U.S. mad cow case in June. Scientists in Ames and England will run tests on multiple samples of the animal to get a definitive result.

The cow was born before the Food and Drug Administration's 1997 feed ban, which prohibits feeding cattle meat or bone meal from cattle or other ruminant animals. Eating meat or bone meal from infected animals is regarded as the main way mad cow disease is spread.

The Food and Drug Administration reports 99.9 percent compliance with the feed ban, but the U.S. Government Accountability Office last February cited several weaknesses in the FDA's regulatory controls. Among the GAO's contentions was that more than 2,800 feed companies had not been inspected in five years or more.

The beef industry responded to Wednesday's announcement by stressing that U.S. beef is safe.

"The beef we eat, like steaks, roasts and ground beef, is safe. These products have never been associated with a BSE-related human illness," said James Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute, a lobbying group for meatpackers.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association noted that the United States has several firewalls against mad cow disease, which include removing from the food supply specified risk materials -- key internal organs where BSE-diseased proteins could be found -- from cattle 30 months of age and older.

Since June 2004, the United States has tested more than 419,000 cattle the agency considers "high risk," although some have criticized the lag time for testing and the methodology of the testing.

The latest test comes after the advocacy group Consumers Union wrote to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to again question the testing program. Consumers Union specifically requested data regarding testing of cattle that die on farms.

"We want to know exactly which cattle are tested and whether or not they really represent the most valid scientific sampling of the highest-risk animals from across the country," Hansen said.

U.S. Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also sent a letter to Johanns this week asking whether the USDA was following through on the department's earlier claims to randomly test older cattle over 30 months of age that may appear healthy.

Harkin said he thinks the agency chose not to test those cattle but declined to publicly report that information.

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Source: Omaha World-Herald

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