U.S. Officials Scramble to Trace Origins Of Cow's Infection; Meat Recall Is Issued
[USDA Briefing on Discovery Of Mad Cow Disease in U.S. - AP 23dec03]
WASHINGTON—Federal officials raced on Wednesday to find out where a Washington state cow, apparently infected with mad-cow disease, was born and where it may have been infected.
Even as the investigation continued, officials sought to reassure Americans about the safety of the nation's food supply. That didn't stop several nations from banning U.S. beef, including Japan, Taiwan and Mexico.
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VALUE OF U.S. BEEF EXPORTS For 2002, in thousands of US$: Japan 843,021 South Korea 609,742 Mexico 595,691 Canada 286,282 Hong Kong & China 72,097 Taiwan 49,774 Russia 14,613 World 2,585,373 Retail equivalent value of U.S. beef industry in 2002: $65 billion. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Meat Export Federation |
U.S. Agriculture Department officials told a briefing that the cow joined the Washington state herd in October 2001 and was culled from other cows Dec. 9, after she became paralyzed, apparently as a result of calving.
But because the brain-wasting disease is usually transmitted through contaminated feed and has an incubation period four to five years, it is "important to focus on the feed where she was born" in 1999, USDA chief veterinarian Ron DeHaven said.
Mexico Bars Live U.S. Cattle
The impact was evident almost immediately: Japan, the world's top importer of U.S. beef in terms of value, imposed an indefinite ban and planned to recall certain meat products already on the market, while South Korea halted customs inspections of American beef and suspended sales for meat already on supermarket shelves.
Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Chile also banned the imports, as did the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.
Mexico, which imports the largest quantity of American beef—384,900 tons, also banned the import of live cattle from the U.S. The U.S. shipped 106,000 head of cattle to Mexico last year.
"This is a precautionary measure, in which Mexico is saying "stop everything" and we'll study the situation," said Javier Trujillo, director of safety and inspection for Mexico's Agriculture Department. "We're even going to send inspectors to Washington state and once we know the exact dimensions, we will decide if we maintain it."
In Brussels, the European Union, which already bans much U.S. beef because of fears about growth hormones, said it would not take any additional measures.
Other Animals Are Quarantined
Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said tissue samples from the diseased cow were put aboard a commercial jet expected to arrive in England Wednesday for conclusive tests of the preliminary diagnosis. She said results of those tests could be available in three to five days.
She said the animal fell ill on at large dairy farm with two sites and 4,000 cows in southern Washington state. All the animals on this farm have been quarantined by the state. If the preliminary testing confirms the preliminary finding, it is likely that other cows in the herd will be slaughtered.
President Bush, who is with his family at Camp David for Christmas, has been receiving regular updates on the situation, a White House spokesman said. He spoke with Ms. Veneman again on Wednesday, and will be getting briefings on the incident later in the day, the spokesman said.
Agriculture Department officials and cattle industry executives tried to allay fears that American beef supplies had become infected, saying the U.S. inspection system was working effectively: The farm where the cow originated has been quarantined and officials were tracing the movement of the cow from the farm to the slaughterhouse, and the flow of the meat to processing plants.
"The important point is that the high-risk materials—that is, the brain and spinal column that would cause infectivity in humans—were removed from this cow," Ms. Veneman said on ABC's "Good Morning America" Wednesday.
She noted that the U.S. since the early 1990s has banned the use of cow and sheep byproducts for animal feed, which cuts off a major mode of transmission of the disease.
USDA officials announced early Wednesday that Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co., a distributor in Moses Lake, Wash., is voluntarily recalling approximately 10,410 pounds of raw beef that may have been exposed to tissues containing mad cow. They said the beef was produced on Dec. 9 and shipped to several establishments for further processing and is being recalled "out of an abundance of caution" even though it "would not be expected to be infected or have an adverse public health impact."
The department's Food Safety and Inspection Service said it is continuing its investigation to ensure that all the recalled beef is correctly identified and tracked, but gave no further details immediately. There was no answer at the telephone number listed for Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co.
Ms. Veneman also assured Americans that no foul play was suspected, saying "this incident is not terrorist-related."
Appearing on CBS' "The Early Show," Ms. Veneman asserted, "The risk is extremely low to human health and I would without hesitation say that no one should be afraid to eat beef."
Mad-cow disease eats holes in the brains of cattle. It sprang up in Britain in 1986 and spread through countries in Europe and Asia, prompting massive destruction of herds and decimating the European beef industry.
People can contract a form of mad-cow disease if they eat infected beef or nerve tissue, and possibly through blood transfusions. The human form of mad-cow disease so far has killed 143 people in Britain and 10 elsewhere, none in the U.S.
Risks to Humans 'Extremely Low'
Ms. Veneman said the risk to human health in this U.S. case was "extremely low." Nonetheless, U.S. beef producers worried that they could suffer heavily from a mad cow scare. Restaurants that serve beef also could be affected.
"I think it has the potential to hurt our industry," said Jim Olson, a rancher in Stanfield, Ariz., who owns about 150 cattle.
Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, called on the government to test more cows for the disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
"The U.S. needs to be far more proactive in protecting the American food supply," said Michael Hansen, a senior research associate. "We are very concerned that the diseased animal made it into the food supply and that the processing plants could be contaminated."
The disease was found in a Holstein cow, which could not move on its own, from a farm in Mabton, Wash., about 40 miles southeast of Yakima. Tissue samples were taken on Dec. 9, and eventually tested positive for BSC. Parts of the cow that would be infected—the brain, the spinal cord and the lower part of the small intestine—were removed before the animal went to a meat processing plant, standard operating procedure in the U.S.
Many residents of Mabton—population 2,045—were protective of local cattle owners Tuesday and unwilling to discuss the matter with reporters, who were turned away from businesses and farms.
The apparent discovery of mad-cow disease comes at a time when the U.S. beef industry is flourishing, in part because imports from Canada dried up after a single case of the disease was found there last spring and also in part because of the popularity of the Atkins high-protein diet .
A USDA Choice sirloin steak sells for more than $6 per pound, compared with about $4 per pound a year ago. The price of pound of ground beef is $2.04, up from $1.84 last year.
"The beef cattle industry has just had a resurgence of growth," said Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R., Miss.). "This is going to be a setback."
Some American consumers said Tuesday they weren't ready to find something else for dinner. "We're beef eaters," said Carrie Whitacre of Omaha, Neb. "Plus we're not going to get beef from Washington state here anytime soon."
Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said that while whole cuts of meat should be safe, there could be problems with ground meat, which can be mechanically stripped from the bone near an infected part. "USDA needs to take swift action to insure that the meat that is found in hot dogs, hamburgers and those others doesn't pose a risk," Ms. DeWaal said.
The beef industry said there was nothing to worry about.
"The infectious agent is only found in the central nervous system tissue," said Patti Brumbach, executive director of the Washington State Beef Commission. "None of that made it into the beef supply. I think once consumers understand that the beef supply is safe, it should be a short-term concern."
LONDON, Dec. 24 — Concerns about the possible spread of mad cow disease impelled the largest international markets for American beef to suspend imports from the United States following the discovery of a single diagnosed case of the disease on a Washington State farm.
Japan, South Korea and Mexico, the three largest importers of American beef, led a growing list of countries that announced import bans on beef. Additional testing on a Holstein cow slaughtered Dec. 9 in Mapton, Wash., is being conducted today and Thursday.
Initial tests indicated the cow was infected with the disease, and its carcass and the farm on which it was raised were put under quarantine. One sample of its brain tissue is being flown to a laboratory in Britain, which since the 1980's has experienced one of the largest modern epidemics of mad cow disease and, in 2001, its livestock herds were struck by an even larger epidemic of foot and mouth disease.
The tissue sample from the Holstein is expected to arrive at Heathrow Airport near London early Thursday morning. It will be transported to the Veterinary Laboratories Agency laboratory, in Weybridge, Surrey, said Kevan McClair, a spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in Britain. The test is relatively quick, he said, and the results are expected the same day.
If confirmed by testing here and in the United States, it would mark the first appearance of the disease in the American herd, which supports a multibillion-dollar industry.
British experts said scientific credibility and aggressive intervention were crucial to averting a larger crisis. "The key here is to restore confidence quickly, not to allow it to drag out," Sean Ricard, former chief economist of the National Farmers' Union of Britain, told BBC radio. "What I hope America will do is take rapid action, perhaps slaughter the herd that animal came from."
Australia, still free of the disease and a major cattle and beef exporter, is expected to gain considerable market share from the sudden interruption of American beef supplies to Asia's largest markets.
Still, recent history in Japan, home to some of Asia's pickiest eaters, shows that beef sales over all tend to drop precipitously on the news that the disease has re-emerged. When Japan's relatively small cattle industry was hit by mad cow disease in September 2001, beef sales plunged and restaurants specializing in grilled beef and fast-food chains like McDonald's were hard hit as consumers switched to pork, chicken and fish.
Russian, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Australia, Taiwan, the Chinese territory of Hong Kong and Singapore joined in the suspension of American imports.
Canada, where the discovery of a single case of mad cow disease last May cost more than $1 billion in lost sales to the Canadian beef industry, said it would wait up to 48 hours before deciding whether to close its border to American beef, according to officials of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The European Union took no immediate action because Europe already bans most American beef imports in a dispute over the use of growth hormones in the American cattle industry. Antonia Mochan, a spokeswomen for the union's executive commission in Brussels, told The Associated Press that the United States was already classified as an "at-risk country" under the criteria adopted in the wake of Britain's mad cow crisis.
The British outbreak of mad cow disease spread across Europe in the 1980's, infecting 200,000 cattle and killing more than 130 Britons who caught the human variant of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, from infected meat.
Britain is still in the final stages of its multiyear mad cow epidemic, with 147 animals confirmed infected by the disease in 2003, though the rate of infection dropped 50 percent from 2002 levels. Additional concerns over the transmittal of the human variant of mad cow disease, know as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, arose this week when John Reid, the health secretary, told the House of Commons that a number of blood donors who contracted the disease may have transmitted it more broadly in the population than previously thought.
Russia's agriculture minister, Aleksey V. Gordeyev, said today that Moscow had temporarily suspended imports of American beef, which accounted for 4 percent of Russia's meat imports, or 20,000 tons. He emphasized in remarks to Interfax news agency that the suspension would be lifted once "we are confident that the safety of Russian consumers and livestock is guaranteed."
Mr. Gordeyev suggested that it could take months for the ministry's inspectors to complete checks on American beef.
Mexican officials said today that they had halted all imports from the United States of beef and live cattle following the country's first potential case of mad cow disease.
"This is a precautionary measure, in which Mexico is saying `stop everything' and we'll study the situation," Javier Trujillo, head of the Agriculture Ministry's animal health commission, told Reuters.
The Mexican market is the largest in volume trade, with 106,000 head of cattle shipped to Mexico last year and 384,900 tons of beef.
Japan is the largest importer in dollars terms, taking 221,874 tons of beef in the first 10 months of this year and paying $983 million to American beef growers and accounting for about a third of their business.
South Korea's beef imports totaled $610 million last year, and 187,000 tons of American beef had been landed there through November of this year.
The Mexican authorities said they would aggressively examine the new threat from mad cow disease by dispatching their own inspectors to the United States. "We're even going to send inspectors to Washington State and once we know the exact dimensions, we will decide if we maintain" the import ban, Mr. Trujillo was quoted as saying.
Chile said it was suspending imports as a precautionary measure. A spokesman for the country's Agricultural and Livestock Service told Reuters that most beef imports from the United States were used to make pet food and that Chile has not imported bone meal, one of the products considered most risky in transmitting the brain-wasting disorder, from the United States in 20 years.
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