December 24, 2003, Pg. A01

Mad Cow Case Found In U.S. for First Time;
Infected Animal Killed In Washington State

By Shankar Vedantam

A Holstein cow slaughtered in Washington state earlier this month was infected with mad cow disease, marking the first time that the dreaded illness that devastated the beef industry in Britain has been detected in the United States, officials announced yesterday.

Meat from the animal, which was slaughtered Dec. 9, traveled through three processing plants before a test revealed the problem 13 days later. But officials at the Department of Agriculture insisted that infectious portions of the animal were removed at the slaughterhouse and diverted to a rendering plant.

"We believe the risk of any human health effects is very low," said Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman. She added, "I plan to serve beef for my holiday dinner."

In the first of what may be a cascade of blows to the industry, however, Japan, the largest foreign customer for U.S. beef, announced a temporary halt on imports, as did South Korea.

A senior administration official said the USDA was considering a recall order for meat in the distribution chain that could have been tainted by the infected cow and could make a decision as early as today, based on data being studied overnight.

Officials have clamped a quarantine on the farm in Mabton, 40 miles southeast of Yakima in south-central Washington. The farm sent the cow to Vern's Moses Lake Meats slaughterhouse in Moses Lake, USDA officials said. They are also investigating three facilities that later handled meat from the infected cow. All the facilities are in Washington state.

Infected tissue samples from the cow were flown on a military plane to England, where a laboratory in Weybridge is expected to conduct a final set of tests.

Agriculture officials said they had informed their counterparts in Mexico and Canada but knew of no immediate plans to close borders to the transport of cattle products. The U.S. beef industry slaughters about 40 million animals every year and is worth $175 billion.

The infection, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, turns the brains of animals spongy. Consuming infected meat can cause a related human disease called variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, a fatal brain-wasting disorder. Unlike diseases caused by bacteria or viruses, BSE is caused by a self-replicating protein called a prion.

The disease surfaced in Britain in 1986, where it led to the slaughter of millions of cattle. A total of 153 people are known to have died from the human form, all but 10 of them in the United Kingdom.

In May, Canadian authorities discovered a case of mad cow disease in an animal in Alberta, leading the United States and a number of other countries to suspend imports of Canadian beef. USDA officials said they were investigating whether the two cases might be linked.

The infected dairy cow in Washington was about 12 years old, said Elsa A. Murano, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for food safety. She said that BSE is not known to be transmissible through dairy products.

The mad cow disease outbreak in England in the 1980s and '90s was triggered when brain tissue from infected animals was fed to other cattle. Murano said safety measures in place in the United States prevented this practice.

Veneman and Murano laid out this chain of events to explain why they believe the nation's food supply is safe:

The Holstein cow was sent to the slaughterhouse Dec 9. Because it was unable to move on its own and believed to be at higher risk for illnesses such as BSE, tissue samples were taken after it was slaughtered. Officials did not say precisely why the cow was immobile -- a "downer" animal -- but it could have been the result of disease, old age or injuries. Scientists conducted routine tests for BSE on 20,526 cattle in the fiscal year that ended Sept 30, 2003.

The brain and spinal tissues of the cow, the parts known to be affected by BSE, were diverted to a rendering plant where the tissues were heated and ground up. Murano said that the rendering plant might have turned the infected tissue into chicken feed or processed it for the cosmetics industry. Mad cow disease is not believed to be transmitted through those routes.

There is a small possibility chickens that ate the infected meat could have been slaughtered in turn and ended up as cattle feed -- but the disease has not been shown to be transmissible in this manner, said W. Ron DeHaven, deputy administrator and chief veterinary officer at the USDA.

Meat from the rest of the infected cow was sent to a deboning plant called Midway Meat and then to two processing facilities, Willamette and Interstate Meat, the USDA officials said.

The first positive test for the infection arrived Monday, DeHaven said, and confirmatory tests were conducted ahead of yesterday's announcement.

Food safety advocates lashed out at the beef industry and the USDA for not clamping down on downer animals.

"We shouldn't be using downer cows in our food supply at all," said Karen Taylor Mitchell of the advocacy group Safe Tables Our Priority. "There is a USDA regulation about not using them for the school lunch program. Yet it is okay for the same children who are protected at school to go home and be served sick cows."

Mitchell also charged that once an infection was found, the government agency was poorly equipped to identify where the infected meat had traveled. She said there were concerns that a technique called advanced meat recovery, which is used to extract the maximum amount of meat from a carcass, might also pull infected tissue from the spinal cord into the food supply.

Bryan Dierlam, director of legislative affairs at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said that the Moses Lake slaughterhouse was not using advanced meat-recovery techniques. He said that less than 1 percent of the 40 million cows slaughtered every year were downer animals.

Asked whether such animals should be kept out of the nation's food supply, Dierlam said: "Many nonambulatory animals don't pose a threat to the food supply, and just using that as a litmus test isn't the way to go."

George Gray, executive director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, said: "While this animal is cause for concern, to me it does not in and of itself raise a major alarm for animal and human health."

A 2001 analysis by the Harvard group found that the USDA had enough safeguards to prevent mad cow disease from spreading widely even if infected cows made their way into the country. For example, it concluded that even if 10 infected animals got into the country, over the next 20 years there would only be four new cases of mad cow disease.

"With this system, the disease would not spread very widely," Gray said.

Staff writers Rob Stein, Mike Allen and Blaine Harden contributed to this report.

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