An 11-year-old cow, intercepted at a livestock market in Alabama, is the fifth U.S. case of mad cow disease, the brain-wasting fatal disease found generally in older cattle, said the USDA. “This finding … should not lead to any trade issues,” said USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, because it was the “atypical” type that seems to occur spontaneously.
The discovery was announced just weeks after China ended a 13-year ban on U.S. beef, imposed following the first U.S. case, found in December 2003, in a dairy cow in Washington state. The USDA spent years re-opening beef trade around the world in the wake of that discovery, a “classical” type of mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Classical BSE appeared in Britain in the late 1980s, with the primary source of infection being livestock feed contaminated with prions.
Mad cow disease is not contagious. Classical BSE has been linked to a brain-wasting disease in people called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The United States has two lines of defense against mad cow disease: a “feed ban” that bars the use of cattle meat-and-bone meal in rations for cattle and other ruminants and removal of “specified risk materials” that might contain BSE, such as brains and spinal cords, during slaughter.
After the Washington state case in 2003, which involved an animal imported from Canada, the following U.S. cases have been the atypical variety. In the Alabama case, “the animal was showing clinical signs and was found through routine surveillance” said USDA.
“The World Organization for Animal Health has deemed the United States to have ‘negligible risk’ for BSE and today’s announcement should not affect the United States’ status,” said a meat industry trade group, the North American Meat Institute.