Mad Cow Disease Reported in US
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| Wed, 12-24-2003 - 12:06am |
Discovery of the brain-wasting disease immediately halted U.S. sales of beef to some nations Tuesday, pressured share prices of fast-food companies and raised consumer concerns about food safety -- especially as officials said meat from the cow may have been eaten as hamburgers.
"A single Holstein cow from Washington state was tested as presumptive positive for BSE or what is widely known as mad cow disease," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said.
Japan and South Korea, two of the biggest buyers of U.S. beef, immediately halted imports as a precaution, and others were expected to follow suit. Shares of fast-food companies like McDonald's Corp. dropped, and analysts in Chicago predicted beef and grain prices would fall sharply when trading resumes Wednesday.
Mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, has never been found in the United States before. Scientists believe humans can be infected by eating meat contaminated with diseased brain or spinal column material. BSE is not found in meat like steaks and roasts.
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more follow link:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20031224/ts_nm/food_disease_madcow_dc

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There's still no definite link between mad cow disease and vCJD except that they are in the same family of disease...
I was going to point out that only 200 people have died from it worldwide, most of which were in Britain. I agree that every precaution should be taken when the cause of something like this is known but the toll it has taken on the cattle industry in Canada (and soon the US) seems overblown compared to the risk (particularly when it is not a contageous disease, in the classic sense). I can think of unpleasant things that routinely come from animals that are much more common than this but don't get the press.
I don't think it is that odd that the cows came from Alberta because that is a huge cattle producing province. About the discrepancy in records, it could merely be an administration error or it could be "funny business" as you said.
I had mentioned before that both countries have basically the same regulations when it comes to cattle feed (the ban happening in 1997 for both countries) so any cases in older cattle coming from early contaminated feed could have easily happened on either side of the border. Given the long incubation period for the disease and that the pre 1997 cows are just now showing up with the disease, I hope we aren't seeing the tip of the iceburg.
Interesting articles:
http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=8380
http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2003/12/29/rtr1193000.html
Renee
I'm not really a Dean fan (I can't understand why he is the more popular candidate). Personally, I would have found the cartoon even funnier if you replaced Dean with Bush.
;o)
A lot of the panic seems to be coming from outside and getting cut off by trading partners. (The US being one of Canada's when the case in May was discovered....though to be fair, Japan was putting a lot of pressure on the US to keep up their ban on Canadian beef at that time as well).
Thanks for posting.........
>"Prusiner tried, since the Canadian case was detected in May, to get an appointment with US Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, a peach-grower's daughter and former cattle industry lobbyist (according to some reports). http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Science&oid=41359
UPDATE:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/160920_madcow17.html
New mad cow strain found
Some cases of human brain disease may be linked to Italian discovery
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
By DONALD G. MCNEIL JR.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A new form of mad cow disease has been found in Italy, according to a study released yesterday, and scientists believe that it may be the cause of some cases of human brain-wasting disease.
While the strain has been found in only two Italian cows, both apparently healthy, scientists in Europe and the United States said the discovery should provide new impetus for the Department of Agriculture to adopt the more sensitive rapid tests used in Europe because it may not show up in those used here.
Reports of unusual types of mad cow disease have also been reported recently in France and Japan. Scientists say the new forms suggest that many cases of "sporadic" human disease -- by far the most common kind, responsible for about 300 deaths a year in the United States -- are not spontaneous at all, but come from eating animals.
The brain-destroying diseases involve prions -- misfolded proteins that are believed somehow to induce other proteins to fold incorrectly, leaving patches of useless debris and holes.
The study, by a team from universities in Turin, Verona, Brescia and Milan, was edited by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, who won a 1997 Nobel Prize for his prion work. Results of the recent study appear this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Two U.S. experts not involved in the study said that the findings were sobering.
Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti, director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University, called the report "very convincing."
Dr. Paul Brown, a prion expert at the National Institutes of Health, said that it "opens the possibility of a second strain of the agent in circulation -- and that's probably not good news."
Current U.S. testing focuses only on finding the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cows and "variant" Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
But the disease found in two aged dairy cows in Italy is so different that its discoverers gave it a new name, bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy, or BASE, because it forms amyloid plaques in the brain -- round, dark clumps of sticky protein junk.
"We don't know if this disease is passed to humans," said Dr. Salvatore Monaco, a neurologist at the G.B. Rossi Polyclinic in Verona and an author of the study. "But it is very similar to a subtype that causes sporadic CJD in humans."
In the past, some people with cases diagnosed as sporadic said they had eaten squirrel brains, pig brains or raw meat, but no link to a different prion was established, said Dr. Michael Hansen, who studies prion diseases for Consumers Union.
Recently, he said, a new prion strain closely related to a French strain of scrapie, a sheep disease, was found in a French cow.
Both the Italian cows, one 15 years old and one 11, appeared healthy. Their unusual strain was discovered only because Italy tests all cattle over 30 months old slaughtered for human food. By last August, it had tested 1.6 million and found 103 that tested positive for prions.
Finding a new strain in apparently healthy cattle "suggests that all surveillance should be like we do in Italy," Monaco said.
Many American prion experts concur. The United States plans to test 40,000 cows this year, focusing on those too sick to walk, and using an immunohistochemistry test that takes about eight days and is "much less sensitive," Gambetti said, than tests used in Europe that take only hours.
Besides forming plaques, the strain differs in that it appears in much older cattle. Most cows with the well-known strain die before they are 10. Also, the new prions collect in different parts of the brain -- the olfactory bulb and thalamus, rather than the brain stem. By comparison, the two cows also had fewer "holes" in their brains.
These characteristics resemble those found in about 30 percent of humans who have the sporadic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
In the United States, about one person per million develops and dies of the sporadic form each year, meaning that there are usually about 300 cases in the country. (For unknown reasons, Italy has nearly 2 cases per million; Switzerland has about 3.)
Only one person in the United States has had variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the human form of mad cow disease, which was first described in the 1990s and has killed about 150 Europeans; she grew up in Britain and was probably infected there.
Most sporadic cases are among the elderly, while in Britain the variant form struck many people under 30. Victims of each rapidly develop staggering, memory loss and dementia and then fall into comas and die.
Brown said the discovery did not suggest that many humans were suffering from undiagnosed illness. If that were the case, he said, the number of sporadic cases found in Britain since 1994 should have shot up; they have not.
The sporadic form has been assumed to arise spontaneously because there has been no other obvious cause, said Dr. Laura Manuelidis, a Yale neuropathologist who studies the disease.
But human cases from several countries produce different symptoms when injected into susceptible mice, showing that there are several human strains.
Manuelidis is skeptical of the conventional wisdom that prions, which contain no DNA or RNA, can transmit infections. She believes that a slow-acting virus, not yet discovered, may be the cause.
To make her point that such infections may have been crossing species well before mad cows created a scandal in Britain a decade ago, she read from an old report she has posted on her office door.
It is from an 1883 issue of the Medical Veterinary Review: A veterinarian named Serraet from southwestern France describes a cow he saw die of the symptoms of scrapie, which had then been known in sheep for 100 years: itching, nervousness, partial paralysis and, ultimately, coma.
Serraet ends with a suggestion: "I would advise the managers of cattle abattoirs to sell the meat only to lower-class butcher shops."
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