America denies having BSE, but has yet to prove it

June 27, 2003

And still has yet to prove it!!

Mad cow USA

New Scientist vol 169 issue 2277 - 10 February 2001, page 11

America denies having BSE, but has yet to prove it

AS BSE casts its menacing shadow across much of the globe, the US is becoming increasingly nervous that its $400 billion beef industry may not escape. Officials have taken precautions to keep BSE out. But New Scientist has established that even if the US has as high an incidence of BSE as France, where it has sparked a health and farming crisis, American surveillance efforts would not spot it.

The US imported a mere 44 tonnes of British meat and bone meal (MBM) before 1996, plus 126 cattle that escaped a subsequent round-up and could have ended up as feed. But last year, the European Commission's scientific advisers warned that any infection in those imports would have been spread and amplified by American rendering and feeding practices (New Scientist, 10 June 2000, p 4).

American officials strongly deny this. "We have no BSE," says Linda Detwiler, who chairs the BSE Working Group at the US Department of Agriculture. Despite this, in 1997 it banned the feeding of ruminants to ruminants to prevent the recycling of any infection. Last week, Texas staged a highly publicised round-up of 1221 cattle that had been fed ruminant MBM by mistake. The source of the contaminated feed was Purina Mills, the country's biggest feed manufacturer, which now says it will no longer use the remains of any mammal in its feed, a move others seems likely to follow.

Last year, the USDA more than doubled its BSE tests on sick cattle and downers—animals that are found dead or cannot stand. But the 2303 tests it carried out are too few to detect a very low incidence of the disease, says Marcus Doherr of the Swiss Federal Veterinary Office, who helped design a similar programme in Switzerland. "That sample size allows you to say only that you have no more than 1.3 infected cows per thousand." This is almost exactly the incidence that France discovered it had in downers last year.

The US disease monitoring system also relies on farmers or abattoirs reporting sick cows. "People who think they have no BSE are unlikely to recognise a case, let alone report it," says Doherr. "That is what happened in Germany."

And BSE is not the only prion disease that might stalk American cattle. In 1985 in Stetsonville, Wisconsin, a disease similar to BSE broke out in mink which the farmer said ate only downer cattle.

Chronic wasting disease, also caused by prions, is striking down elk and deer in some western states and Canada. The USDA denies reports that a handful of CJD cases in young hunters in those areas is linked to elk or deer. Road kill and slaughtered elk and deer may be fed to livestock, however. "In an experiment where cattle ate CWD elk, there's no sign of it after 30 months," says Gary Weber of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. But prion diseases often take longer to incubate.

Detwiler insists that surveillance in the US is adequate. "Over time the rate of sampling should be enough to warn us of any problems, if we make sure we test every region." But knowing you have fewer mad cows than France is not the same as saying you are BSE-free. "Testing to that level of sensitivity is accepted as showing you are free of many animal diseases," says Doherr. But it would not detect an industry-shattering appearance of BSE.

Debora MacKenzie karl theis jrvideo field reporterwww.RealityExpander.com Ch.10 TimeWarnerAustin,Texas cell 512 297-9875e-mail: theis888 www.exposureofthetruth.isfamous.com

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