BSE, BOVINE - USA (06): CONFIRMED - Mad Cow Disease

[BrklynLiberal]

BSE, BOVINE - USA (06): CONFIRMED
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A ProMED-mail post
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Date: 24 Jun 2005
From: ProMED-mail <[e-mail]>
Source: The Guardian
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5096778,00.html>


Tests confirm second mad cow case in US
---------------------------------------
WASHINGTON (AP) - Tests have confirmed mad cow disease (bovine spongiform
encephalopathy; BSE) in a US cow previously cleared of having the brain
wasting illness, the Agriculture Department said Friday. It is the second
case of BSE in the United States.

An internationally recognized laboratory in Weybridge, England, confirmed
the case of BSE after US tests produced conflicting results, Agriculture
Secretary Mike Johanns said.

Human health was not at risk, Johanns said. The animal was a "downer",
meaning it was unable to walk. Such animals are banned from the food
supply. The department has said there was no reason to believe the animal
was imported.

New tests were ordered two weeks ago. Those results came back positive,
leading officials to seek confirmation from the Weybridge lab. The
department also performed more tests at its lab in Ames, Iowa. The first
case confirmed in the US was in December 2003, a dairy cow imported from
Canada. "I am encouraged that our interlocking safeguards are working
exactly as intended," Johanns said at a news conference. "This animal was
blocked from entering the food supply because of the firewalls we have in
place. Americans have every reason to continue to be confident in the
safety of our beef," he said. Johanns also announced the department will do
more sensitive tests as a matter of routine.

The department has come under fire for not resolving conflicting test
results on this animal in November. The department did initial screening
using a "rapid test", which was positive. A more detailed
immunohistochemistry, or IHC test, was negative. But the department did not
conduct a third round, using a test called the Western blot, until ordered
by the department's inspector general. Now the department will use both IHC
and Western blot when rapid tests indicate the presence of the disease,
Johanns said.

"I want to make sure we continue to give consumers every reason to be
confident in the health of our cattle herd," Johanns said. "By adding the
second confirmatory test, we boost that confidence and bring our testing in
line with the evolving worldwide trend," the secretary said.

(byline: Libby Quaid)

--
ProMED-mail
<[e-mail]>

BSE, bovine - USA (05): susp. 20050614.1664
BSE, bovine - USA (04): susp. 20050613.1657
BSE, bovine - USA (03): susp. 20050612.1637
BSE, bovine - USA: susp. (02): tests 20050611.1626
BSE, bovine - USA: susp. 20050611.1625]

......................mhj/sh


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[colmkelleher]

1. Re: Confirmed Mad Cow Case

Mad Cows, Mad Wildlife and the rise of Alzheimer’s Disease in North America.
Fifteen Things You Should Know.
Colm Kelleher Ph.D
http://www.colmkelleher.com

The release on June 24 by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) of the second confirmed case of mad cow disease in the United States highlights the inadequacy of the department's testing procedures. The failure of the USDA to conduct a more accurate Western blot test in November 2004, in spite of pressure from both national and international experts, has called into question the legitimacy of the more than 300,000 tests for the fatal disease conducted so far. If the cow from Texas slipped through the net, how many others have the USDA failed to detect? International experts in mad cow disease have voiced extreme skepticism over the low number of positive mad cow discoveries in the United States, citing the Canadians who have conducted only one tenth the number (30,000) of tests as the USDA, and have already found 3 positive cases. The Canadians routinely use the more sensitive Western Blot test as do the Europeans and the Japanese. The USDA was finally forced by it's own Inspector General to conduct the more accurate Western blot test on the animal that had passed it's previous test in November 2004.
Is the American beef supply really safe? Americans should ponder the following points when deciding the answer to this question.
(1) According to a June 10 Associated Press report quoting Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns: “Johanns, former governor beef-producing Nebraska, said that there was no health risk and that he intended "to enjoy a good steak.". The statement was reminiscent of then Agriculture Minister John Gummer and his young daughter Cordelia consuming hamburgers on television in 1996 to assure an anxious British public that beef was perfectly safe. Shortly afterwards, scores of young people began dying of human mad cow disease in the UK.
(2) A study from Yale University showed that approximately 5% of Alzheimer’s Disease patients were incorrectly diagnosed. The patients actually had Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD). One variant of CJD is caused by eating the beef from mad cows.
(3) The number of deaths from Alzheimer’s Disease has increased by more than 9000% in North America since 1979. In 1979 only 653 people died from Alzheimer’s Disease. By 2004, that number jumped to 60,000. About 5 million North Americans currently have Alzheimer’s Disease.
(4) CJD is not a mandatory reportable disease in about half the states in the US. Therefore, all estimates of numbers of CJD cases in the US are probably wrong.
(5) The infectious agents in mad cow disease, CJD, and other wildlife brain wasting diseases are called “prions” and are almost indestructible. Normal sterilization of surgical instruments will not kill them. Patients have died from procedures using prion-contaminated surgical instruments.
(6) A September 2004 survey of pathologists in California showed that more than 70% were reluctant to conduct autopsies on CJD patients, fearing contamination of their instruments and facilities.
(7) Toronto coroner Dr Murray Waldman has alleged that many funeral homes do not embalm patients who have died from CJD, fearing that their facilities will become contaminated with deadly prions. Waldman also argues that there is a statistical link between eating red meat and Alzheimer’s Disease.
(8) Prions can be transmitted in the blood supply. In Europe, people have died after receiving blood from prion infected donors.
(9) Veterinarian Dr Richard Marsh presented strong scientific evidence that mad cow disease was already present in United States cattle in the 1980s. His data were ignored.
(10) In spite of assurances from the USDA and the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) that since 1997, cows are no longer fed to cows in the US, several loopholes remain, even in June 2005. It is still OK to feed cow blood to cows. Dead cows can also be fed to chickens and chicken litter is then fed back to cows.
(11) Several clusters of CJD have been reported in the United States in the past decade, notably in New Jersey and in New York in the past couple of years. Clusters imply a non-random origin for the disease. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has dismissed all of these CJD clusters as statistical flukes.
(12) An epidemic of chronic wasting disease, also called mad deer and mad elk disease, is currently spreading through the United States wildlife. Since 2003, the disease has jumped from the epicenter in Colorado to New Mexico, Illinois, Utah, Wisconsin, and in 2005 it had reached New York. Every year eleven million hunters try to kill deer and elk and many of them eat venison.
(13) In 2002 a number of reports of young hunters dying of brain wasting disease surfaced in the scientific literature, although the CDC said the deaths of the hunters was not conclusively linked to eating contaminated venison.
(14) Another unanswered question is: can prion disease jump species from deer and elk to cattle?
(15) A 2004 letter to Science Magazine cited evidence that flies could be vectors for transmitting prion disease. A current study at the University of Wisconsin has documented over a dozen different scavengers, including raccoons, skunks, foxes, opossums, mink, hawks, owls, and coyotes, visiting the carcass of a dead deer. If a prion loaded deer is scavenged by over a dozen species and by flies, how great is the risk of transmission to other species, including humans?

Colm A. Kelleher PhD is the author of Brain Trust: The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s. He is a senior research scientist in the biotechnology sector. For more information, see: http://www.colmkelleher.com

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Pretty scary. The meat industry is still trying to kill us