Food safetyUSDA announces fourth Mad Cow case

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced it had identified a cow suffering from Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This is the fourth case of mad cow disease found in the United States since 2003, and the first since 2006.

The latest case was found in a cow from a dairy herd in central California. The USDA says that the discovery is not likely to affect the safety of U.S. beef supplies. No meat from the diseased cow has entered the U.S. food supply.

The animal carcass is kept in a rendering plant in California. Samples from the carcass were analyzed by the USDA National Veterinary Service Laboratories in Ames, Iowa. The lab tests samples from about 40,000 cows a year.

The USDA has notified world health authorities about the discovery.

Mad cow disease is a progressive neurological disease in cattle and can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. It is always fatal in cattle.

The USDA’s chief veterinary officer John Clifford says that there were twenty-nine cases of BSE in 2011, down from the peak of 37,311 cases in 1992.

msnbc reports that if people eat BSE-tainted meat, they are likely to develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a variant of BSE, which is a rare and deadly nerve disease. In 1993 there was a massive outbreak of mad cow disease in the United Kingdom, leading to the death of more than 150 people and resulting in the culling of 180,000 heads of cattle.

There have been only a handful of cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease confirmed in people living in the United States, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)says those were linked to meat products in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, not to U.S. meat.

The Wall Street Journal notes that the finding comes as the beef industry is trying to cope with softer demand as consumers have pushed back against rising beef prices. Recent publicity about a 2-decade-old ground beef additive known as lean finely textured beef – or, less appetizingly, “pink slime” — has further curbed beef demand though the product poses no known safety risks.

“It’s the last thing we need,” cattle rancher Daniel Mushrush, part-owner of Mushrush Ranches in Strong City, Kansas, told WSJ. “It’s not going to help demand at a time when we need demand.”

U.S. secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack yesterday made the following announcement regarding detection of BSE:  “The beef and dairy in the American food supply is safe and USDA remains confident in the health of U.S. cattle. The systems and safeguards in place to protect animal and human health worked as planned to identify this case quickly, and will ensure that it presents no risk to the food supply or to human health. USDA has no reason to believe that any other U.S. animals are currently affected, but we will remain vigilant and committed to the safeguards in place.”

The USDAhas a Web page dealing with BSE. The page also offers updates as USDA continues to investigate this incident. Video of an interview with USDA’s chief veterinary officer John Clifford on the BSE case is available here.