United Press International 6/30/2004 7:26 PM
Up to 100 More Mad Cow Cases Expected By Steve Mitchell
WASHINGTON, June 30 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of
Agriculture reported Wednesday a cow that initially tested
positive for mad cow disease has come back negative on follow-
up testing, but a food industry consultant told United Press
International he estimates there could be more than 100
cases of the deadly disorder in the country's herds.
About half of the cases will go undetected and passed on for
human consumption, Robert LaBudde, president of Least Cost
Formulation Ltd., a food industry consultancy in Virginia
Beach, Va., told UPI.
The USDA is still awaiting results from another case that
initially tested positive Tuesday. Results could take four
to seven days. Under the agency's expanded surveillance
plan, which went into effect June 1, cows initially are
screened by so-called rapid tests and any positives are
followed up with confirmatory testing. The only confirmed
U.S. case of mad cow disease to date occurred in Washington
state last December.
The concern is humans can contract a fatal, incurable brain
illness known as variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease from
eating meat infected with the mad cow pathogen. The USDA
said any cows that initially test positive are withheld
from the food supply pending additional testing, so U.S.
beef is safe.
"No matter how the confirmatory test comes back, USDA
remains confident in the safety of the U.S. beef supply,"
USDA's chief veterinary officer John Clifford told reporters
Wednesday.
LaBudde, who has served on the faculties of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, thinks there will be many more
infected cows detected.
"There is no question that we will be seeing a dozen or more
-- possibly 100 or more -- cases of BSE-positive cattle in
our national herd," said LaBudde, whose clients include the
meat industry.
Mad cow disease is also known by the technical name bovine
spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.
LaBudde said he bases his prediction on the one positive
case detected so far, compared to the number of downers, or
at-risk animals, in U.S. herds -- which amounts to about
250,000 by his calculations. That would yield about 68 cases
among the at-risk cows, he wrote in a recent article
published in Food Safety magazine. In Europe, the number of
cases among seemingly healthy animals has been about half
that seen in the at-risk cows. So in the U.S. that would
yield 34 additional cases, for a total of 102.
Only about half the cases will be detected, however,
because many animals will not show any symptoms, LaBudde
said. This is based on the experience in Europe, where half
the animals that test positive have no outward symptoms of
infection, he added.
The USDA's surveillance plan focuses predominantly on
animals with obvious signs of the disease, such as
staggering, the inability to stand or dying from it.
Only a small percentage of healthy-appearing animals
will be tested.
LaBudde said the department should test all cows over age 5
regardless of their health status, because these are the
most likely to have passed through the lengthy incubation
period of the disease and test positive. He called the
USDA's failure to do that bordering on "negligent."
The USDA and the meat industry have insisted the U.S.
beef supply is safe because the most infectious parts of
the cows -- the brain, spinal cord and intestines -- are
being removed.
LaBudde agrees with that assessment, estimating there would
be, at most, only one case of vCJD in the United States.
"But that doesn't mean that the policy is not malfeasance
and morally wrong," he said. "It's much like a car company
taking the 'insurable risk' and letting the gas tanks
explode under certain types of rear-end collisions."
Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and other USDA officials
have said they expect to find additional mad cow cases, but
agency spokeswoman Julie Quick said the agency does not have
an official estimate of the total number of cases they
eventually expect to detect.
"That is one of the reasons we put this enhanced
surveillance plan in place," Quick told UPI.
David Ray, spokesman for the American Meat Institute, a
trade group in Arlington, Va., told UPI his organization
also does not have an estimate of the number of infected
cows that might be lurking in U.S. herds.
"We've never even tried to make an estimate," Ray said.
The number of cases is irrelevant to food safety, he said,
because the agency's testing program is designed to help
determine the prevalence of the disease, not ensure the
safety of the meat supply. The safety of the food is
ensured by the removal of the most infectious parts of the
animal, he said.
Spinal columns are often split open during processing,
however, and some experts have expressed concern this
creates the potential for the infectious agent to
contaminate the meat.
--
Steve Mitchell is UPI's Medical Correspondent. E-mail [email hidden]