Canadian Mills Blamed for U.S. Mad Cow
By IRA DREYFUSS
WASHINGTON (AP) - Canadian officials have traced to two mills the feed
that probably caused North America's two cases of mad cow disease, one
in Canada last May and the other in the United States in December.
The feed from the Canadian mills could have contained infectious
protein from imported British cattle, said Dr. George Luterbach, an
official of a mad cow working group in the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency. He said Canadian law prohibits disclosing the identity of the
mills.
Canada reported its only case of the brain-wasting disease in an
animal on a farm in Alberta. The United States followed with an
announcement that an animal in Mabton, Wash., had mad cow. Both
animals had been raised on farms in Alberta. And both ate feed
containing meat and bone meal while they were calves.
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``Our best hypothesis was the animals were exposed by contaminated
feed,'' Luterbach said. He said the two infected animals did not eat
feed from the same mill.
In both cases, the feed was given to the animals as calves just before
Canada and the United States banned the use of cattle tissues in feed
intended for cattle in 1997.
Luterbach said the feed could have contained tissue from infected
cattle imported from Britain before Canada banned the importation of
British cattle after a devastating outbreak of mad cow disease there.
Canadian investigators had performed mad cow tests on all they could
find of the 192 British animals imported to Canada between 1980 and
1989, when Canada banned such imports, Luterbach said. The
investigators followed the cattle until 1993, but could not find 68
animals that died or were culled, he said. Protein from those animals
could have been processed into feed, he said.
``One or a small number may have had BSE,'' Luterbach said. Mad cow is
also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.
The feed would have been shipped in large batches to individual farms
and consumed in about a week, and would not have been widely
distributed, he said.
03/19/04 19:27
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