NEWS: Possible 7th Canadian Mad-Cow Case - Bloomberg.com 7/10/06

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Canada Says Alberta Cow May Be Seventh Mad-Cow Case (Update2)

 

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Canada said it may have found its seventh case of

mad-cow disease, in a 50-month-old Alberta dairy animal born after 1997

feed restrictions were imposed to curb the spread of the livestock ailment.

 

The cow was identified through preliminary screenings. Confirmatory

tests are being performed on tissue samples and results will be made

public by the end of the week, George Luterbach, senior veterinarian

with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said today on a conference

call. No part of the animal entered the human or animal food or feed

chain, the agency said.

 

The discovery comes less than two weeks after Canada found its sixth

case of the disease, which cattle contract by eating feed tainted with

parts of an infected animal. The CFIA last month tightened its feed

restrictions to speed up eradication of mad-cow disease, or bovine

spongiform encephalopathy, which has a rare and fatal human form.

 

``All countries that have had cases of BSE have found some cases after

the feed ban,'' Luterbach said. ``The most logical explanation is that

there is some contamination that remained within their feed system for a

period of time.'' An ``exhaustive'' investigation is under way to find

out the path of infection, the CFIA said.

 

USDA spokesman Ed Loyd would not comment on whether the discovery of

another BSE case in Canada would affect beef and cattle trade with the

U.S., which has found three cases of BSE, one in a cow born in Canada.

 

``We are not going to make any conclusions until Canada has results from

confirmatory tests,'' he said in a phone interview from Washington. The

USDA had anticipated there would be additional BSE cases in Canada

before deciding to relax import restrictions, he said.

 

U.S. Beef Trade

 

The U.S., which buys most of Canada's exported cattle and beef, banned

imports from its northern neighbor after Canada found its first case in

May 2003. Three months later, the U.S. began easing import restrictions

and in July 2005 it allowed Canada to resume shipments of younger cattle

after a court found the animals posed little risk to U.S. livestock or

consumers.

 

The USDA is currently weighing whether to allow imports of Canadian

cattle older than 30 months along with beef on bones.

 

Canada and the U.S. require meatpackers to remove and discard the

tissues suspected of harboring BSE-causing agents when cattle are

slaughtered. The U.S. in 1997 also imposed a ban on using cattle feed

supplemented with ground-up cattle parts for protein.

 

More Tests

 

The CFIA, which has screened more than 115,000 animals for BSE since

2003, said the affected animal died on the farm where it was born. All

cattle from the farm born within a year of the suspect cow will be

segregated and tested, it said.

 

The cow wasn't producing milk at the time of its death and a World

Health Organization analysis has shown that BSE is not transmitted to

humans from dairy products, Luterbach said. People get the disease from

eating meat from infected animals.

 

``This detection is consistent with a low level of disease and does not

indicate an increased risk of BSE in Canada,'' the CFIA said in a

statement. The agency predicts Canada's herd will be BSE-free within 10

years, Luterbach said.

 

Canada slaughtered 3.93 million cattle last year, according to CanFax,

the Canadian Cattlemen's Association's research arm. The U.S. slaughters

about 35 million cattle annually.

 

More than 150 people worldwide have died from the human form of BSE,

which is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Most of the deaths were in

the U.K., where mad-cow disease surfaced in the 1980s.

 

 

 

To contact the reporter on this story:

 

Alexandre Deslongchamps in Ottawa at

 

adeslongcham (AT) bloomberg (DOT) net

 

/Last Updated: July 10, 2006 15:39 EDT

/

 

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