With new BSE case in Canada, R-CALF calls for more testing

By Tom Lutey - 08/20/2008

BILLINGS — Mad cow disease cases in Canada since 1997 now number nine, yet officials there and the United States said Tuesday that brain wasting sickness transferable to humans is out of the food supply and in control.

U.S. cattle organizations disagree on whether everything possible is being done to protect consumers and the beef industry.

The latest case, revealed last Friday by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, involved a 6-year-old beef cow born five years after the Canadians banned animal tissue from cattle feed ingredients. That’s significant, say the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, or R-CALF, because the bovine should never have been exposed to food that included body tissue, known as special risk material, from other cows.

Specified risk material includes the skull, brains and nerves attached to the brain, as well as eyes, tonsils, spinal cords, and spinal cord nerves from cattle 30 months or older. Small intestines of cattle of all ages also are on the list. The material is thought to be the most likely source for the large, misfolded proteins called prions that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

BSE causes small spongy holes in the brain. Scientists say BSE is related to a rare, degenerative fatal brain disorder in humans called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Consuming contaminated beef can cause the brain-wasting disease in people. The most recent cow discovered easily could have made it to the United States.

“This animal would have been fully eligible for export to the United States,” said Bill Bullard, chief executive officer for R-CALF, which is headquartered in Billings.

The most recent case stems from a cow imported from Canada. R-CALF argues that Canadians should be required to test “herd mates,” or cattle from the same herd as an infected bovine.

What Canadians now do is test the cattle born the same year as the diseased animal, as well as cattle from the generations born immediately before and after the infected animal. The government focuses on those generations because the prions that spread the disease are abnormally large and most easily absorbed by calves with still developing digestive tracks, which are extremely porous. Later in life, the animal’s digestive track is less porous, and less likely to absorb BSE-causing protein.

“The test is invasive,” said Marc Richard, a spokesman for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. “You have to chop their heads off.” Canadians are confident that BSE will eventually be eradicated. Food inspectors there attribute BSE occurrences in younger cattle to loopholes in feed requirements that ban animal tissue in cattle feed, but permit adding the material to food for other animals. Because feed for various types of livestock is processed through the same factory, it’s thought that cattle feed processed immediately after feed for another animal still managed to contain some otherwise banned tissue. The other possibility is that feed intended for other livestock was fed to cattle.

Last September, the Canadian government banned all special risk material from all livestock feed and pet food. Other countries have taken similar measures, because before 1997, special risk material was allowed in feed sold in many countries, including the United States.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is satisfied with Canada’s program for BSE after inspections and a risk assessment study of BSE entering the United States.