Press Release

Jim Rogers	(202) 690-4755
Andrea McNally	(202) 690-4178

USDA CERTIFIES FIVE NEW LABORATORIES FOR BSE SAMPLE ANALYSIS

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2004--The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service today announced the approval of five additional state laboratories that will assist in the surveillance program for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

The following laboratories will receive federal funding on a per test basis: Kissimee Diagnostic Laboratory, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Kissimee, Fla.; Minnesota Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, University of Minnesota (St. Paul); Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, Kansas State University (Manhattan); U.S. Department of Agriculture Laboratory, Frankfort, Ky.; and Pennsylvania Veterinary Laboratory, Harrisburg, Pa. These labs will work in coordination with seven other state laboratories that were approved to conduct BSE surveillance testing on March 29.

These labs will use approved rapid tests for BSE surveillance. USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa, remains the national reference lab for BSE and will conduct confirmatory testing.

On March 15, USDA announced an enhanced BSE surveillance program that incorporates recommendations from an international scientific review panel and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis; both have reviewed and support the plan. Experience in the United Kingdom and Europe has shown that testing high-risk cattle is the most effective way to identify BSE if it is present. Therefore, USDA has tailored its surveillance program to collect samples from the following categories: nonambulatory cattle; cattle exhibiting signs of a central nervous system disorder; cattle exhibiting other signs that may be associated with BSE, such as emaciation or injury; or dead cattle.

Under the program, which is scheduled to be fully implemented by June 1, USDA intends to sample as many cattle from these high-risk categories as possible in a 12-18 month period. Sampling some 268,000 animals would allow for the detection of BSE at a rate of one positive in 10 million adult cattle with a 99 percent confidence level. In other words, the enhanced program could detect BSE even if there were only five positive animals in the entire country.

The five laboratories announced today are in addition to the seven laboratories previously announced on March 29. All of these laboratories are part of an existing network of state and federal labs that assist APHIS with animal disease testing as needed.

More information on the BSE surveillance program is available online at http://www.aphis.usda.gov/lpa/issues/bse/bse.html.

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