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Tuesday, April 5, 2005

common sense on: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse) or mad cow disease

Q: What is BSE and how is it transmitted?

A.: Bovine Spongiform Encephelopathy (BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease, is a disease that affects the nervous system of cattle, causing lesions on the brain and making the brain “spongiform,” or sponge-like. The latest scientific research indicates the disease is caused by an infectious protein, called a prion (pronounced pree-on), which is even smaller than a virus. BSE can be transmitted – to other cattle and in some cases to other animals or humans – through feeding, injecting or transplanting tissues with the infectious prion. It can take as short as two years or as long as eight years for an infected animal to show signs of the disease. Certain safeguards have been adopted to prevent transmission of BSE. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibits the feeding of parts of ruminant animals (those with four-part stomachs, such as cattle) to other ruminants in order to prevent BSE infection of U.S. cattle.

Q: What are the chances that I could contract the human form of BSE from eating beef, and what safeguards does the government have in place to protect human and animal health?

A: In the United States, the risk to human health is extremely small for a number of reasons. First, no case of BSE has been found in native U.S. cattle. Second, it is not easy to get the human form of BSE from eating beef. And third, stringent safeguards are in place to protect human, as well as animal, health. The risk to humans is so small in the United States that BSE is primarily an animal health issue rather than a human health risk. However, experience elsewhere indicates that if BSE is prevalent in the cattle population, and if safeguards are not in place, humans can contract a form of BSE called variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease (vCJD). That is why strong U.S. safeguards are so important to protect U.S. cattle from BSE and to solidify consumer confidence in the safety of beef.

In order to make the already very small risk to humans even smaller, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires beef processors to remove from the human food chain those tissues in beef carcasses that are believed to have a risk of carrying the BSE prion. The best example is the USDA rule that all brain and nervous system tissues must be removed from cattle over 30 months of age before they enter the human food chain. USDA set the 30-month benchmark because, according to USDA, neither a case of BSE nor the BSE prion has been confirmed in cattle younger than 30 months. The FDA ruminant-to-ruminant feed ban, mentioned above, is the primary measure to prevent the spread of BSE among cattle. I am carefully monitoring USDA and FDA to make sure they have in place and enforce strong anti-BSE safeguards.

Q: How has this disease impacted trade and what is the U.S. doing about it?

A: The United States has banned imports of live cattle and beef from countries that have found BSE in their cattle. The initial ban applied to Canada has been eased to allow imports of boneless cuts from younger cattle. USDA also issued a rule to allow additional types of beef as well as younger live cattle from Canada, but that rule has been temporarily blocked by a federal court. A number of countries have banned imports of U.S. cattle and beef since the discovery of a BSE case in Washington state late in 2003. Our government is seeking to reopen closed export markets for U.S. beef in Japan and South Korea, which had been among our largest beef customers, but progress has been very slow toward agreeing on terms for resuming trade.

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