Mad cow may have originated in Canada, U.S. says
By PATRICK BRETHOUR
With a report from Heather Scoffield
Saturday, December 27, 2003 - Page A1
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CALGARY -- Investigators tracing the origins of the United States' first case of mad-cow disease are turning their sights northward, saying the infected animal may have come from a Canadian herd.
It is too early to know for sure where the infected Holstein cow was born, but some evidence suggests that it may have been at a Canadian operation, Ron DeHaven, chief veterinarian of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in a conference call yesterday.
The trail is blurry at the moment. Investigators are still trying to determine where the cow came from before it was sold in 2001 to the farm that sent it to slaughter earlier this month -- either a livestock market or a dairy farm that fed calves until they were old enough to produce milk. Both are located in Washington state.
"From there, the epidemiological investigation becomes a tangled web of different possibilities, if you will," Dr. DeHaven said. "Certainly, some of those do lead back to Canada. Some of those other leads would take us into the state of Washington, and other states as well.
"So while anything is a possibility at this point, it would be certainly be premature to speculate whether this animal might or might not have originated from Canada."
The other part of the investigation is the tracing forward to uncover what has become of the Holstein's offspring.
One calf is at the dairy in Mabton, Wash., that was the last place to house the infected cow. Another is at a bull-calf feeding facility in Sunnyside, Wash. Both operations are now under quarantine.
Investigators are sifting through records kept at the Mabton dairy, comparing the information to paperwork at other U.S. livestock facilities, dealers, state and federal offices -- and some records in Canada, Dr. DeHaven said.
"All of those things are happening as we speak."
He praised the co-operative attitude of Canadian officials. Brian Evans, chief veterinary officer at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said he spoke with Dr. DeHaven six times on Christmas Day alone. The CFIA has staff in Washington state working with U.S. officials as part of the investigation and Canada will assist in tracing any records that will speed along that process, Dr. Evans said.
But he said it is far too early to suppose that the infected animal came from Canada, adding that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is being thorough in examining all possible scenarios.
In its briefing yesterday, the USDA said that meat from the infected animal was ground into hamburger and meat patties, but emphasized that no "specified risk materials" -- including nerve tissue and the lower part of the small intestine -- entered the human food chain. The meat processed at the slaughterhouse that day -- about 4,500 kilograms -- has now been recalled.
The Holstein was unable to walk on its own when it arrived at the slaughterhouse, a "downer" in industry slang.
Despite its incapacity, a USDA vet cleared the animal for slaughter after being told the cow had suffered injuries during a recent calving; a postmortem confirmed that assessment.
Under Canadian rules, however, the carcass would have been held until the results of tests for bovine spongiform encephalopathy were known, the CFIA said.
Dr. DeHaven said he hopes a more definitive answer on the Holstein's birth herd will be found soon.
"If we're lucky, we could know something in a day or two," he said, acknowledging that it could take weeks or months to identify the herd.
USDA scientists said they are confident that the animal became infected in its birth herd, since it was 4½ years old at the most and BSE has an average incubation period of four to five years. That means the cow was almost certainly a calf when it was exposed to the agents causing the brain-wasting disease, likely through feed containing BSE-infected protein from another ruminant (cud-chewing animal), USDA officials say.
Ominously, the timeline laid out by the USDA would mean that the animal became infected in 1999 -- two years after Canada and the United States banned the use of ground-up ruminant parts as feed for cattle or other ruminants, a practice considered to be one of the main conduits of BSE transmission.
Another USDA official said yesterday that compliance was "less than 100 per cent" in Washington state when the feeding ban was first put in place, but has since improved to that level.
Dennis Laycraft, executive vice-president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, said that even if the birth herd turns out to be located in Canada, investigators will still need to determine the source of the feed that infected it. A determination of whether the animal became sick after the feeding bans were imposed will have to wait until the birth herd is located, and the age of the animal can be precisely determined, he said.
Whatever the outcome of the investigation, U.S. prices for live cattle have already started to plunge, declining the maximum allowed amount for the second session in a row yesterday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Mr. Laycraft said the larger concern is whether export markets, particularly Mexico's, will remain closed to U.S. ranchers for a protracted period. If that happens, Canadian and U.S. ranchers will both face an even steeper drop in selling prices for cattle, since their beef production will be marooned north of the Mexican border, he said.
"All of that product will have to be eaten in our two countries."
U.S. officials are already taking aggressive action on the trade front, saying they will dispatch an ad hoc delegation to Japan on Sunday to brief that country on progress in the investigation. |
