Second case of mad cow in U.S.
USDA: Food safeguards working well; Taiwan blocks imports
WASHINGTON – The United States has what may be its first homegrown case of mad cow disease, confirmed a full seven months after officials first suspected the animal might be infected.
Despite the delay in reliable results, the government says the food safeguards are working well.
“The fact that this animal was blocked from entering the food supply tells us that our safeguards are working exactly as they should,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said during a news conference Friday.
Sending “downers” to rendering plants “for animals unfit for human consumption” begs the question what sort of rendering plant, what’s produced there?
Testing Changes Ordered After U.S. Mad Cow Case
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Substantial changes in the nation’s mad cow testing system were ordered yesterday after British tests on a cow slaughtered in November confirmed that it had the disease even though the American “gold standard” test said it did not.
“The protocol we developed just a few years ago to conduct the tests might not be the best option today,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in making the announcement. “Science is ever evolving.”
At an afternoon news conference in Washington, Mr. Johanns described serious errors in the testing in the United States on the animal, the second one found with mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Science is ever evolving? The cow was “born before the 1997 ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants”, and “too crippled to walk when it was killed”. Yet, even though “the animal tested positive on two rapid ELISA tests and then negative on the slower, ‘gold standard’ test”, and “another ‘experimental’ test was done that came up positive”, seven months passed before the Agriculture Department’s “inspector general, Phyllis K. Fong, initiated a further test here – the Western blot – because of the earlier confusion. Mr. Johanns complained yesterday that it was done without his knowledge.”
MSNBC/AP misses the second ELISA and the fourth positive using an “experimental” test which the NYT‘s reports Johanns refused to describe but the Agriculture Dept.’s website has as “an enhanced version of the ‘gold standard’ test”:
The department did initial screening using a “rapid test,” which was positive. A more detailed immunohistochemistry, or IHC test, was negative. But the department did not conduct a third round, using the Western blot, until the department’s inspector general, Phyllis Fong, ordered it to do so two weeks ago. Fong has not explained why she ordered new tests.
I’d like to know if Johanns’ permission had been sought before and denied, if so why, and if Fong proceeded without his permission due frustration with stonewalling in a case screaming Mad Cow.
Mr. Johanns also ordered the Agriculture Department’s national laboratory in Ames, Iowa, to reassess the antibodies in its immunohistochemistry test because the British laboratory’s antibodies attached to the misfolded brain proteins, called prions, that cause the disease, while the American laboratory’s apparently did not.
The test is not purchased off the shelf, he said, and every laboratory must make its own.
Mr. Johanns said that the animal did not have many prions and that they were concentrated in unusual areas of the brain, so one laboratory’s test might miss the infection while another caught it.
Doesn’t that suggest others may have gone detected, possibly caught if the department had confirmed this case immediately?
Is there any tracking system either on the gov’t or business end for feed purchases, and whenever new products are introduced into the food chain? Since “the animal’s disease strain did not closely resemble the British-style strain found in the first mad cow, which was born in Canada and raised in Washington State. Instead, it was closer to a strain found in France – a result, another scientist said, that suggested that the infection had come from a different pool of infected feed, possibly imported from France”, then anyone using that feed could have been alerted. Johanns said that “DNA tests will be started to find the herd it was raised with. Normally, an infected animal’s whole herd is slaughtered on the assumption that all ate the same feed.”
Closing the barn door after the horse got out, money better spent on that “evolving science” and simple bookkeeping, Mr. Johanns?