Officials trace origins of cow

The economic health of the U.S. beef industry rides on the probe, an expert said.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
MABTON, Wash. -- Federal officials scrambled Thursday to trace the origins of the first U.S. cow infected with mad cow disease, while announcing that preliminary independent tests in Britain had confirmed the malady in the Washington dairy cow.
Grocery stores in the Northwest pulled meat products off their shelves from at least one Oregon processor where parts from the sick cow had been handled. Even as officials stressed that nerve and spinal tissue from the cow -- the most dangerous parts -- had been kept out of the food supply, consumers across the country remained of mixed mind about eating beef.
A final, definitive test on a second brain sample from the stricken cow is expected this week from Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, Britain.
At Mabton's Sunny Dene Ranch, where the Holstein had lived for slightly more than two years, William Wavrin, a veterinarian and one of the ranch's owners, remained secluded with his family and was unavailable for comment.
Wavrin is "held in high esteem" by Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, said spokesman Charles Powell, reached by phone at Christmas dinner Thursday. "His is an exemplary facility and they keep exemplary records."
Investigation
That should help the federal investigation, which is now focused on two broad goals: discovering where the female cow had lived before it came to Mabton in 2001, and discovering where materials from the cow have ended up since its Dec. 9 slaughter. Minimizing risk to public health requires ensuring that people don't consume meat from the sick cow.
Even if they do, officials said, risk is minimal because the cow's neurological tissues were sent to a processing plant in Spokane, Wash., and are still there. While beef muscle went to two meat processors, muscle does not contain the errant proteins that can transmit mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephelopathy, experts said.
Much depends on how quickly the government can complete the investigation and whether it can show that only one cow was affected.
With more than a dozen foreign countries, including Japan, Mexico, Russia, Canada and South Africa, closing their doors to U.S. beef products and financial markets punishing companies that produce or sell beef, the economic health of the $175 billion U.S. beef industry is at stake.
"What's going to happen in the marketplace is going to hinge on how this investigation turns out," Keith Collins, the USDA's chief economist, said this week. When Canada uncovered its first case of mad cow disease earlier this year, its beef industry ended up losing $8.5 million a day.
Hypothesis
Because mad cow disease typically takes at least three years to incubate, it's likely the Holstein became infected before coming to the Sunny Dene dairy, officials said. Cattle feed is the probable means by which the infection was transmitted, they believe. Cattle can get mad cow disease if they eat material from animals that have the illness. Such material can be mixed in with feed.
The illness can also develop spontaneously through a process of mutation.
If the Holstein became ill because of bad feed, it's possible that other cows in the same herd that ate the feed might have been infected too. Some experts believe the possibility is slim. But if and when they find the Holstein's herd of origin, officials will want to test those cows for mad cow disease and determine which companies supplied feed to the herd.
Though the United States has prohibited feed suppliers from including materials from cows or sheep in cattle feed since 1997, compliance with the ban has been uneven, critics and the government's own documents suggest.
Compliance is made even more complicated by the fact that feed companies can use cow and sheep remains in products sold to poultry and other livestock producers. Whether they keep feed meant for cows separate from feed going to other animals and whether all equipment is cleaned in between feed production are among many issues involved.
GAO report
A January 2002 report from the General Accounting Office gives cause for concern about the United States' enforcement of its feed regulations, the nation's primary strategy to prevent mad cow disease. The report found that the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for inspecting feed operators, had failed to issue warning letters or take other enforcement actions against companies that weren't complying with federal rules.
Firms were failing to mark feed as clearly unsuitable for cattle and in some cases including prohibited protein in cattle feed. Of 10,000 renderers, feed manufacturers, feed distributors and related companies examined, 364 failed to comply with federal regulations. Yet even companies found not be in compliance with federal regulations were often not reinspected on a timely basis and the FDA's data base for tracking inspections was "severely flawed," the report found.
Meanwhile, sick cows that die at dairies or ranches are not being tested for mad cow disease, the GAO noted. Inspecting and testing animals only at slaughterhouses may fail to detect cattle that fall ill and die of mad cow disease in other settings.