Officials say problem Likely to stay localized in Oregon
By VIVIENNE JANNATPOUR
Colorado Daily Staff
December 29, 2003
Boulder County residents are showing little reaction to the nation's first case of mad cow disease. "There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of concern," said Julie Handy of the Boulder County Health Department, who added that they had not received many calls on the matter as of Friday.
Cindy Parmenter from the Colorado Department of Health and Environment reported the same calm in the state office. "We've received 20 calls today and not one of them was about mad cow disease," she said. Greg Yando, Deputy Commissioner of the Colorado Department of Agriculture added that "people have rationalized that this is a one-time event and that they have confidence in the meat supply."
Handy emphasized that there is no reason to panic. "The only meat that we consider a risk is hamburger, cuts of meat or steaks are safe," she said. The disease agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, is isolated to the spinal cord and the brain. It is not contained in the meat muscle or the milk, confirmed Yando.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture placed a precautionary ban Tuesday on importation of all Washington cattle over 30 months old upon news of the infected cow. By Wednesday afternoon, the ban was lifted. "We were satisfied that the farm the animal came from was sufficiently contained, so that was the basis of lifting the ban," Yando said.
The infected cow's herd and those of her offspring are under quarantine. U.S. Department of Agriculture officials have found that the cow gave birth to three calves before it was slaughtered on December 9. The disease usually is spread through infected feed and it is unlikely the infected cow would have passed it on to her offspring, said Dr. Ron DeHaven, USDA's chief veterinary officer, during a webcast news briefing Friday.
To be on the safe side, however, the USDA has quarantined the facilities where the remaining calves - one died at birth in 2001 - currently reside.
One calf - born just prior to the infected cow's slaughter - was sold to a bull calf feeding operation in Sunnyside, Washington, "No animals will be leaving those premises," DeHaven said, adding the quarantine was imposed on December 24.
The other calf remains on the Mabton, Washington, farm where the infected animal resided. That facility was placed under quarantine earlier last week.
The agency issued a recall of approximately 10,000 pounds of beef that could have contained meat from the infected animal on December 24. Two Oregon firms - Willamette Valley Meat in Portland, and Interstate Meat Distributors in Clackamas - processed the meat and began shipping it out to their customers on December 13.
The meat products from Clackamas were processed into ground beef or ground beef patties and were sold within Washington State and Oregon only. Beef trimming products from Portland were sold to "approximately three dozen small mom and pop Asian and Mexican facilities in the states of Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada," said Dr. Kenneth Petersen from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service at a follow-up briefing Saturday. He did not cite the names of the companies that might have received the meat and said his agency still is in the process of collecting information pertaining to the distribution of the beef.
The most likely source of infection in this case is feed comprised of tissue from other infected cattle. This feed practice is banned in the United States, but between 1999 and 2001 - when the cow is thought to have been infected - many firms violated the practice and indeed fed cattle tissue to cows.
"It's going to be a matter of trying to determine where this animal may have gotten contaminated feed," said Dr. Stephen Sundlof, with the Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine, at the press briefing. The average incubation period from the time of exposure to the development of symptoms is about four-to-five years, "so it can be difficult to trace back where the feed originated," he said. "It's not something people keep real precise records of," so it "may not be possible" to determine the origin of the infected feed," he said.
Sundlof said the compliance rate with the feed ban is now 99 percent and all of the firms located in Washington are in compliance. However, he added, in reference to problems with compliance in previous years, "We assume the compliance rate was less than 100 percent" when the animal was infected.
Steve Mitchell with the UPI contributed to this story.