Experts: Mad Cow 'Minor' Health Concern

Experts: Mad Cow 'Minor' Health Concern

NewsMax.com Wires
Monday, June 27, 2005

NEW YORK - The newly identified case of mad cow disease in an animal from an American herd shouldn't worry consumers, experts said, because the condition appears to be very rare and safeguards are in place to protect the food supply.

"It certainly is a minor concern" compared to ordinary food-borne diseases like salmonella and E. coli, said Dr. Richard Johnson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, an authority on mad-cow-like diseases in animals and people.

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"My kids eat beef, and I don't tell them not to."

George Gray, executive director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and head of a group that has studied the threat mad cow poses to consumers, said the available research indicates that mad cow is "a very small risk to our food supply."

Mad cow is caused by harmful versions of proteins called prions, and the concern for humans is that eating meat products contaminated with those prions can cause a human version of the disease. Milk poses no known risk.

Federal officials said no part of the newly diagnosed cow was allowed into the food chain.

The human version of mad cow disease is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or vCJD. It's very rare. The vast majority of cases have been reported in the United Kingdom, which has counted a total of 156 cases in the decade that the disease has been known. No case has been linked to food from the United States.

Symptoms

Early symptoms of the fatal disease tend to be mostly psychiatric, like depression, withdrawal and anxiety, and patients often complain of pain or numbness or a pins-and-needles sensation. Eventually, they become unable to move or speak. They typically enter a coma before death.

The disease typically takes a little more than a year to kill its victims from the appearance of the first symptoms.

Cattle get mad cow disease from eating contaminated feed. To guard against that, U.S. federal officials in 1997 banned the feeding of cattle remains to cattle, although some loopholes in that provision remain.

Several experts stressed that the newly diagnosed cow was born before that ban took effect. Virtually all beef products Americans buy today would come from cows born after the ban went into effect, Gray said.

It's the second cow from U.S. soil to test positive and the first to have apparently been born in the United States. Some 388,000 American cattle have been screened for the disease, so the results suggest mad cow is rare in American herds, said Nolan Hartwig, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University.

"We shouldn't be worrying about it," Hartwig said. "I ate beef last night."

Johnson said that while contaminated feed is suspected of causing mad cow, another possibility is that the disease might arise spontaneously - but rarely - in cattle. Gray said he doubted that, noting that known cases have concentrated in the United Kingdom, rather than appearing more generally as one would expect from a spontaneous illness.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, also said mad cow appears to pose "minuscule" risk to consumers because it's so unusual in cattle.

But the federal government should still institute a mandatory system of animal identification and tracking, she said. That way, when the disease is detected in a cow, it will be easier to track down other animals that could have also been exposed to harmful prions, she said.

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