Thomas Mott Osborne: “yesterday the United States' third case of BSE or mad cow disease was diagnosed. The first case was December 2003, which…”

“yesterday the United States' third case of BSE or mad cow disease was diagnosed. The first case was December 2003, which was a Canadian-born cow that was diagnosed in Washington State. The second case was last June, a cow from Texas, and now this latest case, a cow from Alabama, and it is assumed that it is at least 10 years old or older. If so, this cow was born before the 1997 feed ban went into effect, and that is significant because in 1997, it was decreed that no ruminant animal feed would be fed to livestock; and, of course, ruminant feed means it contains some parts of animal within the feed. It is assumed BSE is acquired by an animal eating part of another animal that is BSE positive. As a result, we think that this feed ban should control the spread of BSE over time, but this apparently was an older animal that may have been prior to the ban. Also, it is duly noted that roughly 150 people in the United Kingdom have died from a related disease to eating BSE-positive animals, so it is a concern. So this leads to some questions: Number one, is U.S. beef safe? The answer is yes, despite this third case. Annually we slaughter roughly 35 million cows in the United States, and we have had three positive since 2003, and our testing system is sophisticated to the degree if there is one animal that is positive for BSE in 10 million cows, we would be 99 percent certain to find that one cow. So the testing, the surveillance has been ramped up considerably.…”