Officials: Mad Cow Risk in U.S. Very Low
N E W Y O R K, Jan. 19 -- How do you know if the steak you are eating is free of mad cowdisease?
Did you ever wonder about the safety of those “glandular” supplements from bovine sources you’re buying off the Web to "beef up" your internal organs?
Are you sure that hepatitis vaccine you took recently does not contain any mad cow proteins?
What about the blood transfusion you recently had, which may have blood mixed in from Europeans?
So far, none of these products or medicines has been contaminated with mad cow disease in the United States. But government officials and public health experts believe all these areas bear close watching, as they are potential entry points for mad cow disease, if current rules and regulations aren’t constantly updated and monitored.
As every day brings more news from Europe about mad cow disease — with Italy reporting its first confirmed case of an infected cow this week from a slaughterhouse that supplies McDonalds, Spain reporting two new cases in cattle this week, and parts of England delaying tonsillectomies to wait for new surgical instruments to prevent human transmission of the disease — Americans are wondering more and more: Are we next?
Federal officials assure us the chance of getting mad cow disease in this country is extremely low, even with some recently exposed potential problems in U.S. livestock feed and human vaccines. But the risk is not zero, as scientists continue to grapple with the food supply, the blood supply, nutritional supplements, among other possible sources.
“I assure my nieces and nephews that it’s perfectly safe to eathamburgers and meat,” says Linda Detwiler, senior staff veterinarian with the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “But there is always more we can be doing.”
Food and Drug Administration Hearing
The Food and Drug Administration is holding a public hearingtoday to discuss whether it should further limit who candonate blood or organs in this country, based upon donors’ potentialexposure to transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.
TSEs encompass the family of diseases that infect cows, humans, sheep, deer, elk, mice andmonkeys, all creating similar neurological devastation as mad cow. Theagency also will briefly consider the nutritional supplement issue at its meeting.
Mad cow disease is thought to be caused by prions, which are as-yet poorly understood infectious agents that eat away brain tissue, giving it a spongy appearance. The human version responsible for more than 80 deaths in Britain is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Scientists believe victims contracted it by eating infected beef. The disease presumably spread throughout Europe by cows fed bone meal and beef by-products contaminated bythe disease.
