Facts About Mad Cow Disease

The case of Mad Cow Disease in six years sparked fears of illness that prompted at least one major South Korean retailer to suspend the sale of American beef.

However, public health officials said the risk for disease for Americans is extremely low given that the affected dairy cow in central California was not part of the human food chain and was not exposed to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) through animal feed.

The is the fourth instance of Mad Cow Disease to have been discovered in US history. It was long believed that cattle were infected with BSE by eating feed that included spine and brain tissue of other cows who had consumed the meat of sheep infected with scrapie. But some scientists have since hypothesized that the disease may develop spontaneously in cattle. Federal officials believe that the recent instance in California was a indeed caused by an atypical genetic malformation, as CBS reported. “It was just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal,” Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University, told the AP. “Random mutations go on in nature all the time.” Federal officials further emphasized that the infected cow had not eaten contaminated feed.

South Korea is the world’s fourth-largest importer of U.S. beef.
South Korean agriculture officials are considering whether to formally suspend delivery of U.S. beef to stores by halting quarantine inspections, which would prevent the meat from clearing customs.

The new case of mad cow disease is the first in the U.S. since 2006. It was discovered in a dairy cow in California, but health authorities said Tuesday the animal was never a threat to the nation’s food supply.
The infected cow, the fourth ever discovered in the U.S., was found as part of an Agriculture Department surveillance program that tests about 40,000 cows a year for the fatal brain disease.
South Korea first imposed an import ban on U.S. beef in 2003 after mad cow disease was detected in a U.S. cow. The country lifted the ban in 2008 but faced a huge outcry from the public and months of candlelight protests.