Elizabeth Cohen: Senate hearing on mad cow disease

Elizabeth Cohen

Elizabeth Cohen is CNN’s medical reporter. She has been following the Senate hearings on mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy – BSE) and the safety of America’s food supply.

Q: What issues were raised during today’s Senate hearing on mad cow disease and meat safety in the U.S.?

Cohen: The Senators wanted to know the chances of mad cow disease coming to the United States. Basically, government authorities said that while there is not zero risk, there is a very low, low risk of mad cow disease coming to the US. That low risk can be attributed to the precautions that have been in place for several years to keep mad cow disease out of the country.

Q: What safeguards are currently in place in the U.S.?

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Cohen: In the 1980's and 1990's, government agencies put forth a series of safeguards. There are three major precautions. It is illegal to import animals from Europe into the US. It is also illegal to important animal feed. It is also illegal for cattle feed to contain body parts from dead animals that would be at risk for having mad cow disease. For example, you can’t include sheep body parts in cow feed because of the way animals contract mad cow disease. The disease occurs when a healthy animal ingests body parts from infected animals, then the healthy animal contracts the disease and dies.

Q: Some people suggest that there are some gaps in the firewall of protection. What are the potential gaps?

Cohen: Even watchdog organizations say that the laws are good, and the organizations applaud the government for putting those laws in place many years ago. The gaps that are being referred to involve making sure that feed processing plants know what the laws are and how to comply.

For example, even though the current laws banning animal body parts from cattle feed have been in place for years, many feed processing plants don’t even know about them. Last September, the General Accounting Office issued a report saying that 20 percent of the processing plants they visited didn’t know the Food and Drug Administration had issued that prohibition. That is the kind of gap these people are talking about.

Also, meat-processing plants are not supposed to put the spinal column in the machine that scrapes the last bit of beef out. Some people are concerned that many processing plants are doing that even though they are not supposed to be. The reason for this ban is that the agent causing mad cow disease is the prion, and prions live in the central nervous system of the animal -- the brain and the spinal chord.

Q: What can individuals can do to protect themselves from the human form of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (nvCJD)?

Cohen: There is really nothing a person can do. The risk is so incredibly low that some people would say there is no reason to check anyhow. The incubation period for this disease in humans is estimated to be very long, somewhere between five and 20 years. It is possible that there are people out there who have been infected but don’t know it because the incubation period is so long. There is no blood test to diagnosis this. The only way to diagnosis this is to examine the brain during an autopsy.

This is one of the things making it so hard to get rid of the disease. If someone falls ill, that person is not likely to know if it is from something he or she ate five years ago or 15 years ago. People are not going to remember what they at that time. This is not like salmonella where you can think back to what you had for breakfast this morning.

Q: What recommendations were made?

Cohen: Two of the watchdog groups made several recommendations, including better policing of laws already in place. For instance, making feed processing plants be more careful about not allowing animal parts into cow feed. In Texas just a few months ago, 1,200 cattle were slaughtered because they had eaten feed containing body parts from other animals, which they were not supposed to do. When the violation was discovered, the animals were slaughtered.

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WHO - Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE)
The BSE Inquiry Report
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