Mad cow disease threat may hurt beef farmers

The possible losses for Alleghany County from "mad cow disease" will be solely economic ones, a local 4-H agricultural extension agent says. Cooperative Extension Agent Charles Young, who serves Ashe and Alleghany counties, said that the possibility of humans catching the disease is very low.

Following an incident in which a Holstein tested positive for the disease in Washington state last week, there has been increased public awareness of the disease.

Written information from Young indicates that the cow was born in Canada and imported to the United States.

"The disease is caused by prion, a malformed protein that is found only in the brain or spinal tissue of infected cows," Young said. Because of the way the meat is processed and then not fed back to cattle in the United States, the disease would be very difficult to transmit. This is not similar to the situation in Canada, where there had been an outbreak of the disease due to a different processing method. "Because of what had been going on overseas, our USDA banned the feeding of that type of tissue back to cattle," he said.

A press release from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) indicated that the FDA's "animal feed rule," which has been in place since 1997, is designed to prevent the spread of what has been medically termed "bovine spongiform encephalopathy" (BSE) — popularly known as mad cow disease — further throughout cattle herds. The regulation prohibits the feeding of most mammalian protein to ruminant animals such as cows, sheep and goats — this type of feeding was the route of disease transmission that led to the epidemic of BSE in the United Kingdom that began in the 1980s.

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