TORONTO (AP) – Another 650 cattle in Canada will be slaughtered and tested for mad cow disease after DNA testing failed to confirm the origin of the lone cow infected so far, an investigator said Tuesday.
The animals from five Alberta farms will be killed and have samples of their brains checked in laboratories, said Brian Evans, chief veterinary officer of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The new tests will likely delay by several days the conclusion of the investigation into any possible spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. Evans had said Monday the investigation could be finished by the end of the week.
That is bad news for the Canadian beef industry, which wants the United States and other countries to lift bans on Canadian beef imports as soon as possible. Sales and production have slowed since the bans began as far back as May 20, and industry figures say the impact increases each day that product cannot be moved.
The additional testing increases the total number of cattle to be slaughtered for examination to more than 1,700 in the investigation of the lone BSE case confirmed May 20 from a farm in Alberta, the heartland of Canada’s cattle country. So far, 800 animals have tested negative.
Two farms were removed from a quarantine list due to negative test results, while another farm was added because it may have received feed before Canada banned ruminant animal-based feed blamed for spreading BSE in 1997, Evans said. The total number of farms under quarantine was 15.
A lack of comprehensive record-keeping left investigators with two possible histories for the infected cow, which was slaughtered on Jan. 31 but kept out of the food chain because of health concerns.
Evans said investigators have to test herds from both possible histories because DNA testing failed to figure out when and where the infected cow was born.
The BSE case was the first reported in North America in a decade, and only the second ever on the continent. Subsequent bans on Canadian beef products, particularly by a U.S. market that gets more than 70 percent of Canadian cattle exports, have harmed an industry worth $22 billion a year.
A U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official said Tuesday that detection of one case of BSE in Canada amounted to good news rather than a cause for panic because it showed the safeguards worked.
Mad cow disease was first diagnosed in Britain in 1986 and is thought to have spread through cow feed made with protein and bone meal from infected animals.
The human form of BSE is the fatal brain-wasting illness variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Scientists believe people get it by eating some meat products from infected animals.
AP-ES-06-03-03 1859EDT
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