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Mad Cow Fears May Keep Labs Busy

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Times Staff Writer

Whatever hardship mad cow disease causes the U.S. beef industry, it could benefit Bay Area laboratories that specialize in rapid screening for the disease and the University of California, which holds an exclusive licensing agreement for some of the newer testing technology.

The arrival of bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- otherwise known as BSE or mad cow disease -- in Canada and the United States after earlier outbreaks in Europe and Japan probably will accelerate U.S. research into detection of the mortal disease in live animals. Currently, all testing is done on the carcasses of dead animals.

Leading the research is In-Pro Biotechnology, a private South San Francisco company founded by a UC San Francisco research scientist, Stanley Prusiner, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his studies of abnormally shaped proteins. Such proteins, called prions, are believed to cause mad cow disease and the related human ailment, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

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Under an agreement with UC, where Prusiner heads the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, In-Pro has the right to market products based on his research, including a testing kit. For each kit sold, UC will get a royalty.

Across San Francisco Bay in the industrial suburb of Hercules, Bio-Rad Laboratories is the international leader in BSE testing, responsible for almost two-thirds of the 8.6 million tests done globally in 2003. Factoring in lab expenses and labor, testing costs about $50 per animal.

Spurred by the discovery of BSE in a Washington state dairy cow last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced plans to increase from 20,000 to 38,000 the number of cattle tested in 2004 and, for the first time, to use rapid screening techniques for some of the testing. Officials say that is a sufficient reaction at this time.

Previously, the USDA did all of its testing at one facility in Ames, Iowa, using another method that takes as much as two weeks. Rapid screen techniques such as those marketed by In-Pro and Bio-Rad can detect BSE in about four hours.

How much of a boon the USDA policy shift will be for the California companies depends largely on the degree of public alarm over the mad cow threat and the concessions the U.S. beef industry is willing to make to protect its $4.3-billion export market, particularly with Japan.

“The wild card right now is the export market,” said Bio-Rad Vice President Bradford Crutchfield. “Japan and all these countries have banned our beef. The question is: What will it take to un-ban it?”

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About 10% of the U.S. beef business is in exports, almost all of which stopped after the discovery of the single U.S. case of mad cow disease. Experts believe that Japan, which tests every slaughtered animal from its domestic herd, and other key countries are not likely to resume imports until the beef that is sent to them is being tested first.

The European Union requires testing on all bovines more than 30 months old. France and Germany require testing of animals older than 24 months. But these policies are under review after two younger animals, age 23 and 21 months respectively, tested positive for the disease in Japan.

Prusiner and his colleagues at In-Pro advocate universal testing of all slaughtered animals regardless of age.

“I would test every animal that is destined for human consumption,” said In-Pro Chief Executive Scott McKinlay. “You don’t want your children and I don’t want my children eating a prion. We need to interdict the flow of these prions into the human food chain.”

McKinlay said that, at current beef prices, testing works out to about “a penny a hamburger.”

But at $50 per animal, testing all 35 million cattle slaughtered annually in the U.S. would cost $1.75 billion, an enormous windfall for testing companies such as Bio-Rad and In-Pro.

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Tireless in his warnings about the dangers of prions, Prusiner has been criticized for using his prestige as a Nobel scientist and UC professor to create a market for his private business in mad cow testing and the development of a live animal test.

Even Bio-Rad executive Crutchfield, whose company stands to make millions of dollars with any increase in testing, said Prusiner’s stand represents a “conflict of interest.”

Prusiner declined comment, referring all questions to McKinlay.

For its part, the U.S. beef industry is leery of any major increase in testing.

“We are certainly not in favor of testing every animal,” said James Reagan, vice president for research for the 40,000 member National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn., the powerful industry lobby. “We feel that is not necessary and not realistic, especially since most science tells us right now that BSE does not occur in cattle under 30 months of age.”

Most American beef, Reagan said, comes from animals less than 2 years old. “Testing any cattle younger than that,” Reagan said, “would be like testing first-graders for Alzheimer’s.”

Public anxiety over the dangers posed by prions, mixed with a presidential election year in which candidates will be looking for issues to use against the Bush administration, will be key factors in what happens next in Washington.

Reagan said the beef association had conducted opinion polls since the Washington state dairy cow case and that the polls showed that public confidence in U.S. beef products remained high -- at about 89%.

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But Crutchfield, who has seen the effects of public panics in Germany and Japan, said the politics of mad cow disease are likely to remain volatile. “It’s all about the perception of risk,” he said.

The discovery of another case or two or the continued boycott by foreign markets, he said, could disrupt the balance.

For example, after two German cows tested positive for BSE in November 2000, Crutchfield recalled, the demand for test kits increased overnight from 200,000 to more than 6 million annually.

When infected cows were discovered in Japan in August 2001, the Japanese parliament quickly sought to allay public fears by requiring testing of all its slaughtered animals.

“It was a political decision, not a scientific one,” Crutchfield said. “The Japanese politicians just wanted to reassure the public that every single animal was tested.”

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