Cow’s Birth Predates Feed Ban, U.S. Says

Federal investigators said Monday that a Washington state Holstein diagnosed with “mad cow” disease was born in Canada in April 1997, months before implementation of a U.S.-Canadian ban on cattle feed containing animal parts.

The assessment, based on the records of the Washington state farmer who bought the cow, came as officials announced they were trying to trace 81 other cows that had entered the U.S. from Alberta, Canada, in August 2001 with the Holstein to determine whether any of them also were infected. Previously, officials had estimated the size of the herd at 74 cows.

Agriculture officials said pinning down the age of the cow is crucial to the investigation. “Mad cow” disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is most commonly spread by the use of cattle feed that contains bone meal made from infected animals. The infected cow may well have ingested contaminated feed before its ban.

“The more time goes by, the fewer animals that are alive that would have been exposed to feed before this feed ban went into place,” said Dr. W. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinarian for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “And so, as time goes by, the risk of more animals becoming infected decreases.”

Officials continued to defend the safety of the food supply and the soundness of their surveillance testing program, which inspects 20,000 out of 35 million cows slaughtered annually.

“There is no indication that we have the magnitude of the problem that Europe had” in the 1980s, DeHaven said. “By any stretch of the imagination, the United States cannot be said to be at high risk. This single case appears not to have been born in the U.S.”

President Bush was said to be monitoring developments from his ranch near Waco, Texas. White House Deputy Press Secretary Trent Duffy said Bush was receiving regular updates on the situation, including a telephone conversation Sunday with Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman.

Officials and farmers in Canada -- which reported a lone case of “mad cow” disease in May -- were reeling from accusations that the diseased cow had come from Alberta, with the province’s premier lashing out at U.S. officials for blaming Canada, and local news agencies reporting that the feed might have been purchased in the United States.

And critics, both in North America and in key U.S. beef-consuming nations such as Japan, continued to call on the United States to test more widely and to prohibit the slaughter of so-called downed animals, which are too sick or injured to walk.

A U.S. trade delegation was in Japan for talks on “mad cow” disease with the government there, and Kyodo News Service reported that the Japanese had declined a U.S. request for a quick resumption of imports. Japan, which tests all slaughtered cows over age 24 months for the disease, imported $1 billion in U.S. beef in 2002.

Once the U.S. investigation is completed, industry sources say, agriculture officials are expected to announce a series of reforms -- including putting a hold on cows that are inspected, so their meat products cannot be distributed until tests are completed.

The infected cow was slaughtered Dec. 9, and test results were not made public until Dec. 23. Officials have since recalled 10,000 pounds of meat distributed from that day’s slaughter, but it is not known how much has been returned.

Agriculture officials said Monday that 80% of the recalled meat products were in Washington state and Oregon. The remaining 20% was sold in California, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, Nevada, Hawaii and Guam.

Dalton Hobbs, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, said officials there “have been getting a fair share of calls.”

“People really have a range of concerns here,” Hobbs added. “We have the people who call saying, ‘I bought this beef at this store, should I be concerned?’ ”

The nation’s three largest supermarket chains -- Safeway Inc., Kroger Co. and Albertsons Inc. -- voluntarily recalled product originating from the Verns Moses Lake Meat Co. in Moses Lake, Wash. However, executives from each of the companies said none of the meat in question had been sold in California.

Officials with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service declined to disclose the names of other retailers or distributors that carried the recalled meat. “It’s proprietary information,” said Daniel Puzo, spokesman for the inspection service. “We are under legal counsel that we cannot distribute information that can harm [these companies] or help their competition.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn., the trade group for cattle producers, said that it supports reforms, but that it considers the U.S. record to this point admirable.

“The system has worked very, very well,” said Gary Weber, the association’s executive director of regulatory affairs. “We were the first country in the world to start a surveillance system, the first to do the feed ban. We’ve been ahead of this.”

Amid a banner year for beef sales in the United States, Weber said the economic fallout so far has been linked to foreign markets, which could cost U.S. producers $3.5 billion. But he said consumption in the United States had been unaffected.

Coincidentally, agriculture officials said there is a proposed regulation in the works -- with comments invited until Jan. 5 -- to make it easier to import cattle under 30 months of age directly to slaughter from “low-risk” countries such as Canada. The industry has asked that the regulation be put on hold.

Democratic presidential candidates, seeking farm state votes in quest of the party’s 2004 nomination, continued to blast the Bush administration’s response to the “mad cow” outbreak as ineffective. Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, campaigning Monday in Iowa, called for closer federal oversight of food safety and more aid to ranchers and farmers hurt by the fallout from the disease.

Gephardt proposed a new food safety agency to coordinate work now done by the Food and Drug Administration and the USDA. He also called on the administration to suspend a proposal to allow Canadian imports of live cattle into the United States and to halt all shipments of meat from “suspicious downed animals.”

“I do think that the ‘mad cow’ disease situation is a very serious one, and it will have a dramatic impact on the economy here in Iowa,” Gephardt told reporters in Creston. He predicted that troubles in the cattle market would ripple through grain markets because livestock feed on much of the corn produced in the United States.

Some consumers, meanwhile, are approaching the prospect of eating beef with caution.

“My mom had roast beef for Christmas, and I ate it, but I have to say it made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t have seconds,” said Tom Benedict, 27, an engineer from Portland, Ore., who was visiting his family in Seattle. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and she said it was Nebraska beef, and not to worry. But you can’t help think about it with all the news.”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen in Waco, Texas, Nick Anderson in Creston, Iowa, Melinda Fulmer in Los Angeles and researcher Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.