Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 21, 2003
By Jeffrey Jones

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - The world slammed the door on Canadian beef and cattle Wednesday fearing a mad cow disease outbreak as inspectors sealed off more farms while racing to trace the origin of the animal confirmed as the country's first case in a decade.

The United States was first to slap a temporary ban on shipments from Canada after a cow from Alberta, the country's top beef-producing province, was confirmed as having the brain-wasting disease Tuesday.

Other countries including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and Mexico have quickly followed suit, forcing Alberta's $3 billion cattle industry to grind nearly to a halt, officials said.

"The closing of the U.S. border is the biggest impact," Alberta Beef Producers General Manager Gary Sargent told Reuters. "But we're starting to see a cascading effect now with packing plants going to partial days or not operating at all, and auction markets taking a break for a week to let the situation stabilize."

The case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, has sent shock waves from Main Street in small town Alberta, where ranching is part of the culture, to Wall Street, where investors fear consumers across the continent will begin avoiding beef products in stores and restaurants.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed inspectors quarantined two farms following a similar move at the one near Fairview in northern Alberta where the case was discovered, but a spokeswoman said she did not know where they were located.

Other farms in the province, where 5.5 million cattle dot the rolling landscape, may be closed off if needed, Alberta Agriculture Minister Shirley McClellan warned.

Canada, only now recovering from the economic blow caused by the fear of SARS in the Toronto area, confirmed Tuesday an eight-year-old cow was diagnosed with the disease following a test after it was slaughtered in late January.

The last case in Canada was in 1993, but that animal had been imported from Britain.

Ottawa said it was confident it could contain the crisis and was trying to reassure trading partners who have banned beef imports from Canada that the situation was under control.

PRIME MINISTER DINES ON STEAK

Prime Minister Jean Chretien said he was waiting for tests that would show whether the animal was imported or born in Canada, and whether other animals in the herd were infected.

"If it is one herd it's not the same thing as if it (the disease) has spread. We hope and we pray and we have all the indications that it is one cow in one herd," he said before eating a steak as a show of support for Alberta's producers.

But the U.S. Agriculture Department said it was investigating whether any additional measures beyond the temporary ban on Canadian imports were needed.

Canadian investigators said they would need at least a week to get the test results back from the rest of the herd. Once the livestock are killed, brain tissue will go to a federal lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for tests.

Officials from Britain, where the disease had led to the slaughter of 3.7 million cattle and a worldwide ban on British imports, said the Canadian case was confirmed at the leading veterinary laboratories agency in Britain.

Tainted meat-based feed is widely believed to have spread the brain-wasting disease through the British herd in the 1980s and early 1990s.

More than 100 people, mostly in Britain, have died from the human form of mad cow disease, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, believed to be caused by eating infected meat.

Canada's chief veterinary officer, Brian Evans, said in Paris that in addition to the 150-head herd in which the case was found, authorities traced 211 animals that left the herd in the three years of its existence. All those animals were now in quarantine and being tested.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21027-2003May21.html