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US mad cow disease: Calls for government to protect consumers

08 May 2012

Following a recent outbreak of mad cow disease in California, CI member organisation Consumer Reports has called on the US Secretary of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to take new measures to detect and prevent the disease in US beef and dairy cows.

Consumer Reports cited studies that suggest L-type bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE can be transmitted to humans, possibly even more easily than classic BSE, the type of mad cow disease that resulted in more than a hundred deaths in the United Kingdom.

Experimental transmission studies (eg, injecting material from the infected cow into the brain of another animal) show that L-type BSE is more virulent.

"The fact that this is an L-type atypical mad cow strain means that this case is not necessarily a spontaneous case, but rather could have been acquired through infected feed," said senior scientist at Consumer Reports Michael Hansen.

Consumers Reports is calling for the following measures to protect food safety:

Prohibiting poultry litter, cattle blood, and brain in cattle feed; and

Conducting a thorough investigation of the current case, including increasing the BSE test program from the current 40,000 annual level and allowing private companies to test at their own expense.