No Mad Cow: Animal Found to Be Free of Disease
Nov. 23rd, 2004 by adminBy John Heilprin on November 23, 2004
From the Associated Press
Excerpt - for complete text please visit The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
WASHINGTON — A cow the Agriculture Department had suspected of carrying mad cow disease was declared free of the illness after follow-up tests, officials said Tuesday. The announcement was a relief to the U.S. beef industry, which is still trying to recover from the nation’s first case of the disease last December.
Initial screenings last week had raised the possibility of a new case of the disease in the United States. But a more definitive test at the National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa, came back negative, the officials said.
Cattle futures trading ended Tuesday at 87.25 cents per pound on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, just slightly below the 87.32 cents per pound it was at the end of last Wednesday, the day before the latest mad cow scare. In between, it had dipped to nearly 84.2 cents per pound.
“We saw the market sell off and then stabilize,” said Bill O’Grady, director of futures research for A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc. in St. Louis. “The market had sort of expected that the odds were high this would end up being a false positive.”
O’Grady and Gregg Doud, chief economist of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said beef prices also were affected by the heavy rains and snow in parts of Texas. Doud said it was hard to say how much the mad cow scare alone had influenced the markets.
“We’re already back to where we were,” said Doud.
After the initial screening, the Agriculture Department said it ran a “gold standard” test twice, on Monday and Tuesday. Officials did not say where the cow came from or why it was suspected of being diseased.
“Negative results from both … tests make us confident that the animal in question is indeed negative,” said John Clifford, deputy administrator of the department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
The initial screenings had produced what officials said were “inconclusive” results, but just the possibility of a second case had rattled cattle producers, meatpackers and hamburger chains.
Julie Quick, a USDA spokeswoman, said officials would provide no further information about the suspect cow since the test results came back negative.
It has been less than a year since the first case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was found in the United States. The disease attacks an animal’s nervous system, and food contaminated with BSE can afflict people with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare disease that is usually fatal.
