OTTAWA (AP)
Canada confirmed a new case of mad cow disease Tuesday, the country's 12th such case since the disease was first discovered there in 2003. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said no part of the cow's carcass entered the human food or animal feed chains. The animal is a 6-year-old cow from Alberta, born after the implementation of Canada's feed ban in 1997. The national monitoring program targets cattle most at risk for the disease, which is also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The agency says it expects to detect a small number of cases over the next 10 years as Canada moves toward its goal of eliminating the disease from its herds. "Any case of BCE is unwelcome, but on the other hand it is recognized worldwide that there were a small number of animals that were born after the implementation of the feed ban that reflect some residual or contaminated feed in the system," Canadian Food Inspection Agency senior veterinarian George Luterbach said. U. S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Chuck Conner said Canada's latest case of mad cow will not affect trade relations with the U.S. "This is no cause for concern," Conner said. In May 2003, the discovery of an Alberta cow with mad cow disease caused the United States to slam the border shut to cattle imports from Canada, causing billions of damage to the Canadian industry. The border between the world's largest trade partners has since reopened for Canadian beef. More than two dozen nations suspended beef imports from the U.S. after a cow in Mabton, Wash., tested positive for the brain-wasting disease in December 2003. The cow's origins were later traced to Canada. Two other cases of mad cow disease have been discovered in the U.S. since 2003. Eating meat products with infected tissue is linked to a rare, fatal illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, that has killed more than 150 people worldwide, most of them in Britain.
