Hawai'i may have beef from sick cow
By Peter Boylan
Advertiser Staff Writer
U.S. agriculture officials said yesterday that meat from a dairy cow afflicted with mad cow disease may be in Hawai'i.
Dr. Kenneth Petersen, a veterinarian with the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection service, said the parts most likely to carry infection — the brain, spinal cord, and lower intestine — were removed before meat from the infected cow was processed for human consumption.
"The recalled meat represents an essentially zero risk to consumers," Petersen said yesterday in a telephone press conference from Washington, D.C.
Meat products from the infected cow and 19 other cows slaughtered Dec. 9 at Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co., in Moses Lake, Washington, have now been identified in the retail markets of eight states. They are Hawai'i, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska and Montana. The U.S. territory of Guam also is affected.
Although federal officials maintain the food supply is safe, Hawai'i is now part of a recall of an estimated 10,000 pounds of meat.
Petersen said most of the meat went to Washington and Oregon, where much of it has been successfully recalled. Petersen said the USDA is still collecting meat and will not know until later in the week how complete the recall was.
All local recall efforts are being coordinated by the USDA and its regional office, Hawai'i officials said. The state departments of agriculture and health have offered to help the USDA track down any recalled beef that may have made its way to Hawai'i.
It is not known which local retailers have been affected.
In a recall, compliance inspectors from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service will go to retail establishments suspected of receiving tainted meat and place a hold on the meat until it can be discarded.
Supermarket chains in the West — Albertsons, Fred Meyer, Safeway and WinCo Foods — voluntarily have removed ground beef products that came from the affected distributors. Safeway has said it would look for another supplier.
Outside the Safeway on Pali Highway yesterday, James Shimabuku, a 67-year-old Punchbowl resident, said he would not be buying beef for a while.
"You can die from that disease," he noted.
But Daniel Kekahuna, a 25-year-old Kalihi resident, said he was not very worried and would continue to eat meat.
"Pretty soon, might as well stop eating; everything is bad for you," Kekahuna said yesterday at Kalihi Super Meats.
Dr. Calvin Lum, a retired state veterinarian who owns a 1,000-acre beef cattle ranch on the North Shore, said Hawai'i imports 95 percent of its beef. Local cattle are fed with grass, he said, not the mixture of brain and spinal cord matter used by Mainland farmers to fatten calves before that method was banned in 1997.
Brain and spinal tissue mixed with feed was cited by the USDA as the main reason for the spread of mad cow disease. It is difficult to track the source of any mad cow outbreak, because the disease has an incubation period of four to five years.
"Right now, we're in the same boat as the Mainland: We're just waiting to see till they get to the bottom of this. Local cattle are safe, I'd put money on that," Lum said.
Paul Ah Cook, director of operations for Ruth Chris Steakhouses in Hawai'i, said the restaurant only serves muscle meat, a cut not likely to carry mad cow disease. He said the company has 100 percent confidence in its steaks.
"We are concerned about the announcement, but our government and our company will do everything to get the word out that our product is safe and that this is an isolated incident that we'll get past," Ah Cook said.
Export market lost
Despite assurances that American beef is safe for consumption, Japan and more than two dozen countries have blocked U.S. beef imports. Jordan and Lebanon joined the list yesterday. U.S. beef industry officials estimate they've lost 90 percent of their $3 billion export market because of the bans.
Japan is the principal importer of U.S. beef — $854 million worth in 2002.
Mad cow disease, officially called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, can cause humans who eat brain or spinal matter from an infected cow to develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which eats holes in the brain, leading to neuromuscular deterioration and death.
In Britain, 143 people died from the disease after an outbreak of mad cow in the 1980s.
Hawai'i herds to be tested
The state recently announced plans to aid the USDA in the testing of 183 head of cattle in Hawai'i for the disease in the coming year.
There are nine dairies and more than 800 beef operations statewide.
It is highly unlikely Hawai'i would have imported an infected animal, because cattle are rarely imported into the state, said Jason Moniz, program manager of the livestock disease-control branch for the State Department of Agriculture, in a previous interview.
In the past decade, Hawai'i has imported 1,485 dairy and beef cattle. The low volume has made it easy to track and inspect animals brought into the state, so the risk that an animal might have been imported from the same herd as the infected animal is "very, very, very low," Moniz said.
Staff Writer Kevin Dayton and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Reach Peter Boylan at 535-8110 or pboylan@honoluluadvertiser.com.
