Posted on: Saturday, July 2, 2005

Mad cow doesn't dampen holiday

By Cheryl Wittenauer
Associated Press

ST. LOUIS — There will be no ribs or steaks on the grill this Fourth of July weekend at the Brown house. Worried by the latest confirmed homegrown case of mad cow disease in the United States, the Browns plan to cook up some chicken.

"They said the cow was destroyed, but how do we know that's true?" said Barbara Brown, 54, who was packing groceries into her mother's car. "We've been cutting back on beef, but this has colored the issue even more."

But at a butcher shop in New York City, Al Wilson, 60, bought a pound of ground beef and planned to grill up hamburgers along with spare ribs for Independence Day. Mad cow disease, he said, is "in the back of my head, but I think the numbers are in my favor."

"Maybe I shouldn't be so trusting," he added, but "it's unlikely to affect me."

Just days before one of the biggest grilling weekends of the year, U.S. authorities announced that mad cow disease has been found in a beef cow from a Texas ranch — the first documented case of the brain-destroying malady in U.S.-born and -raised livestock. The only other known case of the disease in the United States turned up in 2003 in Washington state, in a dairy cow that had come from Canada.

The reaction at supermarkets and butcher shops around the country has been mixed.

Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, causes sponge-like holes in the brain. In people, a rare and deadly form called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has been linked to eating infected tissue from cows.

Mad cow disease in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s has been blamed for the deaths of 150 people. But there has never been a documented case of the human illness from the eating of contaminated beef in the U.S.

Officials said the Texas case poses no new threat to the health of people or animals.

In addition, the government requires the removal of the brain, spinal column and other nerve tissue from cattle older than 2 1/2 years when slaughtered. Many scientists believe that mad cow proteins are confined to nervous system tissue.

Also, the infected cow was 12 years old, born well before the government's 1997 ban on animal feed containing ground-up sheep and cattle parts, which can transmit the disease.

"In terms of science, there is no risk," said Steven Cohen, spokesman for the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Beef industry officials and producers said they do not believe customers will shy away from burgers, steaks or kabobs. Jennifer Whitman, a spokeswoman for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said: "We haven't seen any decrease in demand at all."

In Texas, the No. 1 cattle-producing state, customers streamed into the Old Town Market in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville, stocking up on hamburger, ribs and brisket for the big weekend. "You trust that things are in place to be protective, just like you do with medicine," said one customer, Irene Carey.

Roland Dickey Jr., vice president of Dickey's Barbecue, which has 65 restaurants in six states, said that they did not see any drop-off in business after the first case of mad cow was found in the U.S. and do not expect a decrease this time either.

"I think that the American public knows that basically the food supply is completely safe," he said.