Alabama cow tests positive for mad cow disease

Test younger cattle
Another group, Consumers Union, said the government should test all cattle over the age of 20 months at slaughter for mad cow, not just older cattle now sampled. Food and Consumer Watch said USDA’s budget proposal for fiscal 2007 would scale back the “surveillance” testing to 40,000 head a year.

Four consumer groups faulted USDA for taking too long to set up a nationwide animal tracking system, now slated to take effect in January 2009.

“The U.S. government has no greater capacity to trace a 'mad cow' back to its origins or answer crucial questions about its origins than it did on Dec. 23, 2003,” said Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America.

In late 2003, USDA pledged to speed up work on the system after a dairy cow in Washington state tested positive for the first U.S. mad cow case.

When implemented, the animal identification system would allow officials to trace the home farm and herdmates of suspect animals within 48 hours of a disease outbreak. It will also allow them to trace any contact a diseased animal had with other food animals.

Another group, Consumers Union, said the government should test all cattle over the age of 20 months at slaughter for mad cow, not just older cattle now sampled. Food and Consumer Watch said USDA’s budget proposal for fiscal 2007 would scale back the “surveillance” testing to 40,000 head a year.

“At this point, the nature and extent of that program has not been decided,” Clifford said when asked about the future of USDA’s stepped-up mad-cow testing program.

In humans, eating meat products contaminated with BSE has been linked to more than 150 deaths, mostly in Britain, from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a rare and fatal nerve disease.

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