Euro Ag Ministers Updated on BSE Ourbreak  12/5/02

Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming New York Times 1/5/04

Seattle Times: Worker says Discovery of Infected cow was "a fluke" 1/24/04

A cat becomes a cow as the US sets its pets alight - (A FISH-FOOD CONFECTION Connection)  3/28/04

Wash. Gov. Signs Mad Cow-Related Bills 4/1/02

World-renowned scientist reflects on half century of work with TSE 4/21/04 
 

Ananova: 

Swedes using dead animals as biofuel 

Swedish companies have developed a way of burning dead farm animals that generates energy while reducing the risk of mad cow disease.

The Swedish Board of Agriculture is giving £175,000 to three companies developing the method.

Carcasses and animal by-products are incinerated without the usual step of first grinding them into meat and bone meal.

"We believe that this will be the future way of getting rid of this type of material," a spokesman for the state agency said.

He said grinding them - but avoiding the step of making meat and bone meal - makes the process quicker. It also ensures cadavers and animal by-products are not recycled for animal feed.

After recent outbreaks of BSE, farmers in the 15 member European Union must destroy meat and bone meal from animals not fit for human consumption.

The spokesman added the largest chunk of the grant - £140,000 - was given to Konvex, a company that three weeks ago started testing the new energy-generating method in Karlskoga, 125 miles west of the capital Stockholm.

The company expects to burn 15,000 tons of cadavers and animal by-products like brains and intestines at the Karlskoga plant until May, chief executive Leo Virtue said.

If the method is successful, he said, the company could start sending the minced cattle, pigs and poultry to other power plants that burn biofuel.

Sweden, a Scandinavian nation of 8.9 million people, is the only EU country that has not had a single case of mad cow disease.
 

Story filed: 10:35 Thursday 5th December 2002

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_722178.html 

The European Commissioner responsible for consumer safety, David Byrne, updated EU ministers on the state of play of BSE in the European Union during the meeting of the Agriculture Council last week. 
Commissioner Byrne said: "Most cases, two thirds, were discovered in at risk animals, mainly fallen stock and emergency slaughters. The BSE incidence in this category was one per 1,000 animals tested. 

"The tests in healthy animals uncovered 215 positives from 6.7 million animals tested, or one per 30,000". 

On the incidence, he added: "Statistics show overall incidence of BSE continues to decrease, while the average age of positive cases is increasing. 

"This is encouraging and reflects the positive effect of the measures we have taken since 1996, and reinforced more recently." 

The EC Food and Veterinary Office has recently finalised its 2001 overview report on BSE inspections in the Member States. 

Mr Byrne said: "The report recognises the considerable efforts made by Member States over the last year to implement all the new measures, which entered into force over a relatively short time-span. Nevertheless, some remaining weaknesses have been identified, in particular relating to the organisation of feed controls. I would ask Member States to focus greater efforts in this area." 
 

http://www.wisconsinagconnection.com/story-national.cfm?Id=1372

Sixteen years ago, I met a Holstein cow named Juniper-Mist Bell Paula. She lived in splendid solitude in a stone-walled paddock on a venerable Massachusetts farm. Bell Paula was, in fact, more chicken than cow. Her job was to produce eggs, not milk. Several times a year, she was given hormones that caused her to super-ovulate — to release many eggs instead of one. These were flushed from her, fertilized and implanted in receptor cows as near as the next stone paddock or as far away as China and Japan. The reason was Bell Paula's milking record. At the time, an average Holstein in America — the ubiquitous black-and-white dairy cow — gave some 16,000 pounds of milk a year. Bell Paula could give 31,000 pounds a year when she was still being milked. 

If Bell Paula represents one end of the Holstein spectrum — the long-lived queen of the hive, so to speak — the Holstein in Washington State that was found last month to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, represents something much closer to the middle. She was unusual only in the disease she carried. When it became clear that she was unhealthy, she was slaughtered. And, under a testing regime that was changed only last week, her carcass, once tested, was presumed to be safe and fed into the system, instead of being held until the test results were in. 

There was nothing anomalous in that Holstein's slaughter. Beef cattle and dairy cattle represent two different types of animal, but their fates are identical. What most Americans do not realize is that nearly every dairy cow eventually becomes either hamburger or the cheaper variety of steak when her profitability drops. Holsteins are frequently culled for slaughter when they are between 5 and 6 years old. When you figure that a Holstein first gives milk when about 2 years old, that means a productive life on the da on the dairy farm of about three years. In that brief life span, everything is done to maximize yield, including the regular use of antibiotics and the feeding of high-protein concentrates of the kind that used to contain meat and blood meal from other Holsteins, a practice that has since been banned.

After poultry and pigs, the dairy industry has become one of the most concentrated forms of agriculture in America. The old mental picture of a herd of Holsteins standing hock-deep in pasture bears no relation to the way milk is produced in much of America. Some herds, especially in the West and Southwest, number in the thousands, which means the animals spend their lives in barns on cement where they are milked automatically, in some cases on huge rotating platforms that look like something out of science fiction. 

For all their adaptability, even Holsteins can put up with only a certain amount of this. By the time they mature, at around 5 years old, many begin to break down from leg and foot problems. Dairy organizations distribute locomotion charts to help workers assess lameness, which can lead to reproductive failures — another reason for culling animals. Other cows begin to fail from the stress of carrying an udder that can weigh as much as a full-grown man. To prepare them for slaughter, the cows must be given time to get any residue — the word means traces of drugs — out of their systems. 

As always, the goals of industrial agriculture create a perverse logic. Instead of adapting the agricultural system to suit the animal, we try to adapt the animal to suit the system in order to eke out every last efficiency. We may take it for granted that dairy cows will eventually be slaughtered. But strange as it sounds, it makes greater financial, ethical and social sense if we subscribe to the cows' notions of efficiency, which do not include living on concrete or eating anything but grass and grain, rather than to ours. The animals would be healthier, their milk would be better, and we would not have to worry quite so much about what was in our food. 

At some point Americans will begin to judge agriculture not by its intentions but by its unintended consequences. The intention in the dairy industry has always been to streamline, modernize, automate, all in the interest of greater profits. But the consequence has been to concentrate power and money in the hands of a few, to drive down prices and to create a national surplus of milk that forces small dairy producers out of business. That, in turn, frees former dairy land for development, for suburban sprawl. The consequence has also been to breed an animal that can barely sustain the way she is forced to live.

The river of milk in America brings with it a river of ground beef made from dairy cows, a river that is almost impossible to inspect adequately in a deregulated industry. The problem isn't just a concentration of meat. It's a concentration of political power that hamstrings any calls for closer inspection. The industry has been quick to point out that far more people die from salmonella and E. coli than from mad cow disease. That's not exactly a reason to stand up and cheer.

It's possible that the Washington State Holstein may have had the only case of mad cow disease we come across. But if so, it will have been luck rather than good planning. According to the philosophers at Cow-Calf Weekly, an online journal for the beef industry, "Perception is reality." That's the sort of thing one says when the reality is too unbearable to look at.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/opinion/05MON3.html?pagewanted=print&position=

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001842920_madcow24m.html

Worker says discovery of infected cow was 'a fluke' 

By Carol M. Ostrom
Seattle Times staff reporter

Dave Louthan says he remembers her well: an old dairy cow with specks of blood on her tail, spooky about going down the ramp into the slaughterhouse. 
The government says the discovery that the Holstein had mad-cow disease proves its surveillance program, which focuses on "downer" or nonambulatory cows, works. After last month's discovery, the U.S. Department of Agriculture banned downer cows in the food supply. 

But Louthan says it was "a fluke" that the Holstein, a cow he describes as "a good walker," was tested. 

And even if it had been deemed a downer, under emergency rules enacted earlier this month it would have been sent to a rendering plant, where tests are not done at all. 

Louthan, who killed the Holstein at Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co. on Dec. 9, says he has no doubt he remembers the right cow. "Every cow that comes in there, I kill. That kind of puts us in a relationship," said Louthan, who killed cows at Vern's for four years before he was laid off earlier this month after his bosses told him business had slowed. The plant manager, Tom Ellestad, has also confirmed that the cow was walking. 

If he'd done what he should have, Louthan said, he would have taken the cow out of the truck and herded her around to a holding pen with other ambulatory animals. 

But, he said, it was late in the day, the cow looked balky, and "I was cutting corners." So he shot a bolt through her head, scooped out a bit of brain, put it in a bag, labeled it with her number, and hung it on the wall with samples from others in the truckload. Later, he checked records to confirm that the "mad cow" was the cow he remembered, the balky Holstein from the Sunny Dene Ranch in Mabton, Yakima County. 

If the Holstein had walked into the slaughterhouse, it probably would have been examined carefully, because it had apparent calving injuries and the veterinarian on site had tagged it for inspection. 

But experts in the disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) say the inspector likely wouldn't have found anything, because the tiny protein particles implicated in the disease aren't visible to the naked eye. 

Quite likely, the Holstein wouldn't have been tested for BSE, and no one would have known that the disease had been transported across the border in cows sent from Canada. Or that her meat, which was recalled Dec. 24, had found its way into the food chain. 

The disease, which causes Swiss-cheese-like holes to form in a cow's brain, is fatal for humans who contract a related illness from eating infected meat. 

Felicia Nestor, food-safety project director at the Government Accountability Project, a citizens' watchdog group, said investigation by her office confirms Louthan's account. 

Even more troubling, said Nestor, is that the testing program is totally voluntary, and that the industry — not inspectors — chooses which animals are tested for BSE. 

"Had this cow not given birth, and had a birthing injury, that cow would still be out in the field with BSE," Nestor said. 

In another twist, emergency rules now in place would have let the Holstein fall through the surveillance net. 

On Jan. 12, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) took emergency action banning all downer cows — no matter what the cause of their inability to walk — from the food supply. 

Now, they're sent directly to rendering plants — where, in this state, they're not being tested for the disease. 

USDA spokesman Nolan Lemon said all resources in Washington are being used to track down the remaining cows that came with the Holstein from Canada. 

"Right now, we're evaluating how our surveillance program will have to change," Lemon said. Setting up testing at rendering plants "is a possibility," he said. 

If current rules had been in place when the Holstein came through, "we may not have caught that cow," said Frank Hendrix, a cattleman and Washington State University extension agent in Yakima. 

But, Hendrix added, the USDA is well aware of the problem. 

"I'm sure in the next couple of months, the government will get it straightened out, and start testing at rendering plants as well," he said. 

Whether the infected Holstein was a downer is important, because the government's surveillance system has long concentrated on downers, deemed to be more likely to have BSE than cows that can walk. 

"Downers weren't the only source of samples, but they were a high source of it," Lemon said. Out of a total of 20,277 tests last fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, 16,560 were "downers" and 3,090 were cows that had died before they arrived at the slaughterhouse. 

According to USDA records, Vern's began testing in early October, gathering samples from 258 cows through December. 

The veterinarian's notes from Dec. 9 at Vern's show the Holstein as "alert" but lying down on its sternum. Notes made after it was slaughtered show it had pelvic injuries, which indicate difficulties in calving, not BSE. 

The department's surveillance was designed to catch the 1-in-a-million case that statisticians said would be a tip-off that there were perhaps 45 other cases in the U.S. adult cattle population of about 45 million, Lemon said. 

Before the Holstein tested positive, the USDA had determined that the tests should increase to 40,000 a year to catch that 1-in-a-million case, he added. 

Nestor, at the Government Accountability Project, said much of the voluntary sampling of livestock has been done at smaller facilities. "Thank goodness for us all that Vern's stepped up to the plate and was willing to take the responsibility to sample these animals," she said. "If they had not been willing to do this, then we would never have found this cow." 

But, she added, such an event is financially traumatic for a plant owner, who is not protected from the economic fallout resulting from discovery of the disease. "There is no incentive for a plant to find BSE," she said. 

Louthan, 44, said he's sorry to lose his job, because he enjoyed the work. "I did it because I liked to kill cows," he said. "I don't care if I'm hauling them, feeding them or killing them. As long as I'm around livestock, I'm happy. I'm a cowboy." 

Carol M. Ostrom: 206-464-2249 or costrom@seattletimes.com 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001842920_madcow24m.html

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=505766

Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 1:59 PM
Subject: [CJDVoice] A cat becomes a cow as the US sets its pets alight -

 A cat becomes a cow as the US sets its pets alight
By Andrew Gumbel
28 March 2004
 
Animal rendering is an unpleasant business. I know this not only because of what I've read - rendering being a euphemism for melting down dead animal parts to bonemeal and fat, which are then resold for use in animal feed, rubber and cosmetic products.
 
I know it also because one of my neighbours is Jerry Greenwalt, a decent enough guy who was effectively hounded out of his job at the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control because animal rights activists were incensed at his sending thousands of euthanised strays each year to a rendering company. They plastered his house in fake animal blood and said he was no better than a Nazi sending Jews to Auschwitz.
 
But Greenwalt's part of the story barely scratches the surface of the overall gruesomeness. It turns out that the company, West Coast Rendering, was until last year sending hundreds of tons of rendered dead pet to Asia, where the remains were used to feed farm salmon and shrimp. Quite a bit of this then recrossed the Pacific for human consumption - not a pleasant thought. But it gets worse.
 
As of December, the rendered dog and cat trade ceased overnight. Why? 
Because, according to the US Department of Agriculture, dogs and cats are officially defined for export purposes as "beef byproducts". And December was the month when a single case of mad cow disease was discovered in Washington State, closing down America's beef export markets. You may not have thought of your friendly neighbourhood furball as a miniature cow, but that's how the US government views it. Creepy - and the upshot is even creepier.
 
Unable to sell its dead pet parts, West Coast Rendering is simply stockpiling them in its warehouse in Vernon, an industrial park in south LA. Since Los Angeles is the stray pet capital of the US, the numbers are daunting, with 600 tons of dog and cat piled up so far. The company has room for 1,200 tons in all, after which, if the export ban is not lifted, it will have to find a way to dispose of the animals - assuming it can stay in business.
 
LA's landfills don't accept dead pets, which leaves only the option of burning them - a smelly, smog-inducing, not to say distinctly queasy process. Another round of Auschwitz epithet-hurling, one senses, cannot be far off.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=505766

Wash. Gov. Signs Mad Cow-Related Bills

.c The Associated Press 4/1/04 

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - Gov. Gary Locke has signed four bills aimed at strengthening the state's protection against animal disease outbreaks and boosting businesses that have suffered since mad cow disease was found in Washington state.

House Bill 2929 offers temporary business and occupation tax breaks for Washington companies that slaughter cattle for processing and wholesaling.

Such companies have been hit hard by the loss of international beef markets since a Washington state dairy cow was identified with the nation's first case of mad cow disease Dec. 22, industry officials said. About 50 countries banned U.S. beef, its byproducts or live cattle after the mad cow case was confirmed.

Under the bill, slaughtering and meat processing companies could claim a deduction from the tax until Japan, Mexico, and South Korea - the United States' largest export markets - lift import bans on beef and beef products. Lost revenue to the state was estimated at just more than $2 million.

``Processors have kept their employees on, even though they've had a shortage of beef supply, and we need to keep them still operating until we get those markets open,'' Agriculture Director Valoria Loveland said Wednesday.

Another bill, HB 2802, would outlaw transportation and delivery of live ``downer'' livestock - animals too sick or weak to stand or walk by themselves - except for medical care or euthanasia. Agriculture officials say such animals are statistically more likely to have mad cow disease.

The bill would make moving live downer cattle, sheep and other animals to or from livestock markets, feedlots or slaughterhouses a gross misdemeanor. Violators would face up to $5,000 in fines and one year in jail.

Locke also signed House Bill 2299 on Wednesday. The measure is aimed at preparing Washington to join a federal livestock tracing program now being developed.

The governor also approved Senate Bill 6107, which clarifies the state Agriculture Department's authority to quarantine and treat diseased animals. The bill ensures those in the industry know what steps the agency will take under any circumstance involving disease, Loveland said.

Earlier this week, Locke vetoed a bill that would have created an interagency work group to develop a comprehensive state policy on proper methods for disposing of diseased animal carcasses. Loveland said the bill as passed was unworkable. He said the Agriculture, Health and Ecology departments already have begun researching proper disposal methods of farm animals should a disease outbreak occur. 
04/01/04 07:17 EST

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.  All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL. 

After a half century of being on the cutting edge of transmissible brain disease research, a retired Hamilton pathologist knows when the public is being mislead about diseases such as mad cow disease. That's what's currently happening as the U.S. continues to react to its first reported case in a Washington state dairy cow, according to Dr. Bill Hadlow.

Hadlow, who retired in 1987 from a storied, 35-year research career at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, said important information has been left out of most media reports about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), popularly known as mad cow disease.

Hadlow was one of the first scientists in the world to study what are now known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs, when in 1958 as a young veterinary pathologist in Hamilton, he was sent to the Agricultural Research Council Field Station in Compton, England, to study a degenerative disease of goats and sheep known as scrapie. Hadlow said the three years he spent intensively looking at infected brain tissue under a light microscope allowed him to perfect his observational techniques in the lab and eventually led him to be considered one of the world's foremost authorities on such neurological diseases.

"We had hundreds of infected sheep and goats, but we didn't at the time even know if it was a disease of the central nervous system," Hadlow recalled. "It was great. We used to cut these big cross-sections of a sheep brain. They pretty much left me alone and I spent three years looking at brains."
 

Those early years of scrapie research were particularly productive, he said, because unlike today, there were few restrictions on the treatment of lab animals used for research.
 
"We had all kinds of material to work on," he said. "They used to salvage lab animals and then sell them to the meat market. I'd get the parts I needed (for research) and they'd take the rest."

After completing his three-year stint in England, paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Hadlow said he had a couple of job opportunities fall through before he decided to return to his job at the lab in Hamilton.
 
"My wife was pregnant and I needed a job," he said. "So in April 1961, I came back to Hamilton. It was the same job I had before; the same stuff was still in the drawer."

Perhaps wanting to capitalize on Hadlow's new-found expertise, fellow researcher Carl Ecklund became fascinated with scrapie and encouraged Hadlow to try to inoculate mice with the disease agent which, until that time, had only been successfully injected into sheep and goats. Hadlow learned at the time, he said, that one of his former colleagues in England, Dr. Dick Chandler, had just inoculated mice  with scrapie.

"That's all we needed," he said. "They sent me over to England, and I brought scrapie brain material back in a Thermos. On Sept. 15, 1961, I first inoculated mice with scrapie at the (Rocky Mountain) lab. That started it all as far as TSE research here."

For 16 years Hadlow and Ecklund conducted an extensive scrapie study at the lab, during which time other transmissible brain diseases surfaced throughout the world. With nearly each newly discovered disease, Hadlow was summoned to look at the infected brains.

In summer of 1963 he answered a phone call to the lab from a mink rancher in Blackfoot, Idaho, who thought he had toxoplasmosis in his mink. After examining sections of the infected mink brains, Hadlow observed that the tiny holes resembled scrapie.

Hadlow suspected the Idaho mink were infected with a brain disease similar to scrapie, so he traveled to a mink farm in northern Minnesota to view other infected mink.

"I brought back brains on dry ice in containers sealed with a welding torch," he said. "They let me on the plane with them, and I brought them back here."

Using a few healthy mink, Hadlow injected them with infected brain tissue, and in 1964 the mink started coming down with the disease. Deemed transmissible mink encephalopathy, the newly discovered disease, Hadlow said, was the second example of TSEs in animals, and was suspected to have come from mink feed made from cattle infected with an as yet unidentified encephalopathic agent. The suspected cattle were mainly downer dairy cows commonly used in preparing mink feed.

In 1966 the first human TSE was discovered in an isolated population of people native to Papua New Guinea. First described in 1957, the disease, called kuru, had long caused dementia and death in the
natives, but no one had been able to trace its cause.

Dr. Carleton Gajdusek described the symptoms of the strange disease in a scientific paper read by Hadlow, who noted that the symptoms resembled those of scrapie. According to Dr. Byron Caughey, currently a researcher at RML, Hadlow hypothesized to the scientific community then that such a disease could be transmitted from humans to animals.

Gajdusek proved Hadlow's hypothesis and at the same time causally linked the deadly disease to the practice of ritualistic cannibalism engaged in by the natives. Gajdusek received a Nobel prize for his work, and many people felt Hadlow should have shared the prize, Caughey said.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Hadlow said, was the next human disease to join the ranks of the TSEs, and like kuru was found to be experimentally transmissible to chimpanzees. A "so-called" variant form of CJD, Hadlow said, is mad cow disease.

Chronic wasting disease, Hadlow said, was known to infect captive mule deer, and in 1979, Beth Williams, a graduate student in veterinary pathology at Colorado State University, looked at the brains of CWD-infected deer and saw what looked like scrapie. Almost immediately she and her major professor contacted Hadlow.

"Williams' professor brought me brain samples of the mule deer," Hadlow said, "and gave me my first experience with CWD."

Chronic wasting disease proved to be transmissible experimentally to mule deer, mink, domestic ferrets, squirrel monkeys and goats, Hadlow said, although its source and natural mode of transmission have yet to be determined.

Apart from being another fascinating example of a naturally occurring TSE, chronic wasting disease has practical implications for management of wildlife in free-ranging populations, Hadlow said, but any human health risk it may pose has yet to be identified.

No other TSE in man or animal has gotten more world-wide publicity than bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, popularly known as mad cow disease. It was identified in England in 1986, one year before Hadlow retired from Rocky Mountain Laboratories, by British researcher Gerald Wells. Three years later, Wells persuaded Hadlow to come over to England to take a closer look at BSE.

"I went to the UK in June 1990 and looked at 110 mad cow brains from stem to stern over the summer," Hadlow said. "I went back every year for 10 years. The last time I looked at tiger brains."

Today the retired-yet-active scientist still frequently spends time in his basement with his 50-plus-year-old Lietz microscope, looking at brain tissue. His half-century-long career has allowed him to work first-hand on almost every TSE ever discovered, giving him a unique perspective on the growing family of deadly diseases.

He credits his supervisors for allowing him to do his work with little interference.
 
"I was singularly fortunate that no one ever told me what to do," Hadlow said. "That was always true. I had the freedom to look at what I wanted."

The news in December of the Washington dairy cow infected with BSE came as a bit of a surprise to Hadlow, but the hysteria that followed was not unexpected, he said.

"I was surprised to some extent to see the disease in this country," he said. "But I think most people don't have an understanding of what it's all about. It's a fatal disease and a horrible disease; that's why it's of such concern."

In an attempt to lessen the "unnecessary anxiety and poorly founded concerns," Hadlow said he offers some observations for people to chew on.

To begin with, he said, BSE is a specific infectious disease of adult cattle, caused by a single, feed-borne infectious agent that originated in the UK during the preparation of meat and bone meal from rendered animal material in the 1970s and 1980s. Cattle become infected by what they eat, especially as calves in the first six months, but the disease usually doesn't appear for three to six years. It is not contagious and does not spread from one cow to another as do some other cattle diseases.

And despite comments in the press suggesting otherwise, he said, "there is no certain evidence of maternal or vertical transmission in the strict sense of calves becoming infected before birth."

"Nor is there evidence supporting the heretical notion the BSE has arisen on its own from inherently unstable prion protein," he said, "as proponents of the prion hypothesis would have us believe can happen."

Wherever BSE has occurred in the world, he said, including North America, it has resulted from infection with the BSE agent originating from the UK. The precise conditions considered responsible for its emergence in England do not exist in other countries, including the United States and Canada, he said.

After the dairy cows in Washington and Canada were revealed to have the disease, Hadlow said he contacted the scientists in England responsible for identifying it to make sure it was indeed the same agent that had been discovered there more than 20 years ago.

The affected cows in Washington and Canada, he said, had to have been infected with the BSE agent and no other, and it was certainly not from being fed rendered products prepared in North America, unless they had inadvertently been contaminated with the BSE agent.

Moreover, he said, the diseases in the two cows cannot be attributed to infection with any of the known related agents causing spongiform brain diseases in other North American animals - scrapie, chronic wasting disease and transmissible mink encephalopathy - none of which has been linked to human disease. The disease each one brings about in cattle is readily distinguished from BSE, and with all three, neither the clinical signs nor the pathologic changes in the brain are the same as those of BSE, he said.

Hadlow said any commentary on mad cow disease should take these observations into account to give it proper perspective.

Aside from staying abreast of new research on TSEs, Hadlow has taken up a new cause - spending his time, money and effort to support the American Livestock Breeds Conservatory, searching for rare books on livestock.

With piles of hardbacks next to his desk, he's of late been researching and compiling the history of the Conestoga horse, a breed once common in Lancaster County, Pa., which went extinct sometime after the Civil War.

"I spend most of my time reading," he said, "since I don't watch television. I used to go over to the lab once in awhile, but now my research is confined to my basement."

Reporter Rod Daniel can be reached at 363-3300 or
rdaniel@ravallirepublic.com
http://www.ravallinews.com/articles/2004/04/21/news/news01.txt