Link to AP story here. The US has already banned all Canadian beef imports.
Well, this finally explains Howie Mandell.
I don’t think this will be a huge deal. They caught the cow, after it had already been rejected for slaughter. The system worked. Now they just have to make sure that all the other cows are clean and we’ll be back on track.
And to spite this, the Canadian dollar is higher than it has been in year, unaffected today by the mad cow.
Living mammals do not get BSE (mad cow disease) from other living mammals. They get it from eating the brain and/or spinal tissue of infected dead mammals. Cattle get it from feed that’s fortified with offal from their dead colleagues. Bovine Spongiform Encelalopathy can only be diagnosed by dissecting the brain of a dead animal. It develops slowly, and most cattle grown for meat don’t live long enough for the disease to be detected. Dairy cows are tested, after death, because they get old enough.
The entire herd where the infected cow had lived will be killed. It may be hard to find all the cattle that ate same the contaminated feed as the sick cow.
According to the best information we have, it is safe to eat meat from even an infected animal. The risk comes in eating brain or spinal tissue. Some packers use mechanically removed tissue in ground beef, and there’s a risk of getting contaminated spinal tissue in ground beef from those packers.
Its also a cow from Britian, so its possible the cow was already infected (the cow was around 8yrs old, 2 1/2 when it was imported so it was alive during the last Mad Cow scare) and it has just broken out recently. In Alberta feed never contained processed animal parts so I have my doubts it contracted the disease here.