Mad cow is confirmed in animal likely born in U.S.

WASHINGTON — A cow that was cleared of having mad cow disease last fall by the U.S. Department of Agriculture was in fact infected with the brain-wasting disease, the department announced Friday, making it the second confirmed case of the disease in this country.

The cow was incinerated last fall and never made it into the U.S. food supply, said Agriculture Secretary Michael Johanns. He said the cow appeared to have been born in the United States, a significant fact because it suggests that the animal ate infected feed in this country that could have been eaten by other animals.

U.S. officials were able to mitigate damage from the first case of mad cow disease in the nation, discovered in Washington state in December 2003, because that cow was born in Canada and thought to have eaten infected feed there.

"We don't have any evidence that this is an imported animal," Johanns said Friday.

Critics on Capitol Hill and from consumer groups accused the government of not doing enough to detect and prevent mad cow disease.

"The administration's response to mad cow disease appears to be more public relations than public health," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., in a statement.

The infected animal, which was at least 8 years old, couldn't walk and was covered with manure, placing it a category of "downer" cattle that are more likely to have mad cow disease and are randomly tested by the USDA. But while an initial "quick test" was inconclusive, two more sophisticated tests were negative.

Two weeks ago, the USDA's inspector general noticed inconsistencies in the testing as part of an audit of the agency's mad cow surveillance program and asked for additional tests. A renowned laboratory in England, as well as the USDA's own labs, confirmed that the cow was infected using a test known as the "Western blot."

Johanns suggested that one of the reasons the disease wasn't initially found was that the animal had a different variation of mad cow disease than the classic type that swept through England in the early 1990s. Instead of finding the disease throughout the brain, it was isolated to certain parts of the brain but not others, a form of the disease that has been found in some animals in France, he said.

While insisting on the safety of the U.S. beef supply, Johanns said he would initiate new protocols for testing when an initial "rapid-response" test for mad cow disease was inconclusive that included the "Western blot" test. He also said that he was correcting a number of problems he had uncovered in how the USDA handled the diseased cow — from failing to segregate tissue samples from those of other cows to freezing the samples.