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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >> USDA officials also said that the cow, which was believed to be 4 years old, probably contracted the disease from feed as a young animal, but that they did not know where it was born or where the other animals in that herd are now.
On Friday, DeHaven told a news conference that federal investigators will know "in a day or two" the herd of origin. But, he added, investigators have been encountering a "tangled web" in their efforts to trace the herd, which could delay a final identification.
The discovery of mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), in the United States was bound to happen sooner or later, scientists said.
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"It was an inevitability," Lineback said. "There was a low probability, [but] when you have that many million cattle, that is still a finite risk of occurrence. It's just a matter of when."
But he adds, the bottom line is still good news for now: Go ahead and eat hamburger, or steak if you prefer. "At this stage of the game, I do not see warning people to avoid or to minimize anything," Lineback said.
One reason why experts aren't sounding more alarm bells is the high-risk portions of a cow -- referred to as "specified risk material" (SRM), which includes the spinal column, brain, eyes and other central nervous system tissues -- are supposed to be removed during the slaughter process in the United States.
"Based on the best science that we have available worldwide, the infective agent, the prions that are thought to be responsible for BSE, are not found in the beef muscle meat that we consume in this country," said Dan Murphy, vice president for public affairs at the American Meat Institute, whose member companies produce about 95 percent of the beef in this country.
"That is in sharp contrast to the situation in the U.K. and in Europe in the 1990s," Murphy said. The European beef industry routinely added spinal cord and brain tissue to food products while consumers regularly ate brains.
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