AP: "The investigation into mad cow disease spread to a farm in central Washington state, the seventh facility linked to an infected Holstein, agriculture officials said Friday. Investigators have been working to trace the whereabouts of 81 cattle following the announcement Dec. 23 that a cow at a Mabton dairy farm had tested positive for mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The 81 cattle entered the United States from Alberta, Canada, in 2001."

"The U.S.D.A.'s records of mad cow screenings, conducted on 35,000 animals between 2001 to 2003, reveal no animals were tested for the past two years at Vern's Moses Lake Meats, the Washington slaughterhouse where the mad cow case was first detected... The testing records, obtained by UPI under the Freedom of Information Act, which the USDA delayed releasing for six months, also show a number of other gaps in the agency's national surveillance strategy for mad cow disease, including: - Tests were conducted at fewer than 100 of the 700 plants known to slaughter cattle. - Some of the biggest slaughterhouses were not tested at all. - Cows from the top four beef producing states, which account for nearly 70% of all cattle slaughtered each year in the United States, only accounted for 11% of all the animals screened. - Though dairy cattle are considered the most likely to develop mad cow, some of the top dairy slaughtering plants were sampled only a few times or not at all."

Eric Schlosser writes, "Last year the Agriculture Department tested only 20,000 cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, out of the roughly 35 million slaughtered. Belgium, with a cattle population a small fraction of ours, tested about 20 times that number for the disease. Japan tests every cow and steer that people are going to eat... [We must] begin widespread testing of American cattle for mad cow disease - with particular focus on dairy cattle, the animals at highest risk for the disease and whose meat provides most of the nation's fast food hamburgers. In addition, we need to give the federal government mandatory recall powers, so that any contaminated or suspect meat can be swiftly removed from the market. As of now all meat recalls are voluntary and remarkably ineffective at getting bad meat off supermarket shelves. And most of all, we need to create an independent food safety agency whose sole responsibility is to protect the public health."

AP reports: "The dairy industry contributed to most members of a key House committee who voted nearly in lockstep against banning the sale of meat from ill or disabled animals, like the one that tested positive last week for mad cow disease. Political action committees representing dairy farmers gave money to 33 of the 51 members of the House Agriculture Committee, an Associated Press review of campaign reports shows. Of the 33, 28 voted against the ban on marketing 'downed' animals, four voted for it and one didn't vote, when it was defeated 202-199 in July. The Senate approved the ban on a voice vote in November, but it was left out of the final compromise passed by the House this month and awaiting action in the Senate."

"Canadian officials have accused their American counterparts of jumping the gun in announcing at the weekend that an animal found suffering from BSE on a farm in Washington state had necessarily entered the United States from Canada. Tensions between the two countries grew when it was revealed that Canada had been given just one minute's warning before American officials held a news conference on Saturday asserting that a ranch in Alberta had been the source of the infected cow. Dr Brian Evans, the chief veterinary officer of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said that the cow's origins have yet to be confirmed. He noted that details on the cow's records in the US do not match those kept in Canada, particularly concerning its age. 'What we're suggesting is that we need to verify, using scientific methods such as DNA, that the animal that left Canada with that ear tag is in fact the animal that the US is pursuing at this point.'"

"The Agriculture Department refused to release its tests for mad cow during the past six months," the Moonie UPI reports. The USDA claims it tested about 20,000 cows for the disease in 2002 and 2003, but has been unable to provide any documentation in support of this. "USDA officials told UPI as recently as Dec. 17 the agency was still searching for documentation of its mad cow testing results from 2002 and 2003. UPI initially requested the documents on July 10, and after repeated attempts over the past six months, including Freedom of Information Act requests and threatened legal action, USDA never sent any corresponding documents. 'The government doesn't have records to substantiate their testing so how do they know whether this is an isolated case,' says Lester Friedlander, a former USDA veterinarian who has been insisting mad cow is present in American herds for years."

On 7-14-03, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) offered an amendment to keep downed animals out of the food supply. By a vote of 202-199, the Republican-led House DEFEATED the Ackerman amendment. Did your Representative vote for your HEALTH, or for beef industry GREED? Call his/her office at 202-224-3121 and demand immediate inclusion of the Mad Cow bill in the Omnibus appropriations bill.

"Legislation to keep meat from downed animals off American kitchen tables was scuttled - for the second time in as many years - as Congress labored unsuccessfully earlier this month to pass a catchall agency spending bill. Now, in the wake of the apparent discovery of the first mad-cow case in the United States, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), the author of the House version of the cattle provision wants to press the issue anew when Congress returns Jan. 20 from its winter recess. The massive, $373 billion spending bill covering several government agencies is still pending in the Senate... The agricultural spending bill passed - with the provision intact - on a Senate voice vote in November after failing by three votes in the House in July. But congressional negotiators did not include it in the broader, $373 billion omnibus spending bill that passed the House this month and which is still awaiting a vote in the Senate."

"Though some scientists had long warned that mad cow disease would eventually appear in the US, cattle owners and meatpackers repeatedly resisted calls for a more substantial program to test for the disease, and the Agriculture Dept. went along with them. Congress came close three times to banning the sale of meat from downer cows - ones that are too sick or hurt to amble into slaughterhouses - only to see the industry's allies block each of the bills at the last moment. And proposals for systems to track which farms produced sickened cattle - now required in Europe, Canada and Japan - also languished for years here... [Current] regulation leaves glaring loopholes. Rendered cattle can be fed to pigs and chickens, which can then be fed back to cows. Cow blood, which cannot be guaranteed free of disease, is widely fed to calves as a 'milk replacer.' Deer that may be infected with disease can be rendered into cattle feed. Enforcement of the regulation, they say, has been lax."

"Ever since he identified the cause [of] mad cow disease, Dr. Stanley Prusiner has worried about whether the meat supply in America is safe... In May, a case of mad cow disease appeared in Canada, and he quickly sought a meeting with Ann M. Veneman, the secretary of agriculture. He was rebuffed, he said in an interview yesterday, until he ran into Karl Rove... So six weeks ago, Dr. Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine, entered Veneman's office with a message. 'I went to tell her that what happened in Canada was going to happen in the United States... I told her it was just a matter of time.' The department had been willfully blind to the threat, he said... Veneman's response (he said she did not share his sense of urgency) left him frustrated. That frustration soared this week after a cow in Washington State was tentatively found to have the disease. If the nation had increased testing and inspections, meat from that cow might never have entered the food chain, he said."

AP: "Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean says the Bush administration missed an opportunity to soften the impact of the country's first mad cow scare and that the American beef industry should receive federal aid to weather the crisis... The former governor, whose state has a large dairy cow population, said the Bush administration failed to aggressively set up a tracking system that would allow the government to quickly track the origins of the sick cow, quarantine other animals it came in contact with and assure the marketplace the rest of the meat supply is safe. 'What we need in this country is instant traceability,' he said... 'This just shows the complete lack of foresight by the Bush administration once again,' Dean said. 'This is something that easily could be predicted and was predicted.' Dean said as a result the beef industry will suffer enormously."

Reuters: "Family and friends of victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the fatal brain disorder sometimes linked to mad cow disease, on Friday questioned whether the victims contracted the condition from contaminated U.S. beef... Some researchers believe that the human form of the disease has already hit the United States, but that the government either did not put the pieces together or was slow in notifying the public and the beef industry... Skarbek's suspicions center on the now-defunct Cherry Hill horse racetrack, where her mother worked. A colleague there, Carrie Mahan, died at age 29 of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease... Through obituary reports, Skarbek has since tracked down six other deaths over the past three years in the southern New Jersey and Philadelphia area that were likely due to CJD."

AP: "Legislation to keep meat from downed animals off American kitchen tables was scuttled - for the second time in as many years - as Congress labored unsuccessfully earlier this month to pass a catchall agency spending bill. Now, in the wake of the apparent discovery of the first mad-cow case in the United States, the author of the House version of the cattle provision wants to press the issue anew when Congress returns Jan. 20 from its winter recess. The massive, $373 billion spending bill covering several government agencies is still pending in the Senate... Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., a negotiator who voted for the measure in the House, said Democratic negotiators never had a chance to fight for the proposal. 'The Republicans, the leadership, shut off the conference, they closed it down, and this is one of a number of provisions which were handled in a backroom deal without the Democrats there and with only the Republican leadership,' said Hinchey." GOP = Greedy Offal Party.