|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
From: TSS ()
Posted on Fri, Nov. 04, 2005 Associated Press U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns had earlier insisted that cows younger than 30 months are considered safe from mad cow disease, and can be imported. Japan wants to set the limit at 21 months. "We have received no formal request (from Washington), and even if we did receive one, we're not in a position to say yes," Japan's Agriculture Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said Friday. He said Japan would study the issue. "Our focus is on ensuring safety and gaining public consent," he said. Tokyo banned American beef in December 2003 after the discovery of the first U.S. case of mad cow disease. Japan was then the most lucrative overseas market for U.S. beef, and an increasingly impatient Washington has pushed hard for the ban to be lifted. Earlier this week, Japan's food safety commission approved a report saying the mad cow disease risk in U.S. beef was minuscule as long as imports were limited to meat from cows under 21 months, and all brain and spinal cord matter was removed. Japan is expected to reach a decision on the matter by the end of the year, after monthlong public hearings that began this week. Johanns has criticized the commission's report, saying the conditions are too stringent. "The science is very, very clear that in animals under 30 months, you just don't have a (mad cow disease) problem," Johanns said Thursday. "So obviously we hope to continue to open up the marketplace." Many scientists believe that beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, can cause a fatal brain disorder in humans. Japanese consumers remain deeply wary of U.S. beef, with recent polls showing that nearly 70 percent opposed lifting the ban. http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/breaking_news/13085547.htm i don't believe johanns could tell the truth if the world depended on it. this is par the course for this administration. ... "Terry S. Singeltary Sr." To: USDA ISSUES PROPOSED RULE TO ALLOW LIVE ANIMAL IMPORTS FROM CANADA ; >Under this proposal, ruminant and ruminant products eligible for entry into >6) fresh (chilled or frozen) the youngest age of BSE case to date is 20 months old; As at: 31 May http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/bse/bse-statistics/bse/yng-old.html http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/bse/index.html The implications of the Swiss result for Britain, which has had the most http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail/html-home/28-html/0359.html With the 100% cattle testing under this new system, 8 October 7, 2003 23 months No Clinical Signs 9 November 4, 2003 21 months No Clinical Signs http://www.us.emb-japan.go.jp/english/html/fafacts/bse/bse.htm oral dose of BSE in primates--look at the table and you'll see that as little as 1 mg (or 0.001 gm) caused 7% (1 of 14) of the cows to come down with BSE. Published online January 27, 2005 Risk of oral infection with bovine spongiform encephalopathy agent in primates Corinne Ida Lasmézas, Emmanuel Comoy, Stephen Hawkins, Christian Herzog, Franck Mouthon, Timm Konold, Frédéric Auvré, Evelyne Correia, Nathalie Lescoutra-Etchegaray, Nicole Salès, Gerald Wells, Paul Brown, Jean-Philippe Deslys The uncertain extent of human exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—which can lead to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD)—is compounded by incomplete knowledge about the ef.ciency of oral infection and the magnitude of any bovine-to-human biological barrier to transmission. We therefore investigated oral transmission of BSE to non-human primates. We gave two macaques a 5 g oral dose of brain homogenate from a BSE-infected cow. One macaque developed vCJD-like neurological disease 60 months after exposure, whereas the other remained free of disease at 76 months. On the basis of these .ndings and data from other studies, we made a preliminary estimate of the food exposure risk for man, which provides additional assurance that existing public health measures can prevent transmission of BSE to man. snip... BSE bovine brain inoculum 100 g 10 g 5 g 1 g 100 mg 10 mg 1 mg 0·1 mg 0·01 mg Primate (oral route)* 1/2 (50%) Cattle (oral route)* 10/10 (100%) 7/9 (78%) 7/10 (70%) 3/15 (20%) 1/15 (7%) 1/15 (7%) RIII mice (icip route)* 17/18 (94%) 15/17 (88%) 1/14 (7%) PrPres biochemical detection The comparison is made on the basis of calibration of the bovine inoculum used in our study with primates against a bovine brain inoculum with a similar PrPres concentration that was inoculated into mice and cattle.8 *Data are number of animals positive/number of animals surviving at the time of clinical onset of disease in the .rst positive animal (%). The accuracy of bioassays is generally judged to be about plus or minus 1 log. icip=intracerebral and intraperitoneal. Table 1: Comparison of transmission rates in primates and cattle infected orally with similar BSE brain inocula snip...end www.thelancet.com Published online January 27, 2005 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: On Dec. 23, 2003, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that a cow in Washington state had tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease). As a result, information on this Web page stating that no BSE cases had been found in the United States is now incorrect. However, because other information on this page continues to have value, the page will remain available for viewing. FDA ANNOUNCES TEST RESULTS FROM TEXAS FEED LOT FDA has determined that each animal could have consumed, at most and in total, five-and-one-half grams - approximately a quarter ounce -- of prohibited material. These animals weigh approximately 600 pounds. It is important to note that the prohibited material was domestic in origin (therefore not likely to contain infected material because there is no evidence of BSE in U.S. cattle), fed at a very low level, and fed only once. The potential risk of BSE to such cattle is therefore exceedingly low, even if the feed were contaminated. According to Dr. Bernard Schwetz, FDA's Acting Principal Deputy Commissioner, "The challenge to regulators and industry is to keep this disease out of the United States. One important defense is to prohibit the use of any ruminant animal materials in feed for other ruminant animals. Combined with other steps, like U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) ban on the importation of live ruminant animals from affected countries, these steps represent a series of protections, to keep American cattle free of BSE." Despite this negligible risk, Purina Mills, Inc., is nonetheless announcing that it is voluntarily purchasing all 1,222 of the animals held in Texas and mistakenly fed the animal feed containing the prohibited material. Therefore, meat from those animals will not enter the human food supply. FDA believes any cattle that did not consume feed containing the prohibited material are unaffected by this incident, and should be handled in the beef supply clearance process as usual. FDA believes that Purina Mills has behaved responsibly by first reporting the human error that resulted in the misformulation of the animal feed supplement and then by working closely with State and Federal authorities. This episode indicates that the multi-layered safeguard system put into place is essential for protecting the food supply and that continued vigilance needs to be taken, by all concerned, to ensure these rules are followed routinely. FDA will continue working with USDA as well as State and local officials to ensure that companies and individuals comply with all laws and regulations designed to protect the U.S. food supply. http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2001/NEW00752.html It is clear that the designing scientists must also have shared Mr Bradley's surprise at the results because all the dose levels right down to 1 gram triggered infection. 6. It also appears to me that Mr Bradley's answer (that it would take less grams) was probably given with the benefit of hindsight; particularly if one considers that later in the same answer Mr Bradley expresses his surprise could take as little of 1 gram of brain to cause BSE by the oral route same species. This information did not become available until the "attack experiment had been completed in 1995/96. This was a titration experiment designed to ascertain the infective dose. A range of dosages was used to that the actual result was within both a lower and an upper limit within the and the designing scientists would not have expected all the dose levels to infection. The dose ranges chosen by the most informed scientists at that ranged from 1 gram to three times one hundred grams. It is clear that the scientists must have also shared Mr Bradley's surprise at the results dose levels right down to 1 gram triggered infection. [BBC radio 4 FARM news] http://www.maddeer.org/audio/BBC4farmingtoday2_1_03.ram http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/03/slides/3923s1_OPH.htm To cattle: 1 gram of infected brain material (by oral ingestion) http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/sci/bio/bseesbe.shtml Cristina Casalone *, Gianluigi Zanusso , Pierluigi Acutis *, Sergio Ferrari *Centro di Referenza Nazionale per le Encefalopatie Animali, Istituto Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), or prion diseases, are C.C. and G.Z. contributed equally to this work. ||To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: salvatore.monaco@mail.univr.it . www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0305777101 Gibbs CJ Jr, Amyx HL, Bacote A, Masters CL, Gajdusek DC. Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease of humans and scrapie disease of sheep PMID: 6997404 TSS TSS
|
