FOXNews.com: New Case of Mad Cow Disease Found in California

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New Case of Mad Cow Disease Found in California Apr 25th 2012, 04:31 The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed the country's fourth case of mad cow disease in a dairy cow in California on Tuesday. According to a statement released by USDA Chief Veterinary Officer John Clifford, the cow had not entered the food supply and poses no risk to human health. Clifford said the animal's carcass is being held at a rendering facility and will be destroyed. It has not been revealed where the cow originated, but a senior manager with a California rendering company says they discovered the cow had the disease while it was at his Hanford, California, transfer station. Dennis Luckey, executive vice president of Baker Commodities in Los Angeles, told The Associated Press the disease was discovered after workers selected the cow for random sampling. The sample was taken from the dead cow's carcass on April 18 at a hide-removal site, he said. "This animal happened to be one that we randomly selected," Luckey said. The company does not yet know which farm the cow came from, but the animal never made it to Baker's rendering plant 50 miles away in Kerman, California, Luckey said. Samples of the cow tested positive for atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), a very rare form of the disease that is usually not associated with animals consuming infected feed. The Agriculture Department is sharing its lab results with international animal health officials in Canada and England, Clifford said. Despite the USDA's statement that the discovery poses no health risk, South Korea announced they are suspending sales of U.S. beef. Lotte Department Store and Home Plus said they halted sales of U.S. beef to calm worries among South Koreans. Yonhap News Agency reported that Lotte Mart has also suspended U.S. beef sales because of consumer anxiety. South Korean agriculture officials are considering whether to formally suspend delivery of U.S. beef to stores by halting quarantine inspections, which would prevent the meat from clearing customs. BSE is a fatal neurological disease among cattle, "causing them to display nervousness or aggression, abnormal posture, difficulty in coordination and rising, decreased milk production, or loss of body weight," the USDA's statement said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there is strong evidence of a causal relationship between BSE and varient Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in humans. VCJD is a rare, and typically fatal, degenerative brain disorder that is characterized by prominent psychiatric symptoms and neurological abnormalities such as ataxia and dementia. There have only been a few cases of vCJD confirmed in people living in the U.S., but those were linked to meat products in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, according to the CDC. Click here to read more from the USDA. Click here to read more from KTXL FOX40. The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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