Mad Cow Disease is the commonly used name for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The disease is a slowly progressive, degenerative, fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle. Arlene Weintraub writes in Business Week that the USDA identified a case of BSE in December 2003 when a USDA surveillance program identified a dairy cow in Washington State as infected with BSE. As soon as the USDA identified the case, both USDA and FDA activated their BSE Emergency Response Plans and USDA immediately recalled the meat. Meat that had entered the food supply was quickly traced and was removed from the marketplace. According to USDA Secretary Ann Veneman, this case posed no risk to consumers because the BSE infectious agent is not found in beef muscle, such as steaks, roasts and ground beef. Veneman described this incident as an animal disease challenge -- not a food safety problem (39).
Peter G. Smith writes in Bulletin of the World Health Organization that to date, there have been 155 confirmed and probable cases of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) worldwide among the hundreds of thousands of people that may have consumed BSE-contaminated beef products (123). The one reported case of vCJD in the United
States occurred when a young woman contracted the disease while residing in the UK and developed symptoms after moving to the U.S. Since 1989, the USDA has banned imports of live ruminants, such as cattle, sheep and goats, and most products from the carcasses of animals from countries known to have BSE. The FDA prohibited the use of ruminant protein in the manufacture of animal feed intended for cows and other ruminants in 1997. The FDA extended the prohibition in 2001 to forbid use of all mammalian protein in ruminant feed. Rod Smith writes in Foodstuffs that on Jan. 8, 2004, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service [the FSIS] issued four new rul
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