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# Is the Government Protecting Us Against Mad Cow disease? Not Necessarily
- URL: https://www.foodconsumer.org/mad_cow_disease_0910130725/
- Published: 2013-09-10T08:24:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T16:01:46.000Z
- Description: A suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob case in New Hampshire turns attention back to US meat safeguards. The author recounts the first three domestic mad cow cases, from 2003 to 2007, and the dispute over whether the first cow could walk, which drew congressional and GAO investigations.
- Author: Food Consumer
- Tags: Biological, Food Safety, #vivvo-import

By Martha Rosenberg 

The US has not had a mad cow scare in over six years. But a possible case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, sometimes called human mad cow disease, in New Hampshire, puts focus on government meat safeguards. And past cases of mad cow in domestic cattle do not instill confidence. 

The first three mad cows found in the US, from 2003 through 2007, revealed tremendous infighting, misinformation and ineptitude within USDA. Ag officials openly disagreed with each other, contradicted themselves, and didn’t even seem to understand “where mad cow comes from.” (Mad cow is thought to be transmitted by rogue proteins called prions which are not inactivated by cooking, heat, autoclaves, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde or radiation.) 

And there was a darker side to the USDA’s reaction to the domestic mad cows: the government’s willingness to put the wellbeing of US beef markets over the wellbeing of food consumers. 

On December 23, 2003, as the nation headed into Christmas, the USDA announced that a Holstein cow, imported from Canada and slaughtered in Moses Lake, Washington, on December 9 for human food, tested positive for mad cow disease. Ann Veneman, USDA secretary at the time, along with other USDA officials, said the cow was discovered because it was a “downer” (unable to walk), indicating that the mad cow testing program worked since it screened downers as the main source of mad cow risk. But three workers who saw the animal said it walked just fine. 

What followed were congressional hearings, a federal criminal investigation and a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation largely over whether or not the animal walked to slaughter. Because if the animal looked fine and walked under its own steam to slaughter, the entire federal mad cow testing program was misconceived and was letting millions of similar animals into the food supply. But if the slaughterhouse workers were lying, as the government hoped, and the animal was prodded or fork-lifted to slaughter, we might have a farming system that values money over living things and chews them up and spits them out like heads of lettuce, but at least the mad cow alert system works. 

In testimony before Congress, USDA inspector general Phyllis K. Fong blamed “procedural errors” for the conflicting data about whether or not the animal walked, and said an employee “who alleged that the BSE \[Bovine spongiform encephalopathy\] positive cow was ambulatory and healthy when it arrived at the facility described a different animal from the one that arrived in the same trailer and later tested BSE-positive.” 

One week after the Washington State mad cow was discovered, the USDA announced a ban on downers in the food supply and a new requirement to remove specified risk materials (SRM) from cattle to be eaten by humans. Specified risk materials included the brain, skull, eyes, spinal cord, tonsils, spleen, lymph tissue and most of the vertebral column and small intestine. “Science indicates that in animals with BSE, these materials harbor the infectious agent before the animal shows any clinical signs of disease,” said the government. 

But studies in scientific journals have found prions in the muscles and flesh of infected animals and in their kidneys, pancreases, livers, blood and saliva. A study in PLoS Pathogens found that prions likely accumulate in animal’s fat, too. Articles in the journal Science warned that “humans consuming or handling meat from CWD-infected \[chronic wasting disease\] deer are at risk to prion exposure” and that even casual contact with infected animals could put people at risk. (Deer get a prion disease similar to mad cow call chronic wasting disease.) 

Rumors of mad cow disease in the US meat supply are a huge threat to domestic and foreign markets and public officials are quick to assure us the supply is safe. But can we believe them? 

Learn the complete story of US mad cow scares with over 100 scientific footnotes in Martha Rosenberg's Born with a Junk Food Deficiency.

[http://www.amazon.com/Born-With-Junk-Food-Deficiency/dp/1616145935 ](http://www.amazon.com/Born-With-Junk-Food-Deficiency/dp/1616145935?ref=foodconsumer.org)