Canada Sends Shock Wave With Mad Cow Case
Tue May 20, 3:16 PM ET
By Jeffrey Jones
CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Canada reported its first case of mad cow disease in a decade on Tuesday, a potentially devastating revelation for the country's huge beef industry just weeks after its economy was damaged by the SARS (news - web sites) threat.
A cow in Alberta, Canada's top cattle-producing province, tested positive for brain-wasting bovine spongiform encephalopathy (news - web sites), or mad cow disease, in a test taken after it was slaughtered last winter, officials said.
"It was (detected) just a few days ago. The actual test was taken Jan. 31 from a cow in Fairview, Alberta," an official with the Canadian Beef Export Federation said. "It's just one isolated case of an eight-year-old cow."
Canada's only other case was in 1993, but the animal was imported from Britain, where the disease caused a crisis and sparked a U.S. ban on British beef imports. Its carcass was destroyed, as was its herd.
The animal with the latest case "did not enter the food chain" and its northern Alberta herd will be slaughtered, as will any other found to be affected, Canadian Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief told a nationally televised news conference in the Alberta capital of Edmonton.
Still, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman quickly slapped a temporary ban on beef imports from Canada because of the case.
Alberta, where cattle ranching is ingrained in the culture, accounts for nearly 60 percent of Canada's beef production, providing C$3.8 billion ($2.8 million) in annual farm cash receipts.
Last year, more than half a million live cattle were shipped to the United States, according to Alberta agriculture department statistics.
The mad cow news sent shock waves across the North American economy.
Shares of Tyson Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. beef processor, and fast-food giant McDonald's Co. fell sharply. McDonald's stock slumped 5 percent and was the top loser in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Tuesday.
The Canadian dollar, which has been soaring in recent weeks, also skidded.
"It still remains to be seen how serious it is but the news is not good for Canada, without a doubt," said a currency trader at a major Canadian bank. "We're trading off the headlines."
In April, Canada's economy was hit by fears over flu-like severe acute respiratory syndrome, especially in Toronto, where trade and tourism sputtered. Canada recently declared victory in the battle against SARS, but not before it killed 24 people in the Toronto area.
Some experts believe mad cow disease may have been spread by cows in Britain who were fed the remains of sheep contaminated with scrapie. Other scientists say the disease arose from a mutation in a cow in the 1970s.
So far more than 80 people in Britain and Europe have died from the human variation of mad cow, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (news - web sites).
(With reporting by Gilbert Le Gras, David Ljunggren, Amran Abocar, Brad Dorfman, Randy Fabi, Richard Cowan)