The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is scaling back its bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) surveillance program to correspond to the extremely low prevalence of the disease in the United States.
“It’s time that our surveillance efforts reflect what we now know is a very, very low level of BSE in the United States,” said Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns. “This ongoing surveillance program will maintain our ability to detect BSE, provide assurance that our interlocking safeguards are successfully preventing BSE, while continuing to exceed science-based international guidelines.”
The earliest the new surveillance program would begin is late August. The ongoing program will sample approximately 40,000 animals each year from a variety of sites and from the cattle populations where the disease is most likely to be detected, such as those animals exhibiting clinical signs of BSE or are non-ambulatory. The new program will not only comply with the science-based international guidelines set forth by the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE, it will provide testing at a level 10 times higher than the OIE recommended level. USDA will periodically analyze the surveillance strategy to ensure the program provides the foundation for market confidence in the safety of U.S. cattle.
In April, USDA released an analysis of seven years of BSE surveillance data, which included data from an enhanced surveillance program that began in June 2004 as a one-time effort to determine the prevalence of BSE in the United States. The analysis concluded that the prevalence of the disease in the country is less than one case per million adult cattle and revealed that the most likely number of cases is between four and seven infected animals out of 42 million adult cattle. The analysis was submitted to a peer review process and a panel of outside experts affirmed the conclusions.
U.S. human and animal health is protected from BSE by a system of interlocking safeguards, including the removal of specified risk materials – those tissues that studies have demonstrated may contain the BSE agent in infected cattle – along with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 1997 ruminant-to-ruminant feed ban. Scientific studies indicate that the longer a feed ban is in place, the lower the prevalence of BSE will become.
An outline of the ongoing BSE surveillance plan is available at www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse.shtml.
August 2006 Render