USDA Ramps Up BSE Surveillance

March 25, 2004 - Based on recommendations by an international scientific review panel, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expanding its surveillance efforts for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to include hundreds of thousands of cattle. The panel, operating as a subcommittee of the Secretary of Agriculture’s Advisory Committee on Foreign Animal and Poultry Diseases, recommended a one-year enhanced surveillance program targeting cattle from the populations considered at highest risk for the disease as well as a random sampling of animals from the aged cattle population following USDA’s investigation into a single case of BSE discovered in late December 2003 in Washington.

Over a 12 to 18 month time frame, the enhanced program will test as many cattle as possible in the high-risk population – those animals showing clinical signs involving the central nervous system and dead and non-ambulatory cattle – as well as test a sampling of normal cattle over 30 months of age. USDA will transfer $70 million from its Commodity Credit Corporation to fund the program, which will include defraying costs incurred by industries participating in the surveillance program for such items as transportation, disposal and storage, and carcasses being tested. USDA will build on previous cooperative efforts with renderers and others to obtain samples from the targeted high-risk populations, which are banned from the human food supply.

Under the enhanced program, using statistically geographic modeling, sampling some 268,000 animals would allow for the detection of BSE at a rate of one positive in 10 million adult cattle with a 99 percent confidence level. In other words, the enhanced program could detect BSE even if there were only five positive animals in the entire country. Sampling some 201,000 animals would allow for the detection of BSE at the same rate at a 95 percent confidence level.

The sampling of apparently normal animals will come from the 40 U.S. slaughter plants that handle 86 percent of the aged cattle processed for human consumption each year in the United States. The carcasses from these animals will be held and not allowed to enter the human food chain until test results show the samples are negative for BSE.

USDA will begin immediately to prepare for the increased testing, with the anticipation that the program will be ready to be fully implemented June 1, 2004. In the meantime, BSE testing will continue at the current rate, which is based on a plan to test 40,000 animals in FY 2004. Testing will be conducted through USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, IA, and a network of laboratories around the country. USDA is also working to approve rapid tests for use in the testing program.

USDA’s surveillance plan and the international panel’s recommendations are available by clicking on the appropriate document name.


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