Mad cow cover-up (again)

The New York Times is reporting that Friday's announcement of the second confirmed case of mad cow in the U.S. was delayed ... for seven months! Although the Agriculture Department confirmed on Friday that a cow that died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease. The result was never publicly disclosed. The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow. Indeed, the lengthy delay occurred despite the intense national interest in the disease and the fact that many countries have banned shipments of beef from the United States because of what they consider to be lax testing policies. This isn't the first time.
  • Federal investigators have been probing allegations from a former USDA veterinarian that the USDA was covering up concnerns about mad cow from the very beginning of USDA's mad cow surveillance program in 1990.
  • Moreover, Canadian news uncovered recently that the USDA may have mishandled two 1997 tests of suspected mad cow. In one, an independent university lab concluded that the cow "had a rare brain disorder never reported in that breed of cattle either before or since — not the dreaded bovine spongiform encephalopathy." CBC discovered, however, that "key areas of the brain where signs of BSE would be most noticeable were never tested. The most important samples somehow went missing."
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