As Probe of Infected Cow Spreads, So Does Worry
By Shankar Vedantam and Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 27, 2003; Page A01
Cattle in other states may have eaten the same contaminated feed that infected a Washington state Holstein with mad cow disease, but investigators who want to track the infection to its source are being confounded by the lack of an organized system that would lead them to the herd where the cow was born, officials said yesterday.
The lack of a reliable tracking system, and a complex trail of clues, rumors and false leads, means it could be days or months -- or never -- before all the links are fully explored, officials said. For a nation already jittery about the Holstein, the expanding investigation could spread worry.
"The epidemiological investigation becomes a tangled web of different possibilities," said W. Ron DeHaven, deputy administrator and chief veterinary officer at the Agriculture Department. "Some of those do lead back to Canada. Some take us into the state of Washington and other states, as well."
Already, consumers who ate meat that might have come from the sick Holstein are concerned. Grocery stores were shipped ground beef and beef patties from meat that included the infected cow 11 days before a test for mad cow disease came back positive and the meat was recalled -- it is not yet known how much of the meat was pulled off grocery shelves or has been consumed.
Five major grocery chains in Oregon and Washington have pulled ground beef from their shelves. In Oregon, some of the recalled meat has been accounted for at the wholesale level.
"But some has been distributed at the retail level, at which point it was sold," said Dalton Hobbs, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
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Thjis will turn out to be a far bigger story than Dean's or Lieberman's comments this weekend. This one's gonna snowball... we're talking a 37 billion dollar a year industry, and an Administration which wouldn't know how to regulate any industry if their life depended on it. Scary thought.
More on the story:
Buyers Of Beef Making Inquiries
Mad Cow Case Has Some Ill at Ease
By S. Mitra Kalita and Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 27, 2003; Page B01
Butchers and steakhouses in the Washington area sought to distance themselves yesterday from the nation's first confirmed case of mad cow disease -- a Holstein infected in Washington state -- assuring customers they bring in mostly Angus beef from farms in the Midwest. Still, some consumers reacted cautiously, saying they feared an outbreak of the deadly disease.
At Springfield Butchers, inquiries have come steadily since news of the discovery was disclosed Christmas Eve: Where do you order your meat? How do you know it's safe?
Over and over, manager Earl Vialpando told customers that they need not be concerned because he does not buy that kind of beef or beef from that area of the country. The bovine infection, discovered in England in the 1980s, has been around for much of his market's 26-year history. But Vialpando said he has never seen customers so interested in the stories behind the beef they buy. "This is the first time I've gotten an abundance of calls," he said.
For the most part, butchers in the region have had good news for customers. Holsteins, lean dairy cows, are preferred as meat on the health-conscious West Coast; Angus cows are more common on dinner tables in the Northeast. Many markets and restaurants also say they order their meat from Kansas, Nebraska and other states in the Midwest, more than 1,000 miles from the large dairy farm in southern Washington that owned the infected Holstein.
"We don't have any of the meat here," said Craig Munkle, a spokesman for Safeway at its regional headquarters in Lanham. "Our stores in Maryland, Virginia and D.C. didn't have any of that, and we're making sure our customers are aware of that."
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