BSE in America

Dec 30th 2003
From The Economist print edition

She developed paralysis, poor thing, after giving birth to an unusually large calf. That changed her status from milk producer to downer, the dairy industry's word for a cow unable to stand up. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that downers account for between 130,000 and 195,000 of the total of 35m cows slaughtered each year.
Her owner, the Sunny Dene Ranch dairy farm near Mabton, in Washington state, sent her to Vern's Moses Lake Meats. She was given a routine test for nervous-system diseases, killed, then shipped to Midway Meats in Centralia, also in Washington, for deboning. No one could have guessed she was about to be the cow who stole Christmas. The test, taken on December 9th but not fully analysed until December 22nd, froze America's $27-billion-a-year cattle industry, the world's largest producer of beef. This Holstein had tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a fatal neuro-degenerative sickness popularly known as mad-cow disease and caused, it is thought, by rogue, mis-shapen proteins called prions. …