| June 28, 2008 | - Police in South Korea fired water cannons at protesters as Condoleezza Rice visited Seoul. “We don't need U.S. troops,” read a protest slogan, “we don't need U.S. mad cows.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 13, 2006 | -
Mad cow disease was found in Alabama
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| January 20, 2006 | -
Japan blocked imports of American beef after a spine was discovered in a shipment from a U.S. meatpacker.
| Source:
IHT.com
|
| October 14, 2005 | -
Swiss scientists discovered that the prions that cause mad cow disease and scrapie can be passed through cow urine.
| Source:
Medical News Today
|
| June 24, 2005 | - A second case of mad cow disease was found in the United States.
| Source:
AP
|
| January 28, 2005 | - The world's first mad goat was diagnosed in France.
| Source:
United Press International
|
| December 31, 2004 | - and the Department of Agriculture said it would allow Canadian
beef back into the country.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 2, 2004 | - President Bush did not say when he would lift a U.S. ban on Canadian beef or end tariffs on the country's timber.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 1, 2004 | -
President Bush, on his first official visit to Canada, ate local beef and announced that he was "still standing."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 2, 2004 | - Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, began notifying more than 500 patients that they might have been exposed to sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease because of inadequate sterilization procedures.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| August 8, 2004 | - British scientists discovered mad cow prions in a person who contracted the disease via blood transfusion and died of unrelated causes; they concluded, on the basis of the victim's genotype, that about half the human population is susceptible to mad cow disease.
| Source:
Sunday Times, Washington Post
|
| August 1, 2004 | -
Russian researchers from the Voronezh State Technological Academy said they had perfected a method for using cow blood as a high-protein dairy replacement in foods such as yogurt.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| July 30, 2004 | - A team of scientists led by Stanley Prusiner, the neurologist who won a Nobel prize for his work on the prion hypothesis, succeeded in creating a synthetic prion that produced a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy in mice.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 14, 2004 | - The inspector general of the USDA said that the agency's mad-cow surveillance system is weak, that the testing is not random, that it fails to require rendering plants to participate, and that it is based on flawed, unscientific assumptions.
| Source:
Seattle Times
|
| July 10, 2004 | - Federal health officials were thinking about banning the practice of feeding pork, chicken, and other animal parts to cattle; the pigs and chickens eat rendered cattle and thus could transmit mad cow disease prions. There was apparently no plan to stop feeding cattle huge quantities of cattle blood, an obvious vector for the disease, and cattle will continue to enjoy the feathers and excrement of 8.5 billion chickens.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 4, 2004 | - The French government reported that the number of cows infected with mad cow disease in the past thirteen years is 300 times higher than previously suspected, with nearly 50,000 infected animals entering the food chain because the epidemic had gone undetected.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| June 26, 2004 | - Another mad cow was apparently discovered somewhere in the United States, but the USDA refused to say where until more tests were completed.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| May 31, 2004 | -
Kirin Brewery Co. announced that it had genetically
engineered a cow, which has not yet been born, that will be immune to mad cow disease.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 24, 2004 | - Scientists discovered prions in the muscle of a sheep infected with scrapie; experts were very quick to say that this does not necessarily pose any danger to humans who eat lamb, even though scrapie prions are believed to have caused mad cow disease. A prion expert at the National Institutes of Health predicted that "within the next year, somebody will make a big splash by finding it in the muscles of cattle and the beef industry will go crazy."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 21, 2004 | -
British investigators who studied samples of human biopsies estimated that almost 4,000 Britons could have mad cow disease prions in their tonsils.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 23, 2004 | - Agriculture officials were still trying to convince Japan to drop its ban on American beef that has not been tested for mad cow disease.
| Source:
Seattle Times
|
| April 10, 2004 | - The USDA rejected a request from a Kansas
beef company that asked for permission to test all its cattle for mad cow disease; the decision was announced by the department's undersecretary for marketing and regulation.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 30, 2004 | - It was reported that the U.S. government's main laboratory for mad-cow testing, which is located in an Iowa strip mall, is not secure enough to store dangerous pathogens.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| March 4, 2004 | - The inspector general of the USDA opened a criminal investigation into whether the Washington State mad cow was falsely listed as a downer; the man who killed the cow, the man who took the cow to slaughter, and the owner of the slaughterhouse have all said that the cow was able to walk. A spokeswoman for the agency said that she could not "fathom" the notion that a high-ranking USDA official could have ordered the falsification, though she did not deny the charge but simply repeated that she could not "fathom" it.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 28, 2004 | - Dr. Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel Prize-winning expert on prions, said that until all cattle are tested for mad cow disease, none should be considered safe, and he noted that improved feed practices will not prevent spontaneous cases.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 27, 2004 | - A large beef producer in Kansas applied to test all its cattle for mad cow disease so that it can resume exporting its beef to Japan. "The problem we're having now is that the U.S.D.A. is not wanting to do this," said the company's president. "They don't want to test. They don't want to recognize BSE is a problem. They are not going to allow anyone to test until they decide how or when. We believe that may be never."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 27, 2004 | - The Food and Drug Administration banned the feeding of cattle blood to calves. Dinner scraps from restaurants, known as "plate waste," will no longer be fed to cattle either, though rendered cows will still be fed to pigs and chickens, and vice versa.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 17, 2004 | -
Italian scientists discovered a new form of mad cow disease that could be the cause of some cases of "sporadic" Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 14, 2004 | - An FDA advisory panel recommended widespread testing for mad cow disease, saying that absent such testing there is no way to assess the risk of transmission from meat, drugs, vaccines, cosmetics, or dietary supplements.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 10, 2004 | - The United States Department of Agriculture concluded its investigation into the mad cow outbreak.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 5, 2004 | - A panel of international experts said that mad cow disease is now "indigenous in North America" and advised the United States to ban feeding animal protein to cattle. The panel's chairman said that if the U.S. performed adequate tests it could find "a case a month."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 22, 2004 | - The worker at Vern's Moses Lake Meats who killed the Washington State mad cow insisted that the cow was not a downer. "I can't stand a government cover-up," said Dave Louthan. "Since we only had a few walkers on this trailer full of downers, we just killed her along with them. We took a brain sample from her head because the USDA gives up $10 per sample. If we would have unloaded her in the pens, we would have never caught the BSE. How many other walkers have BSE? We will never know."
| Source:
Columbia Basin Herald
|
| January 17, 2004 | -
South Korea was incinerating tons of American beef products.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 15, 2004 | - People in Indiana were still eating deep-fried cow brain sandwiches. The brains puff up nicely when cooked.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| January 6, 2004 | - It was reported that 18 people died of variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease, last year in Britain, one more than died in 2002.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 4, 2004 | - One government expert pointed out that Americans are much more likely to die of E. coli, listeria, or salmonella than from mad cow disease; in fact, since the mad Holstein was discovered in Washington, more than 1 million Americans were poisoned by their food, 6,000 were hospitalized, and 100 died.
| Source:
Seattle Times
|
| January 3, 2004 | - State officials in California said they were unable to reveal the ultimate destinations of a large quantity of tainted soup bones, tenderloins, and other cuts of meat included in the voluntary mad-cow recall, because doing so would violate the beef industry's proprietary interests. Consumers were told simply to ask their grocers if their meat was infected. "I do think that the USDA has erred in its judgment," said a health officer in Alameda County. "It has sacrificed the public's health in favor of the beef industry."
| Source:
San Francisco Chronicle
|
| January 3, 2004 | - Federal authorities continued to claim that the diseased meat "is a zero-risk product."
| Source:
San Francisco Chronicle
|
| December 31, 2003 | - In response to the mad-cow crisis, the United States Department of Agriculture banned the human consumption of cow brains, skulls, spinal cords, vertebral columns, eyes, and nerve tissue from cows older than 30 months. Downer cows may no longer be eaten by humans, though they will be boiled down and fed to chickens and pigs, and younger cow brains may still be eaten.
| Source:
Forbes, New York Times
|
| December 31, 2003 | - U.S. trade officials were trying to persuade about 30 countries that have banned American beef that there's nothing to worry about.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| December 31, 2003 | -
USDA officials said that there was no need to test all cattle for mad cow disease before they are eaten.
| Source:
Newsday
|
| December 31, 2003 | - Large shipments of frozen french fries, which were pre-fried in beef tallow, were in limbo because Japan and other Asian countries were refusing to accept them.
| Source:
Tri-City Herald
|
| December 30, 2003 | - Washington's mad Holstein was determined to have been old enough to have eaten other cows.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 27, 2003 | -
President Bush, a spokesman said, "continued to eat beef."
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 25, 2003 | - Government and other beef industry officials claimed that there were "firewalls" in place to prevent infectious prions from reaching American hamburgers; Dr. Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel laureate who discovered prions, contradicted those claims and explained that he believes the disease is already widespread in the United States. "They treat the disease as if it were an infection that you can contain by quarantining animals on farms," he said. "It's as though my work of the last 20 years did not exist."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 24, 2003 | -
Mad cow disease was discovered in the United States for the first time, in a Holstein cow that was too sick to walk but was nonetheless slaughtered and sold for meat. The mad Holstein's brain and spinal column were sent to a rendering plant somewhere, possibly to be turned into dog or chicken food; there was no word on whether the cow's blood was processed to be fed to young calves as a milk supplement. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Venemen, a former lobbyist for the beef industry, insisted that even meat from a mad cow is safe to eat, and she promised to feed beef to her family for Christmas.
| Source:
Guardian, New York Times
|
| December 22, 2003 | -
British health officials reported the first possible transmission of mad cow disease to a human via blood transfusion.
| Source:
Nature.com
|
| August 7, 2003 | - An Italian woman died of mad cow disease.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| July 11, 2003 | - The Food and Drug Administration reported that a feed company in Washington State had admitted to violating rules designed to prevent the spread of mad cow disease.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| April 8, 2003 | -
Three deer hunters have died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it was reported, and two of them were good friends who hunted together. The Centers for Disease Control said that it will not investigate the cases to determine whether the men contracted CJD from eating deer infected with chronic wasting disease, a variant of mad cow disease, because there is no evidence that the men ate CD-infected meat.
| |
| October 22, 2002 | -
It was confirmed that a 22-year-old Florida woman has mad cow disease, but officials claimed she was infected in England.
| |
| August 13, 2002 | -
After a Canadian man died of mad cow disease in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, shares of McDonald's, Wendy's, YUM! Brands, and other fast-food companies declined sharply.
| |
| June 11, 2002 | -
“How can the Palestinian Authority assure the security of the Israelis when it cannot even protect its own people?” An Israeli company displayed its new bulletproof infant car seat at a security conference in Tel Aviv, and Israel confirmed its first case of mad cow disease, at a kibbutz in the Golan Heights.
| |
| May 28, 2002 | -
The Irish Food Safety Authority reported finding bovine and porcine DNA in a significant percentage of chicken fillets, leading to fears that mad cow disease could be transmitted via chicken meat.
| |
| May 21, 2002 | -
After failing to diagnose mad cow disease in a dairy cow, a Japanese vet killed herself. “I'm so sorry for my unforgivable fault as a veterinarian,” she wrote in a suicide note.
| |
| April 23, 2002 | -
A British woman living in Florida was diagnosed with mad cow disease.
| |
| April 9, 2002 | -
Chronic wasting disease, a cousin of mad cow disease, was spreading among deer and elk in the Midwest.
| |
| February 12, 2002 | -
Two Sicilians, a man and a woman, were diagnosed with the human form of mad cow disease.
| |
| December 4, 2001 | -
Japan reported another case of mad cow disease and was preparing to slaughter 5,129 cows which might have been exposed to the disease.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | -
Mad cow disease continued to spread in Japan.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | - Beef prices in Japan were dropping after a British lab confirmed a case of mad cow disease near Tokyo, by which time the diseased carcass had been lost.
| |
| September 18, 2001 | -
South Korea banned Japanese beef after a Holstein cow on a farm near Tokyo tested positive for mad cow disease.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | -
Greece announced its first case of mad cow disease.
| |
| June 12, 2001 | -
Mad cow disease showed up in the Czech Republic.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | -
Italy confirmed its third case of mad cow disease and ordered an autopsy of a fifty-seven-year-old man who had displayed symptoms of Creutzfelt-Jakob disease.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | - Sweden continued to insist on the purity of its herds, though there were reports of a mad cow there.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | -
Russia's chief veterinarian was blaming the outbreak of mad cow disease on the Jews.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
France said it would kill 10,000 head of cattle a week in an attempt to raise beef prices, which have been depressed by the mad cow panic.
| |
| February 13, 2001 | - Two Thais were found to have variant CJD, the human form of mad cow disease.
| |
| January 30, 2001 | - One thousand Texas
cattle were quarantined after it was discovered that they were fed ground-up ruminants in violation of a ban designed to prevent mad cow disease.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | -
Italy discovered its first mad cow.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | -
United States
agriculture officials continued to insist that Americans were at little risk from mad cow disease, despite the fact that testing has not been widespread. Loopholes still exist in regulations concerning feeding ground-up farm animals to other farm animals; deer in several western states are infected with another form of spongiform encephalopathy; an unknown number of sheep have scrapie, a form of spongiform encephalopathy; captive mink in eleven midwestern states developed spongiform encephalopathy after being fed untested “downer cows”; and beef byproducts such as milk, blood, fat, and semen are still imported from the U.K. and Europe. The prions that cause mad cow disease survive freezing, cooking, and incineration, which complicates disposal.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | - Spanish cattlemen were trying to prevent their government from killing whole herds when one cow comes down with mad cow disease.
| |
| December 26, 2000 | - After a mad cow was discovered in Bavaria, Germany's health minister warned that the nation's supply of sausage might be contaminated with mad-cow brains; German consumers, who each devour about 55 pounds of sausage yearly, were near hysteria.
| |
| November 28, 2000 | - Spain discovered its first case of mad cow
disease, as did Germany.
| |
| November 28, 2000 | -
France was trying to figure out what to do
with 500,000 tons of meal contaminated with animals parts that can no
longer be fed to livestock for fear of spreading mad cow disease; the
million tons of animal parts produced each year by the French meat
industry will have to be disposed of as well.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | - The European Commission announced its intention to test all beef cattle for mad cow disease.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | - Evidence that Kuru, a disease spread by eating human brains, is more widespread in Papua New Guinea than previously thought, suggested that the European epidemic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow disease, to which Kuru is related, may be more serious than government officials have been willing to admit.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | - People in Galway, Ireland, dug up the carcass of a mad cow and placed it in the owner's farmyard; burying a cow suffering from bovine spongiform encephalapathy could contaminate ground water with the prions that apparently cause the disease.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | -
Scientists warned again that chronic wasting disease, a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy infecting deer and elk in the American West, can probably be transmitted to humans, much like its cousin mad cow disease; up to half the deer in some areas are infected with the disease.
| |
| October 31, 2000 | -
French supermarkets were selling meat thought to be contaminated with mad cow disease.
| |
| August 1, 2000 | - A British Health Department bulletin revealed that fourteen Britons have died of mad cow disease so far this year; scientists have said that 500,000 people could die of the disease by 2030.
| |
| August 1, 2000 | - A family of Vermont
sheep
farmers vowed to prevent the government from slaughtering their flock of Belgian dairy sheep; four sheep descended from the flock tested positive for an ovine form of mad cow disease; “this is just like trying to take Elian Gonzalez all over again,” one neighbor said.
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