Canada hunts for mad cow case origins

Canadian vets said in Europe yesterday they were chasing down possible origins of the country's first mad cow disease case in a decade, which sent shockwaves through the North American food industry.

Canada said on Tuesday it had found a case of brain-wasting bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, in the western province of Alberta but stressed that the affected animal had not entered the food chain.

"We should know in a day or so, but we cannot speculate at this time where the animal came from," Canada's Chief Veterinary Officer Brian Evans told a news conference in Paris where he was attending an international animal health meeting.

The reaction in Europe was muted, with the EU's executive Commission saying it would take no new measures against Canada. "The European Union imports virtually no meat from Canada," a Commission official said.

Officials from Britain, where the disease had led to the slaughter of 3.7 million cattle and a worldwide ban on British imports, said the positive Canadian case was confirmed at the leading veterinary laboratories agency in the UK.

As the list of countries moving to ban Canadian beef exports grew, a leading British expert on BSE said Canada should use testing to establish whether the new case was isolated.

"One needs to slowly tease through with very high veterinary epidemiological surveillance to see whether this is an isolated case or not," Professor Roy Anderson, a government adviser on BSE, told Reuters.

"(BSE tests) are not perfect by any means and they lack sensitivity throughout the average five-year incubation period of the disease, but these tests certainly pick up serious disease in the last year of the incubation period," he said.