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Is Mad Cow Back? It Depends on the Age of This Cow

Canada is investigating its first case of mad cow disease since 2011, but you shouldn't worry yet.
An unnamed farm in Alberta was quarantined after a new case of mad cow disease was found in a single cow. ​​Photo via grahamjpierce/Flickr

​An unnamed farm in Alberta was quarantined on Friday after a new case of mad cow disease was found in a single cow—the first instance of the deadly neurodegenerative disease in the country since 2011. But whether or not we should all be worried hinges on the cow's age.

In a press conference held today, representatives of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) confirmed that the cow became sick after ingesting the tissue of infected cows. The agency is responsible for enforcing bans on cattle feed that include ground up cattle, the cause of mad cow disease.

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The disease has a long incubation period—sometimes up to eight years. That means the cow's age and its farm of origin are of chief importance when it comes to determining whether the cow ate bad feed recently, or before stronger regulations against using processed cow meat in cow food were put in place by the CFIA in 2007.

"As our investigation unfolds, we will trace the animal back through its lifetime to confirm its birth records," said Paul Mayers, CFIA vice president of policy and programs. "That, of course, is the most beneficial indicator of age. There are also other measures that are more gross in their practice, such as dentition, which will also form part of the investigation. It is our pursuit to have a definitive age of the animal."

Mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), has been found in feed containing the brain, spinal cord, skull, or small intestine of other, infected cows. Using these parts in feed has been banned since 1997 under the Feeds Act and Health of Animals Act. Nevertheless, an outbreak occurred in 2003 that crippled Canada's beef export industry for a time, and tougher regulations for all livestock were passed in 2007 that further restricted the kinds of tissues that can be fed to cows.

Isolated cases appeared in 2009, 2010, 2011, and now, 2015.

If humans ingest meat from a cow infected with BSE, they may contract a similar disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). The disease is incurable, fatal, and is neurodegenerative, making the days leading up to death full of pain and delirium.

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Because cows can live as long as 15 years, it is entirely possible that the cow became ill after eating food containing infected cow offal before the stronger 2007 regulations took effect. But pinning down the cow's age and farm of origin won't be easy, and depends on the record keeping at all the farms it lived on throughout its life.

"It's certainly my hope that [the number of farms] is not a huge number, because of course each step in the process adds complexity to the investigation and creates different lines in the investigation that we have to pursue to be exhaustive," Mayers said. "But I can't tell you, because we haven't gotten to that point."

"We've had lots of experience with this, given that we have investigated a number of cases of BSE in the past. So we have very solid procedures, and we will follow those though," Mayers also said.

If it turns out that the cow became sick recently, how then did materials that have been banned since 2007 at the latest—and 1997 at the earliest—end up in the cow's food?

"Any system can be subject to minor errors or breakdowns, I don't care if you're talking about animal nutrition or rocket science," said Graham Cooper, executive director of the Animal Nutrition Association of Canada, an organization that represents both cattle feed producers and suppliers. "The specified risk material is removed from the cow during processing—the brain, the eye, the ganglia, the spinal cord and so on. I'm not sure how much is required, but you can see how, perhaps, it might have found its way out of the controls."

If recently contaminated feed is the cause of this new case of BSE in Canada, then Canadians should ask why the government and the companies responsible for ensuring mad cow disease doesn't infect the livestock we eventually eat failed to do exactly that.