Until then, rendered cows could become part of cattle feed. "If it turns out this cow is less than 14 years old, it proves my biggest concern: Cattle feed is still not protected from mad cow," he said.
You can't feed cows to cows directly. But you can feed cows to pigs and chickens and then feed them to cows."
Clifford said the cow died of an atypical strain of the disease. The diseased cow died while still on the farm. The USDA tests about 40,000 cows a year.
The first American case of mad cow disease since 2006 was found this week in a dairy cow in California, but the animal had not been slaughtered for food, government officials said.
It was also linked to about 225 cases worldwide of a fatal human brain aliment known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Only three previous cases of BSE have been found in cattle in the United States, and no cases of the human version of the disease have been linked to U.S. beef.
The animal’s age is being investigated. Baker Commodities picked up the cow from the dairy after it died, said Dennis Luckey, the company’s executive vice president. The European BSE epidemic is believed to have started when cattle ate feed containing brain and nerve tissues from animals with BSE. Feed supplemented with meat and bones from specific animals is now banned.
How the California cow got the disease remains unknown. Government officials expressed confidence that contaminated food was not the source, saying the animal had atypical L-type BSE, a rare variant not generally associated with an animal consuming infected feed.
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