In Search Of The Mad Cow Herd

Three weeks after the discovery of the United States' first known case of mad cow disease, officials have located only 14 of the 81 cows that came into the country from Canada with the infected Holstein.

The diseased cow, found at a farm in Mabton, Washington, was traced to the farm of Wayne and Shirley Forsberg in Alberta, Canada. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has about 70 people working on tracing the rest of the herd that entered the United States.

"It's a paper trail. We look at import documents, health certificates, farmer sales and shipping orders," said Jim Rogers, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

There are also interviews with ranchers, shippers, feedlot operators and anyone else who may have come across the animals. And there is DNA testing on calves to determine whether they were offspring of the diseased cow.

The scare already has prompted the department to speed up the creation of a national electronic identification system that would track animals as they move from fields to feedlots to supermarkets. It would enable officials to respond faster to an outbreak of mad cow or other animal-borne illnesses.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, eats holes in the brains of cattle and is incurable. Scientists believe humans can develop a brain-wasting illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, from eating infected beef from diseased cattle.

Locating all the cows from the Forsberg herd is key to ensuring mad cow disease does not spread to humans. It also helps reduce the number of cows that have to be destroyed as a precaution.

In fact, just to be safe, U.S. authorities so far have destroyed or marked for destruction more than 570 head of cattle, either because they came from the Canadian farm, might have come from the farm, or might have been born to an infected cow from there.

The scare began with a single diseased cow discovered at the Sunny Dene Ranch in Mabton. It was traced immediately back to the Forsbergs' ranch near Edmonton because it still had a Canadian ear tag. Such tags are not required in the United States.

Records show that the infected cow was born in 1997, shortly before the United States and Canada banned the use of cattle feed made from the ground-up tissue of other livestock. Such feed is believed to spread mad cow disease.

The infected Holstein remained in Alberta until the Forsbergs retired and sold their herd in 2001. A group of 81 or 82 animals from the ranch was shipped to the United States, crossing the border at Oroville, Washington, on Sept. 4, 2001.

The Forsbergs had to obtain a health certificate to export the animals, which were inspected and given ear tags.

Investigators tracking those 81 animals found several more at the Mabton ranch and at farms in Quincy, Washington, and Mattawa, Washington. But the rest are unaccounted for.

The agriculture department for several days this week had maintained that it had located seven of the Canadian cows in Quincy, for a total of 20. But on Wednesday, the agency said additional investigation revealed that only one cow there was from the Forsberg herd, spokesman Jim Rogers said.

"When we got there the records didn't work out," Rogers said.