Ag Dept. Fights Meatpackers From Testing For Mad Cow

AP - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease .

The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. U.S. District Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority to restrict it.

The ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease in the U.S. The first, in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

Meanwhile:

Scripps scientists develop faster tests on mad cow disease

Scientists at Scripps Florida have made headway in the study and testing of the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease and a human variant of the disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

The findings open the door to better understanding of the diseases and their diagnoses and are expected to significantly accelerate the pace of research into how the diseases develop within cells.

The advances come in the form of two new tests developed by scientists at the infectious disease laboratory of The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter. One test, called the Standard Scarpie Cell Assay, measures the infectivity levels of the infected protein, or prion. The test takes only two weeks as opposed to the current 150-250 days, according to Sukhvir Mahal, a Scripps scientist and author of a study published this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The second test, called the Cell Panel Assay, enables researchers to quickly distinguish between different strains of prions. The tests enabled scientists to show that four different cell lines exhibit widely different responses to four different strains of the infections proteins...