Second test confirms US mad cow case

I'm sorry, I don't mean to make light of this, but I couldn't pass it up when I saw the cartoon over at Cox and Forkum. In all seriousness, this is not something to be taken lightly and I'm glad the USDA is on top of it.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said that a second test on an Alabama cow had confirmed the presence of mad cow disease in the animal, which has been killed and buried.
The government confirmed the country's third case of mad cow disease on Monday, but insisted to the world that its beef was safe as it conducted further tests.
The USDA said in a statement that a government laboratory in Ames, Iowa, had conducted a second test for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, which returned "positive results".
"The cow, initially reported to be a Santa Gertrudis, is now believed to be a red crossbred," the USDA said.
The animal, which could not walk, was put down by a veterinarian, who collected a sample from the animal which was submitted for testing.
The animal was buried on an Alabama farm, the government said, stressing it had not entered the food chain.
The department is investigating the animal's origin to trace its place of birth. It had been on the Alabama farm less than a year.
The number of BSE cases in the United States pales in comparison to the more than 183,000 infections confirmed in Britain, where the epidemic was first identified in 1986.
The United States recorded its first case of BSE in December 2003 in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state. The second case was confirmed in June last year in a cow in Texas.
The discovery of BSE in 2003 prompted a slew of bans on US beef imports around the world, which have only recently been lifted in some countries.
Consumption of BSE-infected beef has been linked to a brain-wasting disease in humans called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).