Senate Says No Japanese Kobe Beef for You as Mad Cow Battle Simmers

The US Senate yesterday voted to include language in USDA funding legislation that would bar the agency from allowing the importation of Kobe beef unless Japan reopens its markets to US beef.

Japan was the biggest US customer ($1.7 billion in 2003) until it joined some 60 countries banning US beef imports after the US confirmed its first case of mad-cow disease in December 2003.

Japan experts this week said that the ban is necessary, saying US cows were exposed to a higher risk of mad cow disease infection than their Japanese counterparts due to insufficient feed control in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Kyodo News agency reported.

Kobe beef is a luxury product -- the Wagyu cattle that produce it, once limited only to Japan but now grown in the US, are fed a special diet to create a magnificently tender and well-marbled beef, or so I'm told. Diet is a vector for this disease and scientist believe that the disease is transferred through diseased animal protein in the food chain.

The Kobe beef market is certainly not a keystone of neither Japan's economy nor the US restaurant business. But beef clearly is economically important and the threat of mad cow disease is roiling the American business, which is part of the $170 billion national livestock industry.


Regulators march at a glacial pace

Earlier this month, the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of much of a cow's small intestine for use in food products and cosmetics as long as the final 80 inches of the intestine, which includes the distal ileum, are removed at slaughter. This abridges a previous ban in place since early 2004. Scientists believe that the brain, spinal cord and distal ileium harbor the prions that cause the disease and thus must be kept out of the food chain.

USDA is under some pressure for its handling of the potential threat to the beef industry, and to consumers. In response, the agency has screened some 450,000 sick or dead cows and is now testing an additional 20,000 healthy animals.

The FDA expects to issue new regulations on animal feed sometime in the fall. FDA in 1997 banned the use of ground-up cattle parts in cattle feed, but there have been calls to extend that to include all animal proteins as part of the battle against mad cow.

The solution to the problem may be in the hands of molecular biologists.

Today, there is no in vivo test for the presence of the disease. [See New Biology Economy Aug. 29, 2005; and Aug. 5 for additonal coverage.]

This disease causes abundant body proteins to misfold and accumulate in the brain, presenting long strands of proteins and dead brain tissues that appear much like sponges, thus the name, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow in cattle, scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease or variant CJD in humans.

But, scientists are advancing on creating a number of tests that appear to have some early-stage promise. In August, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine describing a technique to amplify the malformed proteins in the blood to a detectable level, using technology that requires about 70 hours to complete.

Earlier this month, GeneThera of Wheat Ridge, Colo., announced that it would open a lab and testing facility in northern Italy. In June, GeneThera inked an agreement with Beckman Coulter to collaborate on animal diagnostics. [See New Biology Economy, July 12.]

This week, Canada's Alberta Prion Research Institute this week formed an advisory council and named Joseph Martin, dean of Harvard Medical School, as chairman.

Additionally, Innovative Biosensors, a company in the University of Maryland's technology business incubator, has received a $110,000 NIH grant to study BSE. The company plans to use its Canary (Cellular Analysis and Notification of Antigen Risks and Yields) biosensor technology in this area.