Fear of Mad-Cow Disease Prompted Search for 20 Cattle
Globe and Mail
June 10, 2002
By Brian Laghi
OTTAWA - Alarmed federal officials were sent scrambling after reports of a Japanese mad-cow-disease scare last fall to hunt down more than 20 cattle that had slipped into Canada from Japan. The cattle had entered Canada through the United States in the mid- to late 1990s, and Canadian officials were informed of their presence only after the discovery last August of a diseased cow in Japan.
That launched a series of internal e-mails in September and October, in which an anxious civil service hastened to locate the animals.
"This is a serious situation, folks. We need as much information as possible ASAP," wrote Claude Lavigne, deputy director of the Animal Health and Products Directorate in an e-mail obtained by Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin.
"Need more details from Ontario. Need all information available from . . . Beef Breeds Council, etc. Quebec and Atlantic areas should also start looking for the presence of Japanese cattle," Mr. Lavigne wrote.
Another official noted in an e-mail adorned with exclamation marks that one of the cows had been sent to slaughter.
Eventually, all the animals were tracked down, but four had been sent to a slaughterhouse and ended up in the food supply, federal officials said. They added that those cattle were slaughtered well before the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, as mad-cow disease is properly known, in Japan. The other animals showed no signs of the brain-wasting illness, but they were quarantined or sent back to the United States.
"We're sure we've located them all," said Carolyn Inch, manager of disease control at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. "The risk level is negligible."
Canada does not allow the importing of cattle from Japan or Europe, because officials cannot guarantee the animals to be free of BSE. However, the Japanese cattle in question entered Canada through the United States because they were classed as U.S. livestock and thus considered safe.
Canada no longer allows such cattle into the country.
BSE is the animal version of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain-wasting illness that causes death in humans.
BSE is believed spread to humans by the consumption of infected beef.
Only one such animal has been found in Canada, and it was imported from Britain.
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