Officials say meat recalled in Nevada poses no health risk

Monday, Dec. 29, 2003 | 10:15 a.m.

Although meat from a Holstein with mad cow disease has reached stores for distribution to consumers in eight states, including Nevada, it does not pose a health risk, federal officials said Sunday.

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an Agriculture Department veterinarian, said investigators have found that some of the meat from the diseased dairy cow slaughtered Dec. 9 in Washington state went to Nevada, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Montana, as well as Guam.

"The recalled meat represents essentially zero risk to consumers," Petersen said in a news conference Sunday.

The Clark County Health District plans today to begin investigating whether any of the meat from the diseased cow arrived in Southern Nevada, spokeswoman Jennifer Sizemore said.

Federal officials told local health authorities that the meat most likely went to Mexican or Asian markets and restaurants.

"We are going to try and find out if there are any stores in Clark County that received the meat," Sizemore said. The meat may be in Northern Nevada, she said.

The parts of the cow most likely to carry the infection -- the brain, the spinal cord and the lower intestine -- had been removed from the infected cow before it was cut and processed for human consumption, Sizemore said.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a concern because humans eating the infected parts of a cow can develop a related brain-wasting disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In Britain 143 people have died of it after an outbreak of mad cow in the 1980s.

Although federal officials assured the public that the food supply was safe, they took the precaution of recalling 10,000 pounds of meat from the infected cow and from 19 other cows slaughtered Dec. 9 at Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co., in Moses Lake, Wash.

Officials said Sunday they were still recovering meat and would not know how much has been returned until later this week.

The diseased cow was deboned at Midway Meats in Centralia, Wash., and sent Dec. 12 to two other plants, Willamette Valley Meat and Interstate Meat, both near Portland, Ore., Petersen said.

Willamette also received beef trimmings, used in meats such as hamburger. Those were sold to three dozen small Asian and Mexican markets and restaurants in Nevada, Washington, Oregon and California.

Supermarkets such as Albertson's, Vons, Fred Meyer and WinCo Foods voluntarily removed ground beef products from the affected distributors.

More than two dozen countries have banned U.S. beef imports since last week.

Tentative findings tracked the diseased cow from Alberta, the same Canadian province where scientists found one cow infected with the illness in May. But "that is very preliminary information," Dr. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinary officer for the Agriculture Department, said Sunday.