[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 32 (Tuesday, March 14, 2006)]
[House]
[Page H942]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   THIRD CASE OF BSE IN UNITED STATES

  Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time 
of the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Pryce).
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Nebraska?
  There was no objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the United States' third case of 
BSE or mad cow disease was diagnosed. The first case was December 2003, 
which was a Canadian-born cow that was diagnosed in Washington State. 
The second case was last June, a cow from Texas, and now this latest 
case, a cow from Alabama, and it is assumed that it is at least 10 
years old or older. If so, this cow was born before the 1997 feed ban 
went into effect, and that is significant because in 1997, it was 
decreed that no ruminant animal feed would be fed to livestock; and, of 
course, ruminant feed means it contains some parts of animal within the 
feed.
  It is assumed BSE is acquired by an animal eating part of another 
animal that is BSE positive. As a result, we think that this feed ban 
should control the spread of BSE over time, but this apparently was an 
older animal that may have been prior to the ban.
  Also, it is duly noted that roughly 150 people in the United Kingdom 
have died from a related disease to eating BSE-positive animals, so it 
is a concern.
  So this leads to some questions:
  Number one, is U.S. beef safe?
  The answer is yes, despite this third case. Annually we slaughter 
roughly 35 million cows in the United States, and we have had three 
positive since 2003, and our testing system is sophisticated to the 
degree if there is one animal that is positive for BSE in 10 million 
cows, we would be 99 percent certain to find that one cow. So the 
testing, the surveillance has been ramped up considerably. We have 
tested 640,000 animals since June of 2004. Also, any animal in the 
United States that is slaughtered has the brains and spinal tissue 
removed, which is the tissue that normally carries the BSE prion.
  The second question: Will this hurt beef exports from the United 
States?
  The answer is it will certainly not help, and it may hurt to some 
degree. However, I think people around the world have become more 
familiar with BSE, what it is and how it can be prevented, and so it 
might not be quite as alarming as it was 2 or 3 years ago.
  Japan closed their border to U.S. beef 3 years ago. The border was 
opened last December, and it was closed again in January due to a 
breach in our export procedures. So we have lost that market which is 
roughly $1.4 billion a year in U.S. trade to Japan. A lot of this 
depends on confidence on the part of the Japanese public that we have 
rectified the problem. So this latest case is not going to help.
  Hong Kong has also suspended beef imports from one U.S. packing plant 
here in the United States rather recently.
  That leads us to the final question: What needs to be done?
  It is very important that we have animal ID in the United States. 
Most other countries have it. We need to be able to determine where 
this animal from Alabama came from, what feed yard. It has only been on 
this one farm for 1 year, so the previous 9 years, where was it and 
what animals might have been contaminated along with it? Until we have 
that knowledge, until we have animal ID, it is going to be very 
difficult for us to maintain a positive trade climate around the world. 
So it is imperative that we begin to work on this and get this done as 
quickly as possible.

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