Dive Summary:
- Brazil recently became the 26th country to have a suspected or confirmed case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease.
- While this comes with serious repercussions including being banned from from some international markets and required BSE mitagators, the international community is blaming Brazil for the two years it took to report any problems.
- BSE is nearly always fatal and with Brazil's 67 million pounds of beef exported to the U.S. every year, regulators at the FDA were understandably worried and fired up.
From the article:
Details finally began to emerge when Brazil filed a notification to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), reporting that a 13-year- old cow died in December 2010 in Parana and BSE was suspected. The notification said the dead cow was subjected to a histopathological test, one of two primary tests for BSE. It was reportedly negative.
A second test, not conducted until June 15, 2012 at the National Reference Laboratory in Recife, was positive. The beef exporting Brazil claims the long delays were due to work overloads at the lab and OIE rules that cause it to give the test a low priority.
