Usda

Background

Commonly referred to as “mad cow disease,” Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (“BSE”) is a degenerative neuro- logical disease that was first discovered in 1986 and has since infected more than 187,000 cattle worldwide, with 95 percent of the cases occurring in England. In the mid-1990s, public health officials discovered that cattle feeding practices were the likely cause of an outbreak of BSE in England. At the time, cattle feed typically contained recycled or “rendered” cattle parts that gave it a higher protein content.

In 1996, the British government discovered that consump- tion of BSE-contaminated meat could could cause variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in humans. There have been approximately 150 human cases of vCJD, including one case in the United States in a woman who had probably contracted the disease while living in England. Scientists are still learn- ing how these diseases develop, incubate and spread. See R- CALF II, 415 F.3d at 1086. 1 See generally PL 107-9 Federal Inter-agency Working Group, “Animal Disease Risk Assessment, Prevention, and Control Act of 2001 (PL 107- 9), Final Report,” January 2003. RANCHERS CATTLEMEN v. USDA …