New mad cow case found in Austria
14/05/2006 - 13:16:32Authorities today announced Austria’s fourth case of mad cow disease and said all other cows at the affected farm had been destroyed.
They said laboratory tests on the cow, from a farm in Upper Austria province, confirmed after it had been slaughtered that it was infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
The slaughterhouse was subsequently thoroughly disinfected and the other animals were killed in an effort to contain the disease, authorities said. None of the others tested positive for BSE.
A rare but fatal form of the disease in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is linked to eating meat products contaminated with the brain-wasting BSE. It has been blamed for about 150 deaths, most of them in Britain, beginning in 1995.
