The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced this Wednesday that it had identified an atypical BSE case in a six-year-old mixed-breed beef cow in Florida.

"This animal never entered slaughter channels and at no time presented a risk to the food supply, or to human health in the United States," the Department said.

Atypical BSE

This is the sixth BSE case ever detected in the US. Of the five previous cases, the first, in 2003, was a case of classical BSE in a cow imported from Canada. Classical BSE is the type associated with contaminated feed and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which caused the European mad cow crisis at the end of the 20th century.

All other cases in the US have been atypical, according to the USDA. Atypical BSE appears spontaneously in older cattle and remains unexplained. Similar cases appear sporadically in Europe, including the last Irish one in Co Galway in January 2017.

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