Animal-health officials have located and killed 29 cattle linked to a 12-year-old Texas beef cow infected with mad cow disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has said. Since the discovery of the country's second case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the USDA has sought all offspring and herd mates that were born within two years of the infected animal. "On Wednesday, 29 adult animals were transported to a collection site," the USDA said in its daily mad cow update. "These animals were euthanized and sampled for BSE tests." Jim Rogers, spokesman for USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the cattle were from the same Texas farm that the infected cow was born and raised. The USDA has refused to disclose information about the ranch. The department also would not say how many more herd mates and offspring it hopes to find. Samples of the herd mates' brain tissue were sent to the USDA animal-health laboratory in Ames, Iowa, where they will be examined using a rapid screening test. USDA said it would announce the test results as soon as possible. The department does not expect to find any new cases. "It is pretty unlikely to find more than one in a herd that has a [BSE-] positive animal," Rogers said.
