Dozens of Whole Foods stores in the Northeast and a restaurant in New York received beef over an eight-month period that may not have been properly slaughtered to reduce the threat of mad cow disease, federal officials said on Thursday.
The producer of the beef, Fruitland American Meat, in Jackson, Mo., recalled thousands of pounds of bone-in grass-fed rib eyes, and two quartered beef carcasses, after federal officials reviewing slaughtering logs found that certain precautions had not been followed.
The beef in question was processed between Sept. 5 and April 25, and the meat has the number 2316 inside the Agriculture Departm! ent inspection mark.
The federal government said the beef posed only a "remote" health hazard, and the cows themselves had shown no evidence of the disease.
Fruitland American denied on Thursday that the meat had been improperly handled. The company said the government's finding was based on a clerical error, in which the age of the cattle had been documented as 30 months or more, when rules on mad cow must be followed, because older cows are believed to be at greater risk. But birth records showed that the cows were in fact no more than 28 months old, a spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department, Alexandra Tarrant, sa! id the agency was looking into the chance that a clerical erro! r had occurred.
The meat was shipped to 34 Whole Foods stores in northern Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Michael Sinatra, a spokesman for the company, said none of the meat was currently in the stores.
The government would not name the restaurant that received the meat, because it has probably been consumed.
Mad cow disease, scientifically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is believed to lead to a fatal brain disorder in humans called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It is believed to be transmitted to humans who eat the brain, spinal cord or digestive tract of infected cattle, and it can take months to manife! st itself. The Agriculture Department said slaughterhouse logs showed that the cattle's dorsal root ganglia, which are in the spine, may not have been entirely removed.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/nyregion/concerns-on-mad-cow-lead-to-recall.html
