000773 U.S. Judge to Rule Soon on Fate of Vermont Sheep

Brattleboro, VT - A federal judge was expected to rule whether the government will be allowed to buy and destroy some 350 sheep suspected of having a neurological ailment that could be mad cow disease.

After a full day of testimony from expert witnesses, U.S. District Judge J. Garvan Murtha said that he would rule as soon as possible in a case brought by farmers trying to stop the federal government from killing their animals.

The judge can allow the sheep to be killed, spare them or order more testing.

Four sheep on farms near Warren, Vermont, tested positive this month for a disease known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

The sheep are of the East Frisian breed and were imported from Belgium.

One form of TSE is scrapie, a disease fatal to sheep but no threat to people. Another form, however, is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, which has been linked to a fatal human disorder.

The Agriculture Department, which fears that European sheep were exposed to feed contaminated with mad cow disease, says it will take years of testing to determine what form of TSE the Vermont sheep had.

No cases of mad cow disease have been found in the United States, and the Agriculture Department has been closely monitoring all U.S. livestock since an outbreak in Europe four years ago.

Scientists believe that eating meat from an animal with mad cow disease causes a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain-wasting disorder that has killed more than 50 people in Britain.

The hearing in Vermont on Thursday focused on whether the government's method of testing the sheep was reliable.

Richard Rubinstein, a TSE expert who conducted the initial tests on the sheep, said he stood by his methods and was confident his findings were correct.

U.S. Attorney Charles Tetzlaff urged the court to trust Rubinstein's tests and protect public health by allowing the government to destroy the sheep.

But Glenn Telling, a specialist from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said the tests did not have stringent enough controls.

“Doctor Rubinstein's laboratory is extremely experienced in this field,” Telling testified. “His expertise is not in question, but if it were my lab, I would at least repeat the experiment and include a negative control.”

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