031254 Bush Still Eating Beef Despite Scare

Crawford, TX - President Bush, the former governor of the nation's top cattle state, has no plans to stop eating beef despite growing worry about mad cow disease, a White House spokesman said on Friday.

"He's continued to eat beef," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with the president to his ranch. The U.S. food supply is safe and public risk from the discovery of the disease is low, McClellan added.

The president had had beef "in the last couple of days," McClellan said.

Economic stakes in the U.S. mad cow scare rose as Venezuela and Egypt joined some two dozen nations that have halted imports of U.S. beef. Food company stocks and cattle prices tumbled as investors worried that U.S. consumers could begin to eat less beef. The U.S. Agriculture Department quarantined a second herd of cattle in Washington state as the $27 billion U.S. cattle industry came to grips with its first case of the deadly, brain-wasting disease, first found in the United States in a dairy cow in rural Washington state.

An outbreak of mad cow disease, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), forced the slaughter of millions of cattle in Europe in the 1990s. At least 137 people, mostly in Britain, died of a human form of the disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

McClellan said other nations' bans of U.S. beef were understandable but that it is too soon to assess the economic impact on U.S. farmers and ranchers.

He played down the impact of bans from abroad, calling them "standard measures" that United States might have taken itself under similar circumstances.

Cattle production is a multi-billion dollar industry in Texas, and cattle graze on Bush's sprawling ranch.

"I think his focus is on the public health aspect of this," McClellan said. "We should always be working to make sure that we're doing everything we can to protect the food supply, and that includes looking at whether or not there are any additional safeguards needed."

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