The ranch owner, veterinarian Bill Wavrin, declined to comment today, but referred questions to Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine's Charlie Powell, who confirmed the U.S. Department of Agriculture had gathered records from the ranch regarding the cow.

. . .Should further testing confirm an earlier test, it is possible that all 4,000 head of cattle at Sunny Dene Ranch could be euthanized and tested for mad cow disease, according to state protocols.

The cow was purchased in October 2001, likely from sale yards in Central Washington, according to Bill Brookreson, deputy director of the state agriculture department. It was sent to Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co., in Moses Lake, for slaughter, where it was classified as a "downer" cow because it was unable to walk after complications from an earlier pregnancy, Brookreson said.

Tom Ellestad, co-owner of Vern's, told the Columbia Basin Herald that the federal process set up to detect mad cow disease worked well. "We have done nothing wrong," he said. "The inspection system works because we caught this cow."

After a sample of nerve tissue was extracted from the cow for testing, the animal's brain and spinal cord were sent to a rendering plant in Spokane. That tissue was processed, but had not left the rendering plant, said Ray Kelly, executive vice president of Baker Commodities, Inc., which owns the facility.

The meat from the cow was made into hamburger.

Agriculture officials say the chance of humans developing becoming ill, either by eating tainted meat or being exposed to poisoned byproducts, are miniscule. But,

Since 1996, evidence has been increasing for a causal relationship between ongoing outbreaks in Europe of a disease in cattle, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease"), and a disease in humans, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Both disorders are invariably fatal brain diseases with unusually long incubation periods measured in years, and are caused by an unconventional transmissible agent.

Yesterday, the recall effort was expanded to several more states. The list now includes Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana and Guam, along with Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada.

Reasonably related