Crawford, Texas, Dec. 27 (Reuters): US President George W. Bush, the former governor of the nation’s top cattle state, has no plans to stop eating beef despite growing concern about mad cow disease, a White House spokesman said yesterday.

“He’s continued to eat beef,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters travelling with the President to his ranch. The US 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 US mad cow scare rose as Venezuela and Egypt joined some two dozen nations that have halted imports of US beef. Food company stocks and cattle prices tumbled as investors worried that US consumers could begin to eat less beef.

The US agriculture department quarantined a second herd of cattle in Washington as the $27 billion US cattle industry came to grips with its first case of the deadly, brain-wasting disease, first found in the US in a dairy cow in rural Washington.

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 US beef were understandable but that it is too soon to assess the economic impact on US farmers and ranchers.

He played down the impact of bans from abroad, calling them “standard measures” that US 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.”

US slur on Canada

The US agriculture department said it believes a dairy cow infected with mad cow disease was imported from Canada in 2001.

Ron DeHaven, the department’s chief veterinarian, told reporters the cow was one of 74 cattle imported into Idaho from Alberta, Canada, in August 2001. The cow was born in April 1997.

All 74 went to a dairy operation in Mattawa, Washington, DeHaven said. He said it was too early to speculate where the other 73 dairy cows went from there.

“We feel confident that we are going to be able to determine the whereabouts of most, if not all, of these animals within the next several days,” DeHaven said.

If true, the revelation is likely to deal another heavy blow to the Canadian cattle industry which is still trying to recover from a single case of mad cow disease discovered in Alberta in May this year.

A Canadian government official said it would press the US for more information about the dairy cow sent to Mattawa.

“We need to see some solid information and we’ll press them for information to support that ... so we can get on with an investigation on our side of the border,” the official said.