WASHINGTON, (Nov. 18, 2004) — U.S. Department of Agriculture officials still can’t confirm or deny if a second case of mad cow disease may have turned up in the United States, but insist that meat from the suspect animal has not entered the food chain.

USDA officials refused to say where the suspected animal was found. It’s going to take another four to seven days before bovine spongiform encephalopathy — aka mad cow disease — can be confirmed, they say.

Suspicions about another case of the disease came because of an inconclusive test result, officials said. “The inconclusive result does not mean we have found another case of BSE in this country,” Andrea Morgan, associate deputy administrator of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told the Associated Press.

She said initial efforts had begun to trace back the animal from where it was tested to the farm from which it originated.

Just before the start of the July Fourth weekend, the department had announced two other possible cases of the brain-wasting illness in the United States — but then said follow-up testing had proved negative.

The suspect cow comes 11 months after the U.S.’s first-ever mad cow case — a dairy cow originating in Alberta, which was found in Washington. That incident iced any new talks of lifting a ban on live Canadian cattle. That ban has been in place since May last year, when an Alberta cow was confirmed to be carrying the disease. The news instantly closed the U.S. border to beef exports and brought the Canadian beef industry to a standstill.

Last week, American ambassador to Canada said he thinks there’s “light and the end of the tunnel” in ending the 18-month ban, adding that while he can’t pin down an exact date, he’s hopeful the U.S. may be able to open its border “in a fairly short period of time.”

— with files from Associated Press