Canada confirms mad-cow case

VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Canada has confirmed a new case of mad-cow disease, its 15th since 2003.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Monday that no part of the 7-year-old cow's carcass from British Columbia entered the human food or animal feed systems.

Canada banned the use of animal products in cattle feed in 1997 because the products were considered the source of mad-cow infections. But the agency says some cases predating the new rules will continue to surface.

Medically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, mad-cow disease causes spongy holes in the brain. In people, a rare but fatal form of the disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has been linked to eating infected tissue from cows.