WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture can prohibit meatpacking companies from testing their cattle for mad cow disease, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel has ruled. The ruling was made in response to a March 2006 lawsuit filed by Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, which had hoped to test all of its cattle for the brain-wasting disease in order to assure buyers in export markets including South Korea and Japan that its meats were safe. The USDA currently allows mad cow testing kits to be sold only to approved laboratories, and has argued that companies such as Creekstone should not be allowed to use the tests for marketing purposes. The court agreed, based on a 1913 law that allows the agency to control products for the “prevention, diagnosis, management or care of diseases of animals.”

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