Despite being tapped to help with foreign livestock diseases in the past, MSU faculty members and researchers said it's too early to know if they will be called to help out their Canadian neighbors after mad cow disease was discovered Tuesday.

The U.S. government banned importation of meat and livestock from Alberta, Canada, this week after an 8-year-old deceased cow was found to carry the disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. It was the second case of the disease in North America since 1993.

In 2001, Dan Grooms and other faculty members from the College of Veterinary Medicine traveled to England to work with foot and mouth disease, a viral infection which causes fever and the formation of blisters on animals such as cows and pigs.

In England, Grooms and his colleagues surveyed cattle herds for evidence of the disease.

"There were veterinarians from all over the world," he said. "We helped the government control and eradicate the disease."

Grooms, an assistant professor for large-animal clinical sciences, said there is a risk involved with researching these types of diseases in countries not affected, such as the United States.

"It's difficult to work with (diseases) because we don't want to have it here," he said.

Mad cow disease struck herds in Britain in 1986, killing more than 2 million cows.

It also was linked to 130 human cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form causing paralysis and death. Scientists believe humans get it by eating meat from infected cattle.

The United States, which imported nearly 1 billion pounds of Canadian beef and 1 million head of cattle last year, is banning all Canadian beef and cattle. Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand also imposed a ban.

At MSU, Grooms has been conducting research to prevent infectious diseases in cattle for more than a decade.

Specifically, he has specialized in bovine viral diarrhea virus, or BVDV, which is common in United States cattle. The virus can cause reproductive failure, pneumonia and diarrhea in cattle.

"I work with viral and bacterial (diseases) that may cause them to get sick or not perform well," he said.

Grooms works with cattle from MSU and across the state to develop diagnostic, vaccination and biosecurity prevention strategies.

"It's like the flu virus," he said. "The sooner we can detect these animals, the sooner we can do (treatment)."

His experiments have looked at how a vaccine protects the cattles' immune systems by giving a vaccinated herd a dose of the virus and analyzing how it works. All experiments are in a controlled setting at MSU, Grooms said.

The virus also has been tested on feedlot herds, or cattle raised to be slaughtered, where the virus was introduced into the environment and research was taken as to how fast the cows grew, the number of sick cows and their productiveness. The infected herd was compared to a noninfected herd, Grooms said.

Although no mad cow disease research is being conducted on campus, cows are routinely screened, Grooms said.

"We've never detected it," he said. "All precautions have been taken throughout the United States.

"But that doesn't mean we don't still look for it."

The university does have a policy requiring visitors from countries with mad cow disease and foot and mouth disease to wait two weeks before visiting the farms, said Bob Kreft, herd manager for MSU's Dairy Cattle Teaching and Research Center.

Extending the policy to include Canadian visitors might be a possibility, he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.