FDA Wrestles with Whether to Ban Chicken Dung And Other Waste from Cattle Feed

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Hot De. MedicalConspiracies@googlegrobate Over Chicken Dung; FDA Wrestles with

Whether to Ban It And Other Waste from Cattle Feed

 

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

 

http://www.mycattle.com/news/dsp_topstories_article.cfm?storyid=13563

by CHRIS McGANN P-I reporter

 

 

A mountain of chicken dung - among other things - is preventing the Food and

Drug Administration from banning blood, chicken waste and restaurant leftovers

from cattle feed, a top administration official said yesterday.

 

In the scramble to keep mad cow disease from spreading after a Holstein from

Yakima County was diagnosed with the brain-wasting illness, the FDA recommended

in January what seemed like simple and sensible restrictions on cattle feed.

 

Tainted feed from a Canadian mill is believed to have infected the Yakima County

Holstein cow that set off the U.S. mad cow crisis in December.

 

But just days after the agency recommended bans on the widespread practice of

adding such things as blood, chicken excrement and restaurant table scraps to

feed, it was deluged with troubling feedback, according to Stephen Sundlof, the

director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

 

Three months later, the agency is still struggling to reconcile the need to

strengthen safeguards against bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow

disease, and the concerns that the new rules could generate serious unintended

consequences.

 

But with major export markets still refusing to buy U.S. beef, calls to enact

the new rules are getting louder. On Monday, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.,

Washington cattlemen and the director of the state's Department of Agriculture

urged the FDA officials to quit " dragging their feet. "

 

In an interview yesterday, Sundlof provided no likely deadline for the new bans,

only assurances that progress was being made.

 

But Sundlof did offer some explanations for the delays.

 

He said, for example, that the proposed ban on adding chicken litter (fecal

matter, dead birds, feathers and spilled feed) generated huge concern from

chicken producers.

 

Sundlof said adding chicken litter to cattle feed is one of the primary methods

of waste disposal for the chicken growers, especially in the Southeast.

 

" From an environmental standpoint, what are people going to do with the poultry

litter? " he asked. " One of the benefits of doing this was that it was an

environmentally sound way of recycling the material. "

 

If the point is to keep the chicken waste away from cattle, then alternative

methods of disposing it such as spreading it in pastures as fertilizer are

problematic because the cattle can still come in contact with it. Also, there

are limits on how much nitrogen and phosphorous the pastures can handle. Those

chemicals are concentrated in the chicken waste.

 

Sundlof added: " As disgusting as this may sound, poultry litter is really

utilizable in cattle feed because it contains high nitrogen content that cattle

can convert back into protein. "

 

Cattle are fed urea, a chemical found in urine and also synthetically produced,

because the ruminants can convert it to high- quality protein. Chicken litter is

high in those kinds of nitrogenous compounds and that's why it's used in cattle

feed, he said.

 

The ban on adding cattle blood to cattle feed is problematic, Sundlof said,

because the agency is looking at some exceptions for certain cattle blood

products, specifically fetal calf serum.

 

The blood from unborn calves is used in the production of cattle vaccines and

products for use by humans.

 

" The question is, `How risky would fetal calf serum be?' We think that that it's

not very risky because it's from cattle that are not even born yet so they

haven't reached the age when they could be infected, " Sundlof said.

 

" We are trying to sort out the uses that would be a greater risk if they weren't

around. "

 

As for the restaurant scraps: " Plate waste doesn't seem to have many issues

related to it, " he said.

 

The FDA plans on issuing new rules about cattle feed all at once, so that ban

will likely be tabled until issues in other areas are resolved.

 

Scientists believe people who eat beef from cows infected with mad cow disease

can contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a fatal brain-wasting disease that has

killed about 150 people worldwide.

 

P-I reporter Chris McGann can be reached at 206-448-8169 or

chrismcgann

 

© 2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. via ProQuest Information and Learning

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