New Study Reveals Gaping Holes in Mad Cow ‘Firewall’

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http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0722-07.htm

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JULY 22, 2004

9:30 AM

CONTACT: Center for Progressive Regulation

Matthew Freeman 301-762-8980

 

New Study Reveals Gaping Holes in Mad Cow ‘Firewall’

 

 

WASHINGTON - July 22 - Thomas O. McGarity, a food

safety expert and President of the Center for

Progressive Regulation, today derided the Bush

Administration’s response to the threat of Mad Cow

disease in the U.S. beef supply, concluding that the

series of regulatory measures taken to date “are

riddled with sham safeguards and faux firewalls that

fail to protect public health.” In particular,

McGarity described USDA Secretary Ann Veneman’s recent

assertion that USDA regulations for identifying and

banning highly infective “specified risk materials”

(SRMs) “ensures that the highest-risk materials are

not entering the food chain” as based “more on fiction

than fact.” McGarity’s assessment came upon the

release of CPR’s 160-page analysis of the

Administration’s Mad Cow regulatory regime, “Flimsy

Firewalls: The Continuing Triumph of Efficiency over

Safety in Regulating Mad Cow Disease Risks,” written

by McGarity with fellow CPR Member Scholar Frank

Ackerman.

 

McGarity writes in the report: “Unfortunately, none of

the frequently alluded to ‘firewalls’ provide the

precautionary protections that are implied in the

‘firewall’ metaphor and demanded by the meat safety

laws. If they are firewalls at all, they are flimsy

firewalls, easily breached, and much in need of repair

or replacement.”

 

A key finding of McGarity’s research is that because

of a significant loophole in the government’s

regulations concerning handling of especially risky

SRMs from slaughtered cattle – brains, ganglia, and

other body parts that can spread Mad Cow disease –

several troubling practices are now both legal and

widespread in the beef slaughter and processing

industry. The loophole permits industry to elect not

to implement the rigorous standards for specific

controls on these risky materials at specific points

in processing, simply by asserting – as almost all

establishments apparently have – that Mad Cow disease

is unlikely to be a problem in their facility. After

reaching that conclusion on their own, and without

government approval, industry is then allowed to

follow far less rigorous industry-drafted Standard

Operation Procedures, sometimes called “prerequisite”

programs, to keep brain, spinal cord and the like out

of edible meat. They are not required under this

approach to actually check for Mad Cow disease. The

failings of this system are potentially disastrous,

and include:

 

§ Self-regulation. Slaughter and processing

establishments are permitted to devise their own plans

for identifying and preventing the spread of risky

materials, without any requirement for government

approval; as heads are lopped off, carcasses are split

down the spine with power saws, meat is sliced from

bone, and trimmed bones are sent through high pressure

advanced meat recovery devices to remove the last

tidbits of usable material.

 

§ Informal measures. Because the establishments are

permitted to opt out of the more thorough regulations,

their plans are far less formal and far less thorough

than a reading of the government’s regulations or

statements to the public would suggest. Establishments

are not required to check for Mad Cow or even perform

simple tests for brain and other risky nervous system

tissues. They are required to have a written plan, but

they are not required to follow it. Instead, in the

event that an establishment fails to keep risky

materials out of meat, the regulations only call for

it to reassess its procedures.

 

§ Meaningless Sanctions for Failure. Establishments

found to have allowed risky materials in their beef

because of failures in the design or implementation of

their self-devised control plans are not even

penalized. They are simply directed to reevaluate

their plans and try to correct the problem. According

to one expert interviewed by McGarity for the report,

as a practical matter, “It is a lot harder [for a

plant] to get closed under a Prerequisite program.”

 

“The sad truth is that the Administration’s response

to the Mad Cow discovery of last December is so

inadequate, so shaped by a desire to prop up industry

sales, that consumers are left with hollow promises of

protection,” McGarity said. “From the first day of the

Mad Cow scare, USDA has behaved like a cheerleader for

the industry, right up to the point that the secretary

of agriculture promised to eat beef for the holidays.

The public would have been better served if USDA had

been primarily concerned more about public health, and

less about industry profit.”

 

The report charges that the government’s regulations

have been designed more to protect the meat industry

from economic loss than to protect the health of the

American public from mad cow disease. As a result, it

says, American consumers, who in 2001 ate an average

of 63 pounds of beef per person, are at greater risk

of consuming beef from mad cows and contracting a

debilitating disease called Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease

(CJD), a slowly degenerative affliction of the central

nervous system. The disease is characterized by the

rapid degeneration of the brain, which eventually

takes on a spongy quality, as patients are

progressively robbed of their brain functions. The

disease is always fatal.

 

Other findings of the report:

 

§ USDA’s initial response to the discovery of a mad

cow in Washington State was reasonably successful in

bringing about a recall of potentially contaminated

meat and investigating the source of the infected

animal. But after these initial steps, the

Administration veered away from food safety to focus

on an intense public relations campaign designed to

put the public’s mind at ease and ensure the continued

economic well-being of the beef industry.

 

§ In its regulating and its public relations, the

government relies heavily on a statistical analysis by

the industry-friendly Harvard Center for Risk Analysis

of the likelihood of a Mad Cow outbreak in the United

States. CPR economist Frank Ackerman evaluated the

study, and concluded it “could have seriously

understated the risks of a BSE [Mad Cow] outbreak in

the United States.” Worse, he concluded, the report

all but ignored “a scenario in which there was a 25

percent probability of more than a million cases of

BSE occurring in the United States over a 20-year

period,” which Ackerman called “a startling finding.”

 

§ On April 19, 2004, the Administration undercut its

own restriction on imports of beef from countries that

had experienced Mad Cow outbreaks when USDA quietly

informed import brokers that it would immediately lift

the ban on imports of all edible beef products from

Canadian cattle under 30 months, including processed

meat that contained bone and other byproducts. (A

court quickly issued a preliminary injunction.) Even

worse, USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection

Service had already covertly allowed U.S. meatpackers

to import 33 million pounds of beef from Canada

between September 2003 and May 2004 despite Secretary

Veneman’s August 2003 announcement that she was

extending a ban on such meat. USDA has refused to

disclose which processors received exemptions for

Canadian imports.

 

§ FDA’s restrictions on feeding protein from mammals

to cattle has gaping loopholes, permitting blood and

blood byproducts, gelatin, plate waste (from

restaurants), and more. In addition, the regulations

permit cattle protein to be fed to pigs and chickens,

which can in turn be rendered into cattle feed. Litter

from poultry farms may be fed to cattle, even though

it could easily contain significant amounts of uneaten

poultry feed made from protein derived from cattle. In

January, USDA promised to close these loopholes, but

on July 9, 2004, instead of offering an interim rule

that would take immediate effect, it issued a mere

notice of an intention to regulate – delaying a rule

for months, if not years.

 

§ The safest way to make sure no infected cattle are

slaughtered for beef is to test every slaughtered cow

or every cow above a certain age. Japan and other

countries do exactly that. France, for example, tests

more cows in one week than the United States tested in

the decade prior to 2004. But USDA’s “see no evil”

testing program is entirely voluntary and limited to a

narrow sample of the U.S. cattle population.

 

§ When one company, Creekstone Farms, announced its

intention to test every single cow it slaughtered,

USDA flatly forbade it, denying consumers the right to

choose to eat beef from cattle known to have tested

negative for Mad Cow and protecting the big five

meatpacking companies from the prospect of having to

test all of their cattle to meet competition.

 

§ The new rules require that all downer (unable to

walk) cattle be slaughtered and removed from the food

supply, a reasonable and overdue precaution, if it is

in fact enforced. But not all Mad Cow-infected cattle

are unable to walk. And the rule leaves open the

question of what the slaughterhouses will do with the

meat from these cattle. They are allowed, for example,

to sell the slaughtered downer cattle to renderers for

processing into feed for animals that may in turn be

fed back to cattle, permitting Mad Cow disease to

spread.

 

§ The USDA’s regulations for keeping “specified risk

materials” – cattle brain, skull, eyes, and ganglia –

out of the human food supply define that term much

more narrowly than most other countries do, and they

rely on industry to police itself. An example of the

overly narrow definition: cattle under 30 months are

exempted from screening for Mad Cow, for no good

scientific reason. Young cattle can carry the Mad Cow

protein, a fact the government regulations ignore.

 

§ Two of the rules USDA imposed in January were

apparently intended solely for their public relations

value. Both the ban on air injection stunning and the

ban on mechanically separated meat imposed no burden

whatsoever on the cattle industry and provide little

if any additional protection for consumers, because

neither technology had been used in the United States

since soon after the outbreak of mad cow disease in

England in 1996.

 

Professor McGarity holds the W. James Kronzer Chair at

the University of Texas School of Law. He is the

President of the Center for Progressive Regulation.

Frank Ackerman, a Member Scholar of the Center for

Progressive Regulation, is an environmental economist

and Director of the Research and Policy Program of the

Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts

University. He has written widely on cost-benefit

analysis, on the economics of waste and energy, and on

alternative approaches to economic theory.

 

The complete 160-page report and a separate executive

summary are available in PDF form at

http://www.progressiveregulation.org/issue_food_saftey.cfm

 

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