Mad cow/Faulty measures at the USDA

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http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/4891851.html

 

Editorial: Mad cow/Faulty measures at the USDA

July 24, 2004 ED0724

 

Last December, with the nation in a minor panic over

its first case of mad cow disease, U.S. Agriculture

Secretary Ann Veneman announced an ambitious set of

precautions to protect the nation's beef supply. But

this month a sequence of internal reports and agency

statements has revealed gaping holes and egregious

delays in that program. Consumers should take note and

Congress should demand a thorough accounting before it

approves next year's budget for the U.S. Department of

Agriculture (USDA).

 

One pillar of Veneman's new safety regime was a plan

to increase the number of cattle tested before

slaughter for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

But the USDA's own inspector general, in a report

released this month, said the new testing program is

seriously flawed and will result in " questionable

estimates " of the prevalence of mad cow disease. In a

remarkable favor to the livestock industry, Veneman

decided to make the tests voluntary. Inspector General

Phyllis Fong says that would subvert the program's

accuracy because voluntary testing cannot yield

statistically accurate samples of cattle and,

presumably, because farmers might pick and choose

which animals are tested. Fong also found blunders and

omissions in USDA's testing of two cows found at

slaughter to have signs of brain disease.

 

Veneman says testing animals at the slaughterhouse is

merely a last line of defense because the United

States already blocks the initial transmission

mechanism of BSE, feeding protein from dead animals

back to cows. But there are serious gaps in the

seven-year-old feed ban -- it allows the feeding of

poultry byproducts to cows and the feeding of

mammalian blood to young cattle. Officials at the Food

and Drug Administration said in January that they

planned to close those loopholes, but then this month

dropped those plans. " They let five months pass

without action, and now they're back to where they

were in 2002, " says Carol Tucker Foreman, director of

food safety at the Consumer Federation of America.

 

These omissions tend to reinforce what might otherwise

seem like conspiratorial thinking by food-safety

advocates, who note that at least two of Veneman's top

aides at the USDA came to government service from the

National Cattlemen's Beef Association, an industry

trade group.

 

In all likelihood, the risk to consumers remains

small. Most beef cattle are fed on grass, hay and corn

-- not the feed supplements that can transmit BSE --

and most supermarket beef products come from young

animals thought to be safe. Still, British officials

thought their risk was small even as the disease was

spreading more than a decade ago.

 

The odds might be small, but the stakes are enormous:

transmission of a disease that is invariably fatal and

the loss of billions of dollars in revenues to

American agriculture. The USDA can do better, and

Congress should make sure it does.