For Months, Agriculture Department Delayed Announcing Result of Mad Cow Test

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Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:01:02 -0700

For Months, Agriculture Department Delayed Announcing Result

of Mad Cow Test

 

 

 

 

The testing system has been designed to NOT detect Mad Cow Disease.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/national/26beef.html

 

 

For Months, Agriculture Department Delayed Announcing Result of Mad

Cow Test

 

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Published: June 26, 2005

 

Although the Agriculture Department confirmed Friday that a cow that

died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency

conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease.

The result was never publicly disclosed.

 

The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow

disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a

long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the

Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow.

 

Indeed, the lengthy delay occurred despite the intense national

interest in the disease and the fact that many countries have banned

shipments of beef from the United States because of what they consider

to be lax testing policies.

 

Until Friday, it was not public knowledge that an " experimental " test

had been performed last November by an Agriculture Department

laboratory on the brain of a cow suspected of having mad cow disease,

and that the test had come up positive.

 

For seven months, all that was known was that a test on the same cow

done at the same laboratory at roughly the same time had come up

negative. The negative result was obtained using a test that the

Agriculture Department refers to as its " gold standard. "

 

The explanation that the department gave late Friday, when the

positive test result came to light, was that there was no bad

intention or cover-up, and that the test in question was only

experimental.

 

" The laboratory folks just never mentioned it to anyone higher up, "

said Ed Loyd, an Agriculture Department spokesman. " They didn't know

if it was valid or not, so they didn't report it. "

 

On hearing that Friday night, Dr. Michael K. Hansen, a senior research

associate at Consumers Union and frequent department critic, reacted

skeptically.

 

" That seems hard to fathom, " he said. " If it's true, we have a serious

communication problem at the Department of Agriculture. How can we be

confident of anything they're saying? "

 

Mr. Loyd, reacting to a reporter's question about the Agriculture

Department's handling of the issue, said, " In hindsight, reporting it

would have been the thing to do. "

 

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns briefly mentioned the positive test

result at a news conference on Friday. The primary focus of the

conference was to announce that British scientists had confirmed the

United States' second case of the disease.

 

The sequence of events started in November, when an Agriculture

Department laboratory in Ames, Iowa, performed two tests on the animal

in question. After the " gold standard " test came up negative, the

agency announced that the animal had not had mad cow disease. But at

the same time, the same lab also conducted the experimental test, with

different results.

 

Then two weeks ago, for reasons that are unclear, Phyllis K. Fong, the

Agriculture Department's inspector general, arranged for further tests

on specimens of the same cow. A test known as the Western blot, which

is widely used in England and Japan but not in the United States, came

up positive.

 

Because this result conflicted with the " gold standard " result from

November, a specimen from the same animal was sent to a laboratory in

Weybridge, England, that is considered pre-eminent in its field.

Several tests were conducted there, and all of them came up positive;

it was the results of those tests that Mr. Johanns announced at the

news conference on Friday afternoon.

 

The nation's mad cow testing system is now infuriating both ranchers

and consumers. Consumer lobbyists say the flawed results show once

again that 15 years of testing has been dangerously inadequate. And

now the beef lobby, which has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with

the Agriculture Department, is complaining that the testing system is

dangerously unpredictable.

 

Jim McAdams, president of the 25,000-member National Cattlemen's Beef

Association, has complained that unexpected testing creates " great

anxiety within our industry, " and leads to " significant losses. "

 

Thirty-six countries have shut their doors to American beef, virtually

wiping out a $3 billion export market, which Australia happily moved into.

 

On Saturday, Taiwan reimposed a ban on American beef that it had

lifted just two months ago, Reuters reported.

 

The new case of mad cow appeared to be in a native-born animal, though

Mr. Johanns was vague about that. Testing also suggested that the

animal caught the disease from a new food source, since the strain was

different from that of the Washington State cow that tested positive

in 2003.

 

Mr. Johanns said that catching one positive in 388,000 recent tests

proved the system worked.

 

But critics said it did no such thing, because the system was designed

strictly for surveillance. One positive caught after a seven-month

delay was, at best, a stroke of luck, the critics said.

 

Other countries use food-safety standards: Japan tests every cow,

Europe tests about one in four.

 

The United States instead uses statistical models that it says will

let a few tests detect the infection even in one cow in a million. It

now tests one in 90; when the first mad cow case was found in 2003, it

was testing one in 1,700.

 

With its statistical logic under regular attack, the United States has

increased the number of tests to 388,000 in the past year, from 40 in

1990. But until recently, Mr. Johanns was discussing cutting back to

40,000 tests.

 

That system is " bizarre, illogical and woefully inadequate, " said John

Stauber, co-author of the book, " Mad Cow U.S.A., " which was first

published in 1997.

 

" The bottom line, " he said, " is that the U.S. government is afraid of

putting in real food-safety testing because it would certainly find

additional cases. "

 

Mr. Loyd of the Agriculture Department replied that surveillance

testing assumed a few animals would be positive, and that his

department had nearly doubled its own goal of testing 220,000 cases in

a year.

 

" There is no scientific basis, " he said, for doing what Japan and many

critics want: testing all animals or all those more than 20 months old.

 

But even a scientist who helped design the department's testing now

harbors doubts about it.

 

In an interview before the second case was found, Dr. Linda A.

Detwiler, who retired in 2002 as the chief of the mad cow testing

program and now teaches veterinary medicine at the University of

Maryland, said the department should be using the Western blot test it

was resisting.

 

" You need to put as many tools in your tool kit as possible, " she said.

 

Mr. Loyd said Secretary Johanns now agreed. The beef industry now

cites its consumer-protecting " firewalls. "

 

But it took many years to erect them: a ban on feeding ruminants to

cattle, a ban on using near-dead dairy cows as beef and a ban on using

the brains and spinal cords of older cattle in feed.

 

Other practices that many veterinarians dislike continue, such as

feeding poultry litter with spilled cattle meal in it back to cattle,

giving calves " milk replacer " made from cattle blood and letting cows

eat dried restaurant " plate waste. "

 

Dr. Detwiler was adamant that those practices should end, and that the

brains and spines of all cattle should be destroyed, not made into

feed even for pigs or chickens.

 

" That's how you keep infectivity out of the food chain, " she said. " If

a farmer makes a mistake and gives pig feed to cattle by mistake, the

feed is safe. "

 

The beef lobby has opposed many changes, and statements from the

industry and the lobby often echo each other. When Mr. Johanns held a

sort of pep rally for beef in Minnesota recently, no consumer groups

were on a panel that declared American beef " very, very safe, " but

lobbyists were.

 

The industry casts a long shadow over the department. Ann M. Veneman,

a former agriculture secretary, had as her spokeswoman Alisa Harrison,

who, in 1996, accused a doctors' group of being an animal rights group

opposed to eating meat. The doctors' group had endorsed the ban on

feeding cattle or sheep to cattle.

 

Mr. Johanns, a former Nebraska governor who grew up on a dairy farm,

inherited two officials of the cattlemen's group, Charles Lambert and

Dale Moore, as deputies. His under secretary for farm and foreign

agriculture services, J. B. Penn, worked at a consulting firm serving

the industry.

 

Last week, according to the Kyodo news service in Japan, a group of

Japanese lawmakers who visited Mr. Penn in Washington accused him of

" threatening " them with trade retaliation and saying that the United

States' patience was growing short and that they should simply accept

American beef.

 

Mr. Loyd denied that, saying the meeting was " cordial. "

 

Such connections to industry impede the department's duty to police

it, said Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat on the

House Appropriations Committee. (On Tuesday, the department announced

$140 million in grants to advertise American food overseas, including

$12 million to the U.S. Meat Export Federation.)

 

She wants a new, separate food safety agency, like the one Britain

created in 1999.

 

But the department's harshest critic has emerged from within - it is

Ms. Fong, the inspector general, who ordered the new round of tests.

 

Last spring, she issued a scathing analysis of the testing program,

saying, for example, that it could not do scientific sampling because

it was voluntary, tested too few healthy-looking cattle, and could not

assure that sick but walking cattle and cattle that died on farms were

tested.