The Cow Jumped Over the U.S.D.A. - NYT 1/2/04

[Guest guest]

New York Times January 2, 2004

 

The Cow Jumped Over the U.S.D.A.

 

By ERIC SCHLOSSER

Op-Ed Contributor

 

Alisa Harrison has worked tirelessly the last two weeks to spread the message

that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, is not a risk to

American consumers. As spokeswoman for Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman,

Ms. Harrison has helped guide news coverage of the mad cow crisis, issuing

statements, managing press conferences and reassuring the world that American

beef is safe.

 

For her, it's a familiar message. Before joining the department, Ms. Harrison

was director of public relations for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association,

the beef industry's largest trade group, where she battled government food

safety efforts, criticized Oprah Winfrey for raising health questions about

American hamburgers, and sent out press releases with titles like "Mad Cow

Disease Not a Problem in the U.S."

 

Ms. Harrison may well be a decent and sincere person who feels she has the

public's best interest at heart. Nonetheless, her effortless transition from

the cattlemen's lobby to the Agriculture Department is a fine symbol of all

that is wrong with America's food safety system. Right now you'd have a hard

time finding a federal agency more completely dominated by the industry it was

created to regulate. Dale Moore, Ms. Veneman's chief of staff, was previously

the chief lobbyist for the cattlemen's association. Other veterans of that

group have high-ranking jobs at the department, as do former meat-packing

executives and a former president of the National Pork Producers Council.

 

The Agriculture Department has a dual, often contradictory mandate: to promote

the sale of meat on behalf of American producers and to guarantee that American

meat is safe on behalf of consumers. For too long the emphasis has been on

commerce, at the expense of safety. The safeguards against mad cow that Ms.

Veneman announced on Tuesday - including the elimination of "downer cattle"

(cows that cannot walk) from the food chain, the removal of high-risk material

like spinal cords from meat processing, the promise to introduce a system to

trace cattle back to the ranch - have long been demanded by consumer groups.

Their belated introduction seems to have been largely motivated by the desire

to have foreign countries lift restrictions on American beef imports.

 

Worse, on Wednesday Ms. Veneman ruled out the the most important step to

protect Americans from mad cow disease: a large-scale program to test the

nation's cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

 

The beef industry has fought for nearly two decades against government testing

for any dangerous pathogens, and it isn't hard to guess why: when there is no

true grasp of how far and wide a food-borne pathogen has spread, there's no

obligation to bear the cost of dealing with it.

 

The United States Department of Agriculture is by no means the first such body

to be captured by industry groups. In Europe and Japan the spread of disease

was facilitated by the repeated failure of government ministries to act on

behalf of consumers.

 

In Britain, where mad cow disease was discovered, the ministry of agriculture

misled the public about the risks of the disease from the very beginning. In

December 1986, the first government memo on the new pathogen warned that it

might have "severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for

humans" and thus all news of it was to be kept "confidential." Ten years later,

when Britons began to fall sick with a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob

syndrome, thought to be the human form of mad cow, Agriculture Minister Douglas

Hogg assured them that "British beef is wholly safe." It was something of a

shock, three months later, when the health minister, Stephen Dorrell, told

Parliament that mad cow disease might indeed be able to cross the species

barrier and sicken human beings.

 

In the wake of that scandal, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Japan banned

imports of British beef - yet they denied for years there was any risk of mad

cow disease among their own cattle. Those denials proved false, once widespread

testing for the disease was introduced. An investigation by the French Senate

in 2001 found that the Agriculture Ministry minimized the threat of mad cow and

"constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary

measures" that "might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the

agri-foodstuffs industry." In Tokyo, a similar mad cow investigation in 2002

accused the Japanese Agriculture Ministry of "serious maladministration" and

concluded that it had "always considered the immediate interests of producers

in its policy judgments."

 

Instead of learning from the mistakes of other countries, America now seems to

be repeating them. In the past week much has been made of the "firewall" now

protecting American cattle from infection with mad cow disease - the ban on

feeding rendered cattle meat or beef byproducts to cattle that was imposed by

the Food and Drug Administration in 1997. That ban has been cited again and

again by Agriculture Department and industry spokesmen as some sort of

guarantee that mad cow has not taken hold in the United States. Unfortunately,

this firewall may have gaps big enough to let a herd of steer wander through

it.

 

First, the current ban still allows the feeding of cattle blood to young calves

- a practice that Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his

work on the proteins that cause mad cow disease, calls "a really stupid idea."

More important, the ban on feed has hardly been enforced. A 2001 study by the

Government Accounting Office found that one-fifth of American feed and

rendering companies that handle prohibited material had no systems in place to

prevent the contamination of cattle feed. According to the report, more than a

quarter of feed manufacturers in Colorado, one of the top beef-producing

states, were not even aware of the F.D.A. measures to prevent mad cow disease,

four years after their introduction.

 

A follow-up study by the accounting office in 2002 said that the F.D.A.'s

"inspection database is so severely flawed" that "it should not be used to

assess compliance" with the feed ban. Indeed, 14 years after Britain announced

its ban on feeding cattle proteins to cattle, the Food and Drug Administration

still did not have a complete listing of the American companies rendering

cattle and manufacturing cattle feed.

 

The Washington State Holstein at the center of the current mad cow crisis may

have been born in Canada, but even that possibility offers little assurance

about the state of mad cow disease in the United States. Last year 1.7 million

live cattle were imported from Canada - and almost a million more came from

Mexico, a country whose agricultural ministry has been even slower than its

American counterpart to impose strict safeguards against mad cow disease.

 

Last year the Agriculture Department tested only 20,000 cattle for bovine

spongiform encephalopathy, out of the roughly 35 million slaughtered. Belgium,

with a cattle population a small fraction of ours, tested about 20 times that

number for the disease. Japan tests every cow and steer that people are going

to eat.

 

Instead of testing American cattle, the government has heavily relied on work

by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to determine how much of a threat mad

cow disease poses to the United States. For the past week the Agriculture

Department has emphasized the reassuring findings of these Harvard studies, but

a closer examination of them is not comforting. Although thorough and well

intended, they are based on computer models of how mad cow disease might

spread. Their accuracy is dependent on their underlying assumptions. "Our model

is not amenable to formal validation," says the Harvard group in its main

report, "because there are no controlled experiments in which the introduction

and consequences of B.S.E. introduction to a country has been monitored and

measured."

 

 

Unfortunately, "formal validation" is exactly what we need. And the only way to

get it is to begin widespread testing of American cattle for mad cow disease -

with particular focus on dairy cattle, the animals at highest risk for the

disease and whose meat provides most of the nation's fast food hamburgers.

 

In addition, we need to give the federal government mandatory recall powers, so

that any contaminated or suspect meat can be swiftly removed from the market.

As of now all meat recalls are voluntary and remarkably ineffective at getting

bad meat off supermarket shelves. And most of all, we need to create an

independent food safety agency whose sole responsibility is to protect the

public health. Let the Agriculture Department continue to promote American meat

worldwide - but empower a new agency to ensure that meat is safe to eat.

 

Yes, the threat to human health posed by mad cow remains uncertain. But testing

American cattle for dangerous pathogens will increase the cost of beef by just

pennies per pound. Failing to do so could impose a far higher price, both in

dollars and in human suffering.

 

Eric Schlosser is author of "Fast Food Nation" and "Reefer Madness."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/02/opinion/02SCHL.html?ex=1074085577&ei=1&en=187

e565d71ff9a1a