Mad Cow Case May Bring More Meat Testing

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/26/national/26DETE.html?th

 

December 26, 2003Mad Cow Case May Bring More Meat TestingBy DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

 

As the American beef industry struggles with its first case of mad cow disease,

the Department of Agriculture is debating whether to do far more screening of

meat and change the way meat from suspect animals is used, department officials

say.

 

The officials declined to say exactly what they would recommend, but

acknowledged that European and Japanese regulators screened millions of animals

using tests that take only three hours, fast enough to stop diseased carcasses

from being cut up for food.

 

United States inspectors have tested fewer than 30,000 of the roughly 300

million animals slaughtered in the last nine years, and they get results days or

weeks later.

 

But the American system was never intended to keep sick animals from reaching

the public's refrigerators, said Dr. Ron DeHaven, the Agriculture Department's

chief veterinarian.

 

It is " a surveillance system, not a food safety test, " Dr. DeHaven said in an

interview on Wednesday.

 

Statistically, it is meant to ensure finding the disease only if it exists in

one in a million animals, and only after slaughter.

 

A beef industry spokesman said Wednesday that cattlemen would endorse adopting

more rapid tests.

 

Western European countries generally test all cattle over two years old, all

sick cattle and a small percentage of apparently healthy ones. Last year, they

tested 10 million cows. Japan tests all the cows it slaughters each year, 1.2

million.

 

Dr. DeHaven said Japan tested too much, " like a doctor testing every patient who

comes through the door for prostate cancer. "

 

Yesterday the Agriculture Department said that it had received confirmation of

its own tests from the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Waybridge, England,

that a Holstein cow that was slaughtered on Dec. 9 had the degenerative brain

ailment bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. More testing is

planned.

 

An official close to the investigation said the cow came from Sunny Dene Ranch

in Mabton, Wash., which has about 4,000 dairy cows.

 

American beef is still " extremely safe, " said Dr. Daniel L. Engeljohn, a policy

analysis official in the Food Safety and Inspection Service in the Agriculture

Department, but the discovery of the disease " will spur the U.S. to look at the

preventive measures it's had in place for the last decade. "

 

Critics of the industry called the current testing inadequate and said they had

been warning for years that mad cow disease was in American cattle but

undetected because too few animals were tested.

 

They accused the Department of Agriculture of failing to be a vigilant guardian

over the nation's dinner table and said it did not fulfill the common claim that

its inspectors test all obviously sick cows.

 

How many " downers " — cows too sick to walk — are slaughtered each year is in

dispute. The beef industry says the number is only about 60,000 among older

animals, while animal rights advocates cite figures based on European herds that

suggest the number is nearly 700,000.

 

The Agriculture Department said its best guess was from a 1999 beef industry

survey that estimated there were 195,000 downers on ranches, feedlots and

slaughterhouses that year.

 

In any case, only 20,526 animals were tested last year; through the 1990's, only

a few hundred were tested annually.

 

Which downers might have mad cow disease is also in dispute.

 

Dr. DeHaven said inspectors tested animals that were twitching, aggressive,

nervous, stumbling or showing other signs of brain damage; they also test some

dead or unconscious animals, which are not supposed to be sold for food.

 

The beef industry argues that many animals that are falling down are merely

lame. Its critics claim that some downed animals are passed by inspectors

because they are just conscious enough to respond to a kick.

 

Tests in Japan have found the brain-wasting disease in animals that appear

healthy.

 

Although neither Dr. DeHaven nor Dr. Engeljohn would say exactly what changes

were contemplated, some food safety experts want changes like those made in

Britain, including a ban on selling brains or vertebrae or meat attached to

them, mandatory testing of all cattle over 30 months old, and a national

ear-tagging system tracking each animal from birth to slaughter. Others want to

outlaw giving herbivores any animal-based feed.

 

In some European countries, diseased carcasses are boiled down, dried into

powder and then incinerated.

 

Dr. Engeljohn said the department might take measures like those Canada adopted

after it found a mad cow case in May.

 

But other than slaughtering and testing the herds in Alberta that the animal

came from, Canada did not take aggressive measures compared with those used in

Europe and Japan.

 

Canada has tested only about 10,000 animals in the last decade, and has had a

serious backlog of cases. Its one diseased cow was slaughtered in January and

probably made into pet food. It was marked for testing because it was thin;

pneumonia, not brain disease, was suspected. It was not tested until May.

 

" Compared to our neighbor to the north, we did pretty well, " said Dr. John Maas,

a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of California at Davis.

 

The Washington cow was tested within two weeks, but by then its muscle meat had

become food for humans and its spinal cord was sent to a plant that makes food

for pets, pigs and poultry. Its brain went to Ames, Iowa, and then to Britain

for more testing.

 

Dr. DeHaven said the department's testing was " not to provide public safety, "

but to give officials 95 percent certainty that they would eventually detect the

disease if it appeared in one animal in a million. There are about 100 million

cattle in the United States.

 

The department has repeatedly called its test, an immunohistochemistry assay,

" the gold standard. "

 

But Michael Hansen, a Consumers Union researcher, said the test failed to detect

mad cow disease in a 2-year-old bull in Japan this year, while a Western blot

test, like those used in Europe, did.

 

Expanding testing would be " hugely expensive, " Dr. DeHaven said. He estimated

that it would cost $25 to $50 per animal tested, plus any costs of storing the

meat until results were ready. Test makers say that works out to only pennies

per pound.

 

The current system is " grossly inadequate, " said Gene Bauston, the president of

Farm Sanctuary, a farm-animal rights group in upstate New York. Mr. Bauston said

he believed the lone cow found so far was " the tip of the iceberg. "

 

" I think we've had the problem for a decade and it hasn't been detected till

now, " he said.

 

Farm Sanctuary obtained U.S.D.A. slaughterhouse records under the Freedom of

Information Act, he said, and found that downers with hepatitis, lymphoma,

gangrene and other ills had been passed by inspectors.

 

A spokesman for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association defended the current

testing but said it would back the introduction of rapid tests.

 

" In Europe, they needed to test more animals because they had the disease, " said

Dr. Gary Weber, the association's vice president for regulatory affairs.

 

American testing looks only at downers, and Dr. DeHaven said its goal was to

test " as many animals as possible " with signs of brain damage.

 

But inspectors and slaughterhouse workers have said that they see near-dead

animals dragged in by chains or forklifts, and inspectors complain that they are

pressured to approve them.

 

Dr. Lester Friedlander, an Agriculture Department veterinarian from 1985 to

1995, said he worked in a huge Pennsylvania plant that specialized in turning

old dairy cows into hamburger. It slaughtered 2,000 a day, including 30 to 35

downers, and could have as many as 1,200 cows waiting for him to see when it

opened at 5:30 a.m.

 

Ideally, Dr. Friedlander could pick animals at random and watch them walk,

looking for stumbling, facial paralysis, drooping ears and other signs of nerve

damage, which can also be caused by rabies or cancer. Instead, he said,

department rules let them be walked by in groups of six.

 

" I'm lucky if I see the second or third, " he said. " The sixth? Forget about it. "

 

He said that he rejected 25 to 30 cows a day worth about $500 each, and that

when he stopped the production line, managers complained that he was costing

them $5,000 a minute. Ultimately, he said, they complained to Washington, and he

was transferred. He quit and has since sued the department over his transfer; it

is fighting his suit.

 

The world's most popular tests for prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad

cow, are made by the Prionics AG of Schlieren, Switzerland. Its newest, a

luminescence immunoassay, lets one worker screen 200 samples in three hours.

 

Tests use a small scoop of brain. Scientists are still seeking one for live

cows. There is one for scrapies, a prion disease of sheep, Dr. Maas said. It

requires cutting a piece of nerve from an inner eyelid.

 

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

 

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