[lbo-talk] Schlosser: US doesn't test hardly any cows

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Jan 2 00:36:41 PST 2004


[That's how we know none of them have it!]

The New York Times January 2, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

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

By ERIC SCHLOSSER

A lisa 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."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company



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