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