When the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) first detected Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad Cow disease, in a cow in Northern Alberta in May 2003, the United States banned the importation of Canadian cattle. Severe economic repercussions resulted in both the U.S. and Canada. The halt on trade affected employment, cattle supplies and beef prices. The Canadian beef industry lost eight million dollars a day in sales, as Japan and twenty other nations joined the U.S. in banning Canadian beef.[i] In 2005, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) shifted its policy to allow the importation of cattle younger than thirty months of age from Canada and again in 2007 to allow the importation of Canadian cattle older than thirty months of age.[ii] The fact that there have been sixteen official cases of Mad Cow disease in Canada makes U.S. regulations problematic. The U.S. does not import cattle or beef products from the United Kingdom (184,594 cases of BSE) or Austria (six cases) or Finland (one case) or any other nations where cattle have been infected with BSE.[iii] However, the USDA makes special exceptions for its close trading partner Canada. With the opening of the border, Canadian beef exports to the United States totaled over one billion dollars in 2008.[iv] Market considerations have trumped human and animal health protections in the shaping of public policy in America. In looking at the history of the government's BSE regulations and current public policy, this article examines the ways in which the USDA's policies are posing undue risks to the health of cattle and consumers in the United States.
Along with scrapie (affecting sheep), variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (afflicting humans) and chronic wasting disease (plaguing elk and deer), BSE is in a category of progressively degenerative neurological diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). TSEs are transmitted through ingestion of nervous system tissue that contains the infectious agent, an abnormal version of a proteinacious particle that is naturally produced in the body, also known as a prion. Scientists theorize that BSE originated in the United Kingdom through livestock feeding practices. By rendering slaughterhouse waste into meat-and-bone meal and then including the high-protein ingredient in livestock feed, cattle ingested scrapie-infected feed. Once transmitted to cattle, the always fatal, brain-wasting disease spread through cattle herds in the UK when cattle byproducts containing infected offal were rendered, processed and fed to other cattle.[v] In 1996, epidemiologists in the UK realized that consumption of contaminated beef products by people caused a human form of Mad Cow disease. Called a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy has infected over 160 people in the United Kingdom to date, as well as people in other nations of Europe and North America, where there have been many suspected but unconfirmed cases.[vi] According to the OIE (World Organization for Animal Health), 190,493 cases of BSE have been confirmed in twenty-one nations of Europe, Japan, Israel, the United States and Canada as of June 2009.[vii]
In response to the worldwide BSE epidemic, the USDA developed protectionist livestock importation policies. In 1989, the USDA's Animal and Plant Health and Inspection Service (APHIS) banned the importation of live ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) and certain ruminant products, including most rendered protein products, into the U.S. from nations where animal health professionals confirmed previous cases of BSE. In 1997, APHIS extended those import restrictions to all nations of Europe and, subsequently in 2000, banned the importation of all rendered protein products of any animal species from Europe.[viii] In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the feeding of certain mammalian-derived proteins, including cattle, sheep, goats, deer, elk and bison, to ruminants, a measure generally referred to as the feed ban. The trade barriers, coupled with the feed ban, were intended to insulate American agriculture from BSE.
Is There a Mad Cow on My Dinner Plate?
-
By KH Tracy
Nov 11, 2009
Straight to the Source
