January 18, 2004 Oregonian by JIM BARNETT and TOM DETZEL

"There is no scientific evidence to support anything beyond what we're doing in this country, quite frankly," Bobby Acord, a top administrator at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said while defending the agency's testing program May 22, two days after the case was found in northern Alberta.

Similar assurances would be repeated -- until Dec. 23, when the United States suddenly faced its first mad cow case. Within a week, however, federal officials ordered some of the safeguards food safety advocates had sought for years and that industry had resisted.

A review by The Oregonian found that regulators and Congress passed up an opportunity to act more aggressively after the Canadian case, despite pointed warnings from scientists, food safety experts and politicians who saw a looming threat.

During the seven months between the two cases, Agriculture Department and other U.S. officials steadfastly declared their faith in the system of import controls, mad cow surveillance and feed restrictions already in place. Only one response was required: an immediate ban on imports of Canadian beef and cattle. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman quickly took that step. But her agency soon went to work on a regulation to reopen the border, citing big savings for U.S. meatpackers.

Congress, too, did little. With cattle-friendly lawmakers leading the fight, the House narrowly defeated banning high-risk "downer" cattle from the slaughterhouse -- a ban that Veneman has now ordered. They also jammed through a delay in country-of-origin labeling for beef, rejecting claims that mad cow in Canada made such labels a consumer imperative.

Federal regulators should have responded more aggressively to the Canadian case, scientists and consumer advocates now say. Instead, the Agriculture Department focused on restoring the flow of Canadian cattle and soothing alarm in Japan, the biggest buyer of U.S. beef.

Even after Canada in mid-July banned potentially infective nerve tissues from that country's food supply, the Agriculture Department, which had been considering closely related rules, did not adopt corresponding safeguards until the U.S. case appeared.

Ulrich Kihm, a Swiss expert who took part in an international review of Canada's response, had recommended that ban on "specified risk materials" as the most important safeguard to take. In an interview last week, Kihm told The Oregonian that the United States should have adopted the same changes when Canada did.

"I learned in my long experience, all the countries react the same way -- they are quite reluctant until they get the first case," said Kihm, who dealt with the mad cow crisis in Europe for a decade. "All the governments, they still believe they could escape having (mad cow) in their country," he said.

The human form of mad cow disease killed about 150 people in the United Kingdom before it was identified in 1996 and later linked to eating tainted beef. In the wake of that discovery, the United States and other beef-producing countries blocked imports of live cattle from Europe. They also enforced "feed bans" outlawing use of mammalian protein in feed for cattle, sheep and other ruminants.

The feed restrictions are essential to preventing the spread of prions, malformed proteins found mainly in nerve tissues that cause mad cow disease and its human variant. Beginning with the Clinton administration, Agriculture Department officials expressed confidence that those measures, plus slaughterhouse surveillance, would contain the disease even if isolated cases were to crop up in the U.S. herd.

To add confidence, they commissioned the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to assess the odds of an epidemic in the herd and the risk to human health. The three-year study, completed in 2001, confirmed what regulators had claimed: The risk was statistically insignificant.

Even if a U.S. case of mad cow disease turned up, "the course of the disease has been arrested, and it is destined for eradication by the measures currently in place," the study said. The Harvard researchers reaffirmed their conclusions last year, as the Canada case unfolded. And U.S. officials continued to cite the study, casting their response in terms of "sound science."

But when a Holstein from a Mabton, Wash., dairy herd was diagnosed with mad cow disease, science gave way to expediency. After her initial assurances of the safety of the beef supply, Veneman ordered "downer" animals out of the food chain, banned potentially infective nerve tissues from the food supply and called for a national identification system so sick or suspect animals could be quickly traced.

Agency officials also have said they intend to nearly double the number of cattle tested for mad cow disease to 40,000 this year. About 36 million cattle are slaughtered annually in the United States.

George Gray, who led the Harvard research team, stood by his findings that mad cow disease does not pose a significant threat. But in an interview, Gray also said the Agriculture Department's abrupt shift in policy cannot be explained by science.

The risk to public health and cattle had not changed, he said. Because the U.S. and Canadian beef industries are so intertwined, the discovery of mad cow disease in one country is scientifically equal to discovery in the other.

"The USDA is very aware that essentially we have a North American cattle market," Gray said. "It's just that it took the finding of a case to focus the mind and make these things happen."

Some of Veneman's Dec. 30 directives had been under consideration within the Agriculture Department long before mad cow disease showed up here and in Canada. Officials knew, for example, that an industry practice called advanced meat recovery, or AMR, raised the risk of transmission, and they had been studying the prospect of stronger regulations since 1998.

AMR systems use hydraulic pressure to detach meat from bones, including the vertebrae. Potentially infective nerve tissues, such as spinal cord and dorsal root ganglia, or DRG, can be detached as well. Agency surveys in 2002 found that 35 percent of AMR samples from three-fourths of the slaughterhouses tested contained such tissues.

At the urging of Kihm's review panel, Canada banned from the food supply DRG and other "specified risk" tissues in cattle older than 30 months. Veneman lauded Canada's move when it was announced July 18. But her agency held off on adopting a parallel U.S. rule.

Food safety groups called for stronger action. Among them was The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which urged Veneman in May to adopt immediate restrictions on advanced meat recovery systems.

The department's response?

"Silence," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, the center's food safety director. "They didn't want to talk about it. They basically were going to wait until there was a crisis."

The agency pivoted once mad cow disease arose in Washington state. The new emergency rules revise the definition of "meat," forbidding all central nervous tissue from AMR and other food products, extending a prior ban on spinal cord. The rules also declare DRG, skulls and vertebrae from cattle older than 30 months, which are considered to have a higher risk, as "inedible."

A top agriculture official last week defended the agency's decision not to act sooner. "We believed that the preventative systems we had in place, the firewalls, were still adequate to protect public health," said Dr. Daniel Engeljohn of the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

"But with the advent of a positive here in the states," he said, "we made the decision that we would take additional risk management actions."

To Smith DeWaal, however, the new rules are "too little, too late."

"Many of these steps were well-known hazards in the food supply before the cow was discovered and could have been acted on by the secretary much earlier," she said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to act. The agency regulates animal feed, and activists have pushed for safeguards such as extending the ban on mammalian proteins to all animal feeds, including pets and poultry.

Spokeswoman Lenore Gelb said the agency "is seriously considering in a very short time frame" new measures on feed. She said the FDA didn't act after the Canada case arose because "it would have been perceived in the international community as if we were saying that we, as Canada, had become a (mad cow) country."

As food safety and feed regulations languished last year, agriculture officials turned to the needs of the U.S. meatpacking industry. Once Canada confirmed its mad cow case, federal regulators had to close the border, as required by administrative law. It was the only way to protect exports to Japan and South Korea, the No. 1 and No. 3 buyers of U.S. beef, respectively.

But blocking Canadian beef also threatened the profits of domestic meatpackers. The industry relied on Canadian ranchers to provide them with enough cattle -- 1.6 million head in 2002 -- to keep prices low and processing plants operating efficiently. To reopen the border, agriculture officials proposed a new category of "minimal risk" countries, those that had at least one documented case of mad cow disease but had taken steps to contain it and the risk to human health. Canada would be first.

Bill Hawks, an undersecretary of agriculture, unveiled the plan at a news conference Oct. 31. When asked whether industry had pressured the agency to reopen the border, Hawks again cited the Harvard risk study, saying: "We're going to do science-based decision-making here."

But buried within the proposed regulation was an assessment of the economic stakes: Reopening the border would cut U.S. meatpackers' costs by $455 million per year, largely by undercutting prices to U.S. cattle ranchers, who had benefited from the ban. And despite Hawks' assurances about risk, the proposal contained a clear warning from the agency's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that re-opening the border could pose an increased threat to the United States.

"APHIS acknowledges a theoretical increased risk of mad cow introduction into the United States because of this rule," the agency said in the Nov. 4 Federal Register. "However, we conclude this risk is extremely small."

An agriculture spokeswoman said Hawks was unavailable for an interview last week. The Canadian discovery had raised concerns on Capitol Hill. But there, too, warnings were drowned out by meat producers and their allies.

Two issues dominated: country-of-origin labeling for beef and whether to ban "downer" animals from the slaughterhouse. Over objections from the powerful National Cattlemen's Beef Association, Congress in the 2002 Farm Bill had ordered the Agriculture Department to develop rules for labeling meats, fish and produce with country of origin by September 2004.

But large meat producers resumed the fight in 2003, claiming the mandate would saddle the industry with heavy costs. They backed voluntary labeling instead and set their sights on winning at least a temporary reprieve. The issue sparked a floor fight in mid-July, when Rep. Darlene Hooley, D-Ore., and other backers of labeling tried to overturn a one-year delay stuffed into the agriculture spending bill by a meat industry ally, Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas.

Urban Democrats allied with Republican Denny Rehberg, a Montana rancher, who brought up the mad cow case in Canada and noted that Japan had threatened to stop taking U.S. beef products unless they could be certified as free of Canadian beef. But opponents said labeling would be seen as a trade barrier by Canada and Mexico and could prompt retaliation. And because mad cow disease hadn't crossed the border, labeling was merely a marketing issue, not a matter of food safety, they said.

When the vote came, labeling supporters lost 208-193. And although the Senate backed labeling in November, the original one-year House delay was extended to two years. The House next turned to a measure by Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., to block federal inspectors from allowing downer animals -- those that can't walk because of injuries or disease -- into the slaughterhouse.

Backers said killing such animals for food was inhumane. They also cited Agriculture Department studies saying downers could be carriers of mad cow disease. Both the Canadian and U.S. cows diagnosed with mad cow disease were downers, officials have said. "Just one infected mad cow crippled all of Canada's meat industry," Ackerman said on the House floor. "Canada should be a lesson to us."

But opponents said the ban would backfire. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., the agriculture committee chairman, argued that the U.S. surveillance system hinged on sick animals being discovered by inspectors at the slaughterhouse door. Ackerman's amendment went down 202-199.

Although scientists and consumer groups commended Veneman for the most recent mad cow safeguards, they argue that more must be done. Eight groups called on Veneman last week to increase the number of cattle tested for mad cow and to enact still tighter restrictions on nervous system tissue in AMR products by banning spinal column or neck bones.

They also said meat recalls, voluntary under current rules, should be mandatory. And they said the national animal identification system should be mandatory, not voluntary, as envisioned by a government-industry group that is studying such a system.

More broadly, critics said, the Agriculture Department should put human health ahead of trade concerns and industry profits. Even if risk to the public already is low, regulators should err on the side of caution.

"If you go over and ask human health experts, they would say what do you have to do to protect public health?" said Carol Tucker Foreman, a top Carter administration agriculture official now with the Consumer Federation of America. "They start from entirely different points of view."

Kihm, the Swiss scientist, said the United States still has an opportunity to set an example. Because the incubation period for mad cow disease is years, not months, the discovery in Washington state is unlikely to be the last in North America.

"When you have an ocean between you, you have a certain security," Kihm said, reflecting on the U.S. response to mad cow disease in Europe. "But if you have nothing, like you have between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, and you have a lot of trade, you should be alarmed immediately to take measures."