January 13, 2004 San Antonio Express-News (Texas) by Elizabeth Allen

Since the discovery of a Washington state dairy cow infected with mad cow disease last month, the regulation of that feed is getting new scrutiny.

The Food and Drug Administration in 1997 banned the practice of including byproducts from cattle in cattle feed, which is how mad cow - also called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE - is believed to spread.

The infected cow was traced back to Canada, where another cow was discovered with BSE last year. Both were old enough to have picked up the disease before that country also banned feeding cattle byproducts to cattle. BSE has an incubation period of three to six years. No other case of BSE has been confirmed in the United States.

There are questions, however, about where the feed might be falling through the cracks.

Early compliance with the feed ban was spotty, as were the FDA's enforcement efforts, according to reports by the U.S. General Accounting Office.

But state and feed industry officials say there aren't any serious problems in Texas, which has a $16 billion beef industry.

"This issue is so volatile, it could be so destructive for the industry, that they are very, very cautious about handling the materials," said Ben Boerner, president of the Texas Grain & Feed Association.

Because this is the nation's largest beef-producing state, Texas augments the federal regulations with its own, said Roger Hoestenbach, head of the Feed & Fertilizer Control Service at Texas A&M University.

"Not to say that there haven't been a few violations," Hoestenbach said. "But in general, we haven't met with any major problems in Texas."In 753 inspections during the past four years, he said, the state cited 14 facilities for minor violations. Two of the 14 weren't putting the warning labels on feed that contained cattle by-products.

"No one's been trying to not meet the regulations in Texas," Hoestenbach said, "but there's been some confusion."

Feed mills blend different forms of protein into the cattle's diet to fatten them for slaughter. Barred from using cattle byproducts, feed makers have turned to other sources like cottonseed meal and soybean meal.

Chicken litter is another acceptable protein source. The FDA is reportedly reconsidering that practice now, since the chickens can still be fed cattle byproducts, and their litter can include bits of uneaten feed that the birds knocked to the ground.

Many feed makers, when faced with the ban, simply stopped using cattle meat and bone meal byproducts.

"We decided as a company to not handle ruminant meat and bone meal products," said Dennis Jemelka, vice president of Cuero-based Allied Feeds.

That cut down on the risk of mistakes like one three years ago at the Purina Mills plant in Gonzales. In that case, some of the cattle byproduct was mixed in with cattle feed and sent to a feed yard in Floresville. A sample taken before it was shipped out tested for the prohibited substance.

The mill reported it to authorities and bought the cattle that may have eaten the tainted feed.

Lydia Botham, spokeswoman for Land O'Lakes Farmland Feed, which bought the Gonzales plant in 2001, said the company has separated its operations so that no plant that uses the cattle byproducts also makes cattle feed, and the plant no longer handles cattle byproducts.

"Clearly, we strictly adhere to all FDA and USDA regulations," Botham said.

The FDA cited only six lots last year for violating the 1997 feed rule, and its reports showed that hardly any manufacturers received marks for significant violations.

That would be a dramatic improvement from the past several years, in which the GAO released two reports sharply critical of feed handlers' compliance and the FDA's oversight of them.

But a major focus of the GAO's criticism was on feed makers that did not label feed with cattle parts as banned from use for cattle.

And while the FDA's report showed that few manufacturers received "Official Action Indicated" marks, it did not explain whether mislabeling fell into that category or the second one, "Voluntary Action Indicated," which would include what the agency called "minor record-keeping lapses."

An FDA spokeswoman said no one was available to discuss the reports.

By the FDA's calculations, a scant 0.4 percent of feed handlers had significant violations, but 10 percent had minor ones.

Improvement is good, said Michael Hansen, a research associate with Consumer Policy Institute, but it doesn't get around the fact that compliance was much worse for several years after the 1997 feed ban. Considering BSE's long incubation time, Hansen said, that means cattle that may have been exposed to BSE are still entering the food supply.

The government now tests thousands of slaughtered animals each year for BSE, but Hansen's group is arguing for testing of all the 40 million slaughtered annually. Japan, which has dealt with BSE, does such broad testing.

Hansen was skeptical of the FDA's dramatic improvement. He said the agency has been removing detailed information on the Washington cattle herd from its Web site and has an interest in showing improved compliance.

Also, the GAO's January 2002 report criticized the FDA's record keeping.

"FDA's data on inspections are severely flawed, and, as a result, FDA does not know the full extent of industry compliance," the report said. The FDA has worked on improving its database since that time.

But Hoestenbach, the Texas official who should be most familiar with feed handlers, said the GAO could have done some more homework, too.

"They didn't talk to me," he said.

eallen@express-news.net