MAD COW HITS THE U.S.

Validity of Mad-Cow Tests Questioned

By SCOTT KILMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 16, 2004

In monitoring the nation's cattle herds for possible mad-cow disease, the
U.S. Department of Agriculture said it at times has permitted
slaughterhouses to select which animals should be tested.

Consumer groups say the practice raises doubts about the validity of the
testing program.

A USDA spokesman confirmed that the department "sometimes" asked certain
meatpackers to choose the cattle whose brains would undergo screening at a
federal laboratory as part of a continuing survey aimed at determining
whether the fatal brain-wasting disease was present in the U.S. cattle herd.

Food-safety activists complain that such a role by companies could have
tainted the survey, because the companies' officials had an incentive to
send only the brains of cattle that appeared to be healthy.

"It's a clear conflict of interest," said Michael Hansen, a senior research
associate at Consumers Union's Consumer Policy Institute, because a
positive finding would likely force a company to go through the expensive
process of recalling meat.

A coalition of watchdog groups, including Consumer Federation of America
and the Government Accountability Project, asked Agriculture Secretary Ann
Venemen at a meeting Thursday to hold public hearings on, among other
things, whether the government should begin testing all mature cattle for
the disease, which tends to strike cattle of an advanced age. Ms. Venemen
said she is interested in the idea, but she didn't commit to when that
might happen.

The complaints by watchdog groups come at a delicate time for the Bush
administration, which is trying to persuade more than 50 nations to reopen
borders shut to U.S. beef when the first U.S. case of mad-cow disease was
announced on Dec. 23.

The administration is trying to build the case that the infected Holstein
cow found in Washington state was an isolated incident that was detected by
a highly scientific surveillance system. Indeed, investigators so far have
shown that the dairy cow came from Canada two years ago, when its was
probably already sick.

Although the government didn't test animals at some meat plants for months
at a time, and collected many more samples from some states than from
others, USDA officials say their testing survey was designed to detect
mad-cow disease if it was present in one of every one million cattle.

Any doubts about the U.S. mad-cow-surveillance program might prove
particularly upsetting to the Japanese government, which has been pressing
the Bush administration to begin testing far more U.S. cattle as a
condition of reopening beef trade. The administration Thursday said it next
week is sending a second delegation to Japan, which imported roughly $1
billion of U.S. beef last year, about a third of all the U.S. beef shipped
to foreign customers. Mad-cow disease is technically known as bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. People can catch a similar form of the
disease by eating contaminated beef products, especially brain and
spinal-cord tissue.

The USDA is resisting calls for widespread testing of U.S. cattle, and
defends the accuracy of its surveillance. The government, which tested just
one out of every 1,700 cattle slaughtered last year, targeted about 10% of
the cattle that arrived at plants unable to walk. A lack of coordination is
a possible sign of a neurological disorder such as BSE. The USDA refused to
identify the meat plants that it allowed to select cattle for the mad-cow
survey. But Jim Rogers, the department's spokesman, said the plants it
permitted to do so primarily slaughtered nonambulatory cattle, which means
whatever cattle were selected likely qualified for the survey.

Most of the cattle in the survey were selected by employees of the agency's
Food Safety and Inspection Service, who are responsible for checking cattle
and carcasses at meatpacking plants. The brains were forwarded to another
USDA section, called the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, for
laboratory testing. Still, some of the department's own meat inspectors
Thursday criticized the mad-cow-surveillance program at a news conference
in Washington arranged by food-safety activists. The National Joint Council
of Food Inspection Locals, which represents about 5,000 government meat
inspectors, released affidavits from members who complain, among other
things, that inspectors aren't adequately trained to identify the disease
and that some meat companies have had too much influence over testing.

"I'm concerned the government isn't doing all that it could be doing to
test for mad cow," said Trent J. Berhow, a federal meat inspector at a
Tyson Foods Inc. cattle-slaughtering plant in Denison, Iowa, and president
of the Midwest Council of Food Inspection Locals. But he said he wasn't
aware of any cases of cattle with clear signs of mad-cow disease -- such as
staggering and slobbering -- that escaped testing.

Separately, the Food and Drug Administration said it has placed six
Canadian animal-feed plants on "import alert" after finding prohibited meat
material in its shipments, Reuters reported. The import-alert list means
that the plants must test all feed shipments bound for the U.S. for traces
of animal tissue. The U.S. has banned meat and bone meal in all animal feed
from Canada since its northern neighbor found a case of mad-cow disease in
an Alberta cow last May.

Write to Scott Kilman at <mailto:scott.kilman@wsj.com>scott.kilman@wsj.com

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