August 21, 2004 Ottawa Citizen by Margret Kopala

Trade experts say winning its case is possible but this -- along with initiatives to create independent meat-packing operations for processing cattle whose numbers are swelling in their millions at the Canada-U.S. border -- is a stark reminder of the absence of progress in resolving a crisis that's had Canadian cattle producers on their knees since May 2003. Or, should I say it's a reminder of the absence of any progress in eliminating or even determining the extent of mad-cow disease in Canada, because certainly enormous sums of money and effort are supporting an industry severely affected by it.

The answer is blanket testing for BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the always fatal brain-wasting disease that produces symptoms in 30-month-old cattle and can be transmitted to humans where, after long incubation, it appears as variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease. Organizations such as the Alberta Cattle Feeders have demanded this blanket testing, but when Cattleland Feedlot in Strathmore, Alta., wanted to test its own cattle, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said only it does BSE testing and only it can issue export permits.

The Canadian Health Coalition also wants more testing and expressed outrage earlier this year at the federal government's rejection of advice from its own experts to test 65,000 cattle over a one-year period to ensure BSE is not widespread in Canada. Instead, the government plans to test 8,000 cattle this year, the minimum required by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) to maintain surveillance obligations, increasing to 30,000 over the next five years.

"Their policy is: You don't test, you don't find," said the coalition's Michael McBane. "Every other country that increased testing found significantly more (infected) cows. They keep saying it's an isolated case. How would we know? We're not testing enough to find out."

And now, thanks to a $70-per-head charge by renderers collecting dead stock and farmers' reluctance to take their "downed, diseased, dead or distressed cattle" to testing labs, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is behind in meeting even its reduced surveillance obligations.

Delivering his report earlier this month, Alberta Auditor General Fred Dunn said that, although the OIE can't penalize Canada for failing to test sufficient numbers of animals, it can drop its designation from minimal BSE risk to moderate risk. If that happens, decisions about border openings move to the World Trade Organization where they will languish interminably.

What Dunn didn't say is that failing to test means Canada won't have a competent assessment of the risk to consumers. This is urgent, as science is rapidly catching up with the reality of BSE.

British microbiologist Stephen Dealler, who monitored the BSE crisis in Britain, says the large amount of research that has taken place demonstrates several things should now be taken as accepted.

His website editorial on important data concerning BSE in the United States notes there's a major problem in the tendency to assume that cattle with no symptoms are not infected. BSE infects cattle particularly when young, he says, even the first few months of life, though the level of infectivity is much lower and harder to detect before symptoms appear. And like Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas who estimates that Canada and the U.S. slaughter 1,750 infected cattle every year, Mr. Dealler believes that, for every BSE animal with symptoms, probably a further six or seven with no symptoms have been eaten. Most importantly, he says that farmers will avoid tests that cost them money and that may cause them to lose money if the test is found to be positive. This means that it is essential to introduce compensatory mechanisms.

Canada can't know the extent of its BSE problem until comprehensive testing takes place. For cattle producers, negative tests create a competitive advantage while positive tests compel a remedy. But failing to test at all is a betrayal of the very science we invoke to say our animals are healthy. Worse, it is negligent and suggests we don't care whether our animals are infected because, after all, we remove certain risk materials from the human food chain.

Never mind animal rights, this approach puts a ticking time bomb in humans.