January 16, 2004 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By SCOTT KILMAN

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 scott.kilman@wsj.com