January 12, 2004 XINHUA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE

"When it comes to prevention, the situation is still confused," the Rome-based agency said in a press release issued in New York. "To reassure consumers will require more than the minimum action to be taken by countries. It will require better controls and more surveillance and testing."

The disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), has been linked to a fatal brain-wasting illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

FAO urged governments and the industry to carry out a proper danger assessment and to keep risk animals and materials out of the food chain. It also called for such precautionary measures as a ban on feeding meat-and-bone-meal to farm animals and a strict avoidance of cross contamination in feed mills.

Other measures involved destroying specified risk materials such as the brain and spinal cord from cattle over 30 months old and ensuring safe practices in the rendering industry. In addition, the agency recommended active surveillance measures for accurate identification of animals as well as traceability throughout production, processing and marketing.

If mad cow disease is known to be present and control measures have not yet been strictly applied, a wider testing program would be needed, FAO said, recommending testing all slaughter cattle over 30 months to enhance consumer confidence.

To help promote stricter controls, FAO is carrying out training projects in several countries and facilitating cooperation between Switzerland, which has successfully dealt with the mad cow crisis, and countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.

Commentary

My interpretation of the recommendations announced yesterday as they pertain to the U.S.:

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United States should destroy Specified Risk Materials (not feed them to other animals), stop the feeding of meat and bone meal to pigs and poultry and test millions of cattle every year.

Source:
-BSE controls in many countries are still not sufficient
-http://www.fao.org/english/newsroom/news/2003/26999-en.html

FAO urges "to strictly apply the following preventive measures:
-ban the feeding of meat-and-bone-meal to farm animals, at least to ruminants [see clarification below as related to pigs and poultry]
-remove and destroy SRMs (Specified Risk Materials: brain and spinal cord, etc.) from cattle over 30 months"

"If BSE is known to be present and control measures have not yet been strictly applied, a wider testing programme is called for, FAO said. Testing of all slaughter cattle over 30 months is a measure to enhance consumer confidence."

These items are clarified in an interview with a FAO official who is quoted saying: "[All countries] should be testing, particularly animals that show symptoms--they collapse--or they show symptoms that look like BSE--all these animals should be tested. And the older animals which, again, die, or for some reason have to be killed other than for meat--this is absolutely essential."

Question: "Are countries doing enough to prevent the spread of BSE?" Answer: "The most important things are again, this ban on feeding meat and bone meal... but what we find is that most countries are not quite doing it exactly, there is a risk of cross contamination because they're still feeding meat and bone meal to pigs and poultry, for example... So we think that they should be doing these things exactly, and they should be doing all these things--the feed ban, the removal of the SRMs, and the testing--to be absolutely sure that there's no risks, of the disease or the spread of the disease."

According to the USDA, roughly 20% of cattle slaughtered in the U.S. are over 30 months [1] In 2002, the U.S. slaughtered 36,969,000 cattle. And we have an estimated 195,000[2] to 1.8 million[3] downers. So following the FAO recommendations , the U.S. should be testing between 7,589,000 and 9,194,000 cattle a year, about 400 times more than the USDA is presently testing. This is not including animals that die on the farm which the FAO calls to be tested and which the USDA has also neglected[4]

[1] http://www.usda.gov/Newsroom/0451.03.html
[2] Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) Surveillance. .
[3] Livestock Mortalities: Methods of Disposal and Their Potential Cost. http://www.renderers.org/economic_impact/index.htm The truth may be somewhere between the USDA's and the rendering industry's estimates. Based on comprehensive European records showing a downer rate of 1.92%,[Report on the monitoring and testing of bovine animals for the presence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in 2001. June 2002. ], the U.S. would have about 864,000 downers in U.S. every year.
[4] USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Current Thinking on Measures that Could be Implemented to Minimize Human Exposure to Materials that Could Potentially Contain the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Agent. 15 January 2002.