June 24, 2005
Tests by a British laboratory have confirmed that a steer born and bred in the United States was infected with so-called mad cow disease. The U.S. Agriculture Department said the fact that the animal did not enter the food supply proves that the USDA's safeguards are effective, but critics derided the USDA's safeguards as "faith-based mad cow policy."
"Since the United States does not have a mandatory animal tracking system, USDA's strategy is basically to cross its fingers and hope that beef from a BSE-infected animal doesn't end up on Americans' dinner plates," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food Safety Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
Government officials say the system is working properly to prevent the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease.
"The presence of the disease is extremely low in the United States. Our safeguards are working exactly as they should," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told a news conference.
But DeWaal said that in fact the USDA has done very little to step up surveillance of the American beef supply and, in particular, is not moving quickly enough to adopt mandatory tracking of each animal in the system.
"In May ... Johanns put national animal identification on a slow boat and delayed implementation (of mandatory animal tracking) until 2009," she said. "Canada was able to move from a voluntary to a mandatory animal tracking system in one year. There's no reason why the United States can't implement a system just as good as Canada's just as quickly."
Consumers Union also has been calling for mandatory tracking and testing. Earlier this week, CU formally petitioned Johanns asking that the USDA test all cattle over 20 months of age at slaughter and adopt the most accurate and sensitive "Western blot" test as part of its testing protocol in suspected mad cow cases.
Cattlemen's groups have also questioned the USDA's safety procedures and called for a more aggressive stance against BSE.
Johanns said the department is investigating where the animal with BSE originally came from. He said he has directed USDA scientists to develop a new protocol to deal with "inconclusive" screening tests. The infected animal had tested "inconclusive" in at least one test before follow-up testing found evidence of infection.
The previous U.S. confirmed case of mad cow disease was found in December 2003 in a Washington state dairy cow. That discovery halted billions of dollars worth of American beef exports and raised questions about the safety of the U.S. food supply.
