Mad Cow Facts

By Iain Murray - December 17, 2004
From the Competitive Enterprise Institute

(Excerpt - for complete article, please visit TechCentralStation.com)

On his first official visit to Canada, President Bush promised to end the madness: the United States’ ban on Canadian beef. Such a move is long overdue. The ban has hurt producers and consumers in both countries — for no public health gain.

Recent news of a second possible case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) — popularly known as “mad cow disease” — in the U.S. proved to be a false alarm when the tests came back negative. But the U.S. border remains closed to Canadian beef because of one confirmed BSE case found in Canada over a year ago.

The President said, “I fully understand the integrated nature of the cattle business and I hope we can get this issue solved as quickly as possible.” These are encouraging words. Since the border was closed last year, the previously integrated U.S. and Canadian beef industries have been forced to separate, at great cost.

If the border remains closed for much longer, the two countries’ industries will have to adapt permanently, which will mean further cost increases as they duplicate facilities they once shared. And it is consumers who are most hurt by the border closure and the resultant artificial spiking of beef prices. Worse, the total ban on Canadian cattle isn’t just economically harmful, it is completely ineffectual in protecting public health.

The simple fact is that the two North American cases of BSE pose no noticeable threat to human health, and precious little to the health of cattle herds. BSE reached epidemic proportions in parts of Europe because of a practice of feeding cattle with contaminated meat, a practice that was always rare in North America because of the ready availability of the alternative soybean meal. But it was nonetheless banned in 1997.

A study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis showed that even if BSE had been introduced to the U.S. in 1990, well before the offending practice was banned, a worst-case scenario estimated only around 24 infected cattle nationwide.

It is inconceivable for such a low level of infection to pose a real threat to human health. For example, recent research has revealed that France suffered an unnoticed BSE epidemic during the 1980s. An estimated 48,000 infected cattle entered the French food chain but only two people contracted the human form of the disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). And in the UK, where possibly millions of cattle were infected, 149 people have contracted the fatal disease and the best estimates place the number of future deaths at fewer than 100 — a far cry from the apocalyptic mid-1990s predictions of hundreds of thousands of fatalities.

Today, the U.S. guards against contaminated meat through a variety of measures, including the 1997 feed ban, import controls, a BSE surveillance program, and public health response plans.

Complete article…

From the Providence Journal on December 16, 2004

Excerpt - for complete article please visit The Providence Journal

About 35 million cows are slaughtered every year in the United States, give or take a few million. Only one was ever found to have mad-cow disease, and it came from Canada. Then, this fall, a suspected second case was announced.

Tests have subsequently proved that suspicion unfounded, but not before certain consumer activists tried to sow massive fear, and cattle investments swooned. The public should understand that had the cow indeed been infected, there would still have been no reason to panic. The risks of encountering a mad cow would still be minuscule.

Furthermore, you could eat the muscle meat of a “mad cow” in complete safety. Only the brain and spinal cord can pass serious illness to humans. Americans generally don’t consume these central-nervous-system parts, which helps account for the lack of any human cases in the United States. (People do eat them in Europe, in things like meat pies.)

This is not to underplay the gravity of mad-cow disease. Humans who eat infected tissues can contract a horrible brain-wasting illness called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It’s just that the likelihood of this happening in the United States is close to zero, according to Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis.

Our system for protecting the beef supply appears to be working. American cows are no longer fed the animal parts that spread the disease. Furthermore, the Department of Agriculture now tests 6,000 “high-risk” cows a week. These tend to be animals older than three years (younger cows don’t get the disease) or that show any symptoms of mad-cow disease, such as an inability to stand.

Full story…

By Yvonne Vizzier Thaxton on December 13, 2004
For Meatingplace.com

(Excerpt - For complete article please visit Meatingplace.com)

Shame on you, Mr. Thompson

There has been a lot of flack concerning former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson’s comment about the vulnerability of our food supply. (See Thompson warns of possible attack on food supply, Meatingplace.com, Dec. 7, 2004.) I do not agree with Mr. Thompson. I’ve thought a lot about the dangers to the food supply since 9/11 and have concluded that it isn’t so easy to attack.

One of the criticisms is that so called “factory farming” increases our vulnerability by concentrating animals in one place. I understand the argument, but there is no one central location that receives all of our animals or even most of them. There are thousands of feed lots and poultry houses scattered throughout the United States. It is possible to target one large confinement group or even to target multiple units at one time, but it would be virtually impossible to get them all at once. And, if it were possible to get all of the chickens in a single large complex, the loss would reduce the food supply for a period of time, but it would not cause massive problems.

Tampering with food would cause short-term alarm, but it could be calmed quickly as a result of the “factory farming” arrangement. Companies have controls in place that would allow them to quickly replenish the food supply and verify whether or not the food was safe. The delay would be brief and the harm minimal. We know this because product recalls are a common occurrence. These recalls have shown us that problems can be identified and quickly removed from the marketplace. The number of recalls has increased over the years, not as a result of less security, but as the result of more. Companies take more samples and use more sensitive techniques than ever before. Technology is constantly improving the methods available to assess quickly the quality and safety of our food.

For complete article please visit Meatingplace.com

December 10, 2004 from Penn State University

Excerpt - for original article please visit Penn State Live

University Park, Pa. — With the most recent threat of mad cow disease on American soil revealed as a false alarm, a specialist in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences says consumers still can have confidence that the nation’s beef supply is safe.

The headlines surrounding the recent U.S. Department of Agriculture announcement of inconclusive test results for bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE — popularly known as mad cow disease — have some consumers wondering if the nation’s beef supply is well protected. John Comerford, associate professor of dairy and animal science, says he’s surprised by the media attention generated by the testing, since it’s not unusual for a false positive to occur.

“This was the third time that USDA testing procedures have produced an inconclusive test since June of this year,” he says. “The animal tissue is sent for more intensive testing in Iowa, where the samples were all found to be negative. The initial test is screened at the local processor, so there’s always a possibility of another positive test, but the fact that the process is working is what’s important.

“Scientists and human health officials pretty much agree that BSE is really an animal-health industry problem because it will ultimately have a profound effect for beef producers in terms of economics, credibility, marketing, processing methods and other factors. Most of the scientific community agrees that the probabilities of someone getting sick from eating beef with BSE — even from a known infected cow — are very remote. And the industry is closely attuned to ensuring that unsafe animals are identified and removed from the food chain because it’s best for their business.”

Comerford says the age of most cattle used for beef — coupled with screening tests aimed at high-risk animals — provides safeguards to protect the American food supply.

“Only about 20 percent of the animals that are processed for food are susceptible to BSE,” Comerford says. “That’s why we only test a small proportion of the animals harvested — many of them can’t have BSE. We’ve never identified BSE in an animal less than six to eight years of age. Most of the retail beef that you would find in the grocery store, for example, comes from animals that are under 30 months of age. So, the chances of any of those animals having BSE are extremely remote.”

The beef supply soon will be even safer, Comerford says, as a new voluntary state and federal system will assign tracking information to all beef animals and production locations, so that BSE and other diseases can be isolated and eliminated from the national beef herd more quickly.

“Every beef animal will have a unique identification that will be entered into a centralized database along with the farm or location of origin,” he says. “Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture and the Pennsylvania Beef Council are leading that effort in a beta-testing procedure for mandatory animal and premise identification. It’s going to take time — individually identifying a few million animals and knowing where they are at any given time can’t happen overnight. The industry is very interested in making this happen, but it’s a large job to work out the logistics of recording the identification and transferring information to the database. The other issue is deciding who will have access to the information.”

Complete article…

From the AFF Sentinel Vol. 1 #3

It is understandable that cattlemen trying to follow factions in agriculture these days are having a hard time keeping the players straight on their scorecard.

They not only have to figure out new teams and players, but understand unfamiliar motivations and new coalitions. These new players are smart enough to divvy up responsibilities and attack our American agricultural system on multiple fronts. They definitely share philosophies, tactics and some directors and members. The Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) is one of those relatively new players, working with other players like R-CALF and the Livestock Marketing Association.

The OCM was founded with the help of Ralph Nader in 1998. OCM bills itself as a group formed to “challenge the growing income power disparities between agricultural producers and agribusinesses in the food system.” They also describe themselves as an “agricultural antitrust organization,” with board members that include ranchers, lawyers and a faith group representative.

OCM’s annual meeting was the setting earlier this summer for a gathering of representatives from these fringe agricultural groups, along with those from Nader-founded activist groups, social justice and religious groups. It was also where the “USDA Inc.” report was released. That report castigated USDA for having ag industry people on staff and for alleged policy decisions favoring “large” (more than 1,000 head) cattle operations. The report highlighted these groups’ opposition to confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and corporations of any kind being involved in agriculture, and decried USDA’s handling of the BSE incident, meat inspection and foreign trade.

One has to consider a key class of players in these new organizations - attorneys. Attorneys can be farmers, too. But they farm industries-fields of dispute and unrest — with one goal in mind-taking money from somewhere and putting it in the pockets of clients and themselves. Along the way, they can totally rework how entire industries function. Just as trial lawyers farmed and harvested the tobacco field until they had reaped huge sums from corporations and insurance companies, they are actively casting about now for new fields, like obesity in America. Their theory is that if something isn’t quite right — or can be cast in that light — someone should be made to pay.

These attorneys are looking to nurture the unrest inevitable in the transitions going on in agriculture, to see if they could make some money. Lawsuits against packers have been a popular method for years. OCM was active in nurturing and supporting the Pickett case against IBP/Tyson. The lead law firm in that case was Domina Law of Omaha. Ever heard of cattlelawyers.com? Domina, along with several other firms who are working on related cases against Excel and Swift, are part of cattlelawyers.com .

By the way, the main staff person and the chief counsel for OCM is Michael Stumo. That must be just one of his jobs since he is also one of the attorneys associated with Domina’s firm and worked on the Pickett case. His specialty is anti-trust law.

But the attorneys see this as just the beginning. They want to enlarge the field. OCM has established a “Litigation Clearinghouse” for those interested in “litigating agricultural competition and trade practice issues.” The Clearinghouse is to provide a central information base for litigation against agribusiness and big corporations. They note that, “This concept has been used successfully in such areas as tobacco, asbestos and tire defect litigation.” Is it a good idea when these predators target your industry?

Only if you have nothing to lose .