USDA to Continue Stricter BSE Testing; Critics Say Higher Testing Levels Needed to Ensure Other Countries of Meat’s Safety
Nov. 21st, 2005 by adminLibby Quaid, Associated Press Writer
November 21, 2005
Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota)
Excerpt…
The government plans to maintain its escalated level of testing for mad cow disease, extending a timetable that would have slowed the search for infection significantly.
With the lucrative Japanese market poised to reopen to American cattle, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns says he wants government scientists to continue testing about 1,000 cattle a day.
“I have just been very reluctant to even set a date as to when we would bring that to a close,” Johanns says. “It’s safe to say the enhanced surveillance is going to extend beyond the end of December.”
Johanns says his decision is not about Japan, which bought more American beef than any foreign customer until the United States discovered its first case of mad cow disease. Johanns says he wants to ensure that testing represents all regions of the country, and healthy animals are tested.
Still, critics of the department say higher testing levels are needed to reassure Japan and other trading partners.
“I’ve said time and time again: There is little risk of BSE in U.S. beef, but it is obvious that we have not yet convinced key trading partners of that,” says Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Under pressure
Harkin and other lawmakers have been pressuring the department to do at least 20,000 more tests on cows that are healthy.
The government has been testing only sick, injured or dead cows, those deemed to be at “high risk” of having mad cow disease. High risk means animals showing signs of mad cow disease, such as nervous system problems or emaciation, downer animals that can’t walk or dead animals.
Tests are done on brain tissue from cows, so animals must be killed before they can be tested. No test has been devised to confirm the disease in a living animal.
Johanns’ predecessor, Ann Veneman, promised to test healthy animals based on recommendations from a panel of international experts on mad cow disease. Johanns says he recently reread Veneman’s comments on testing healthy animals in transcripts from a congressional hearing…
Safeguards
The nation’s first case of mad cow disease was confirmed in December 2003 in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state. In response, the Agriculture Department increased its testing in June 2004 from an average of about 55 daily to more than 1,000 a day.
Authorities have tested 516,496 animals and turned up a second case in a Texas-born cow that tested positive in June. The number of cows tested is about 1 percent of the 45 million adult cows in the United States.
As part of its campaign to guard against the spread of mad cow disease, the government also inspects processing and rendering plants and tests animal feed. The only way mad cow disease is known to spread is through feed containing certain tissue from infected cows. Adding animal protein to feed was a common practice to speed growth until the United States banned it in 1997.
