Mad cow madness

THE SATURATED FAT IN hamburgers is more likely to do the American public harm at this point than the tiny probability of getting the human variant of mad cow disease. But the discovery of a third infected cow in the U.S. this week serves as a reminder that this country is not magically protected against the deadly affliction, partly because federal officials aren’t following their own recommendations for keeping it out of the food supply.

Japan has again blocked U.S. imports of beef, not because of the discovery in Alabama but because cow parts it had banned -- such as brains and spinal cords, the most likely to harbor the disease -- still recently found their way in. The lesson: Assurances and half-measures by the federal government aren’t enough to safeguard beef supplies.

Creekstone Farms in Kansas has always had a simple answer to pleasing the jittery Asian market -- test each and every head of cattle. But instead of applauding the company’s safety-minded enterprise, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is actually blocking the beef producer, saying that only the government is authorized to conduct tests for mad cow.

That’s typical of the laggardly, incoherent federal response to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. A year ago, the USDA rejected the idea of using the Western blot test for mad cow, saying it was unnecessary. After a wary administrator ordered a test on a cow last spring and it came back positive, the agency suddenly changed its tune.

The Alabama cow is believed to be at least 10 years old, which would mean it was born before the government’s 1997 ban on the gruesome and disease-spreading practice of using the remains of cows as an ingredient in cattle feed. Yet the Food and Drug Administration, after announcing in 2003 that it would ban such practices, still allows cattle blood to be fed to calves and bovine remains to be fed to chickens (after which the leftover feed is scooped off the floor with the chicken manure and added -- you guessed it -- to cattle feed). Not only does that make a mockery of the ban, it goes against the common sense that a grazing herbivore wasn’t meant to be a cannibal.

Likewise, nearly three years ago, the Bush administration planned a national tracking system for cattle, similar to what McDonald’s Corp. already has in place. Yet the Alabama cow was at its current home for about a year, and officials are scrambling to find out exactly how old it was, where it had lived, the location of cows that might have eaten the same feed and so on.

The government had some good ideas more than two years ago for preventing the spread of mad cow. It’s time they got implemented.