Mad Beef Policy

The more federal officials downplay mad cow disease, the scarier things get.

A Texas-born beef cow said to have arrived dead at a pet-food plant had been declared disease-free in November, but turned out to have had mad cow disease after all. Not only that, a test conducted seven months ago on the cow had come up positive, but those findings were not made public.

The positive test was only experimental, USDA officials said, while the negative came from the Agriculture Department’s “gold standard” test. There matters rested until recently, when the agency’s inspector general, Phyllis Fong, reportedly concerned about the discrepancy, ordered a third test, using a method called the “Western blot,” and received a positive reading.

This shows, according to a strange interpretation of events by the USDA, that the nation’s testing system works. Actually, it shows the testing works only when safety-minded leaders reject complacency.

Now USDA officials, having determined that the 12-year-old cow was born and raised in the U.S. (no blaming it on Canada, as with the only previous confirmed case), are scrambling to track down its ranch-mates and offspring as well as other places its apparently contaminated feed was sent.

The animal never entered the human food chain, USDA officials soothed. So-called downer cattle can’t be butchered for the supermarket. Feedlots are banned from feeding beef and its byproducts to cattle. Those can, however, be put in the feed given to other animals, such as pigs and chickens, and it is easy for different types of feed to get mixed up or misused. In addition, the waste left after butchering chickens, including their leftover feed containing cattle meal, can be fed to cattle.

The Bush administration has been dragged, kicking, into every protective step. Three months ago, the USDA, in a letter to Consumers Union, dismissed any need to use the Western blot test for confirmation of the disease. Then Fong ordered it for the Texas cow, a move that provided the key results. This week, the USDA said it would regularly use the blot test for confirmation.

The U.S. beef industry has already lost billions in overseas beef sales to more cautious nations and stands to lose billions more. Japan, for instance, was once the primary export market for California beef.

Former Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman announced plans two years ago for a national identification system to track animals coming to the nation’s feedlots. It was never carried out, even though some large corporations, such as McDonald’s, already do so.

The USDA should enforce the ID system now, so in future cases the government can quickly track cattle and feed.

It should also:

* Ban the feeding of cattle meat, bone meal and other byproducts to any livestock.

* Prohibit the use of cattle blood as a “milk replacer” for calves.

* Allow beef producers who want to test all of their cattle to do so. The USDA has barred Kansas meatpacker Creekstone Farms from such testing, which would enable it to market its meat in Japan.

* Expand testing to include more healthy-seeming animals.

In the Bible, cattle disease was one of 10 plagues to strike Egypt when an unheeding leader refused to act for the good of his people. Pretending that mad cow disease will just go away won’t help the USDA any more than it helped Pharaoh.