U.S. Toughens Curbs in Bid to Stem ‘Mad Cow’ Disease

Cattle too sick or injured to walk will no longer enter the food supply, under an aggressive series of reforms that Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman announced Tuesday in an effort “to further protect” the nation from “mad cow” disease.

A national identification system will make it easier to track cattle from birth to slaughter. And any carcasses tested for “mad cow” disease will be held in a cooler until the results are available, so the meat does not reach consumers unless the test comes back clean.

The reforms -- some of which had been resisted by the cattle and dairy industries for years -- came a week after the first diseased cow was discovered in a U.S. herd. Federal authorities said the steps were crucial to boosting public confidence in American beef and restoring the $3.8-billion-a-year beef export market.

Beef industry representatives said they would accept the new regulations. But they also made clear that they viewed the reforms as largely cosmetic. American beef was safe before, they said, and would continue to be safe with or without the Department of Agriculture directives.

“A lot of this has to do with consumer confidence, and with our trading partners’ confidence,” said Chandler Keys, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. “We’re reacting to our consumers, to what they need and want.”

At least 36 countries that import American beef have banned it in the past few days. The industry’s top priority is to get those bans lifted so it can resume shipping 45 million pounds of beef a week around the world; Keys said he was optimistic the measures announced Tuesday would help.

The most aggressive of the USDA reforms would ban from the nation’s food supply cattle that are too injured or too ill to walk. Congress has repeatedly considered a similar measure but it never became law because of opposition from lawmakers from Texas and other cattle states.

The USDA estimates that 130,000 of these so-called downer animals are slaughtered each year -- a tiny fraction of the 36 million cows processed annually.

Animal-rights groups have long argued that it’s cruel to drag downer animals onto slaughterhouse kill floors. And public-health advocates have long warned that those lame, often visibly ill, animals are unfit for human consumption.

“We are obviously very thrilled,” said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States.

“Mad cow” disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a fatal disorder in which malformed proteins, known as prions, which can’t be killed by cooking, eat holes in the animal’s brain. It’s much more common in older animals. The deadly prions thought to both cause and spread the disorder ‘tend to concentrate in nerve and brain tissue.

Humans can contract a form of the disease from eating infected meat; more than 150 people worldwide have died from the human illness, which is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

Under the new regulations, downer cattle could still be rendered into pet food, high-protein feed for swine and poultry, industrial lubricants and natural glycerine, which is used in dozens of consumer products, from crayons to cosmetics, to tires and fabric softener.

Another far-reaching reform would keep the organs, nerves and tissues that are most likely to harbor infectious agents out of the human food supply.

So the USDA on Tuesday banned from the human food supply the brain, eyes, spinal cord and other high-risk tissue of any cattle over 30 months old. In the past, some of this material could have been processed into sausage or other meat products. It could also have been rendered into edible lard and gelatin, used in everything from soup to marshmallows.

Keeping the brains and spinal cords from older cows out of the food chain “is the single most important public health measure we can take,” said Will Hueston, director of the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the University of Minnesota.

Critics, however, point out that older cows make up just 15% to 20% of the cattle slaughtered in the United States. Under the new regulations, the brains and spinal cords of younger cattle can continue to be rendered into edible products. There have been only a few cases of “mad cow” disease found in young cattle in other countries.

If a young cow were infected with BSE, the disease likely would not have progressed far enough to produce visible symptoms, so USDA inspectors might not single out the animal for testing, said Leon Thacker, director of the animal disease diagnostic lab at Purdue University.

In an attempt to address a failure exposed by the lone “mad cow” case in the U.S., Veneman also announced that meat from any animal tested for BSE will be held out of the food supply until the results are known.

In the current case, the diseased Holstein was slaughtered on Dec. 9 but positive test results were not announced until Dec. 23. By then, the meat from that cow had been mixed with other beef processed in the same plant, and shipped to eight states and the territory of Guam. The USDA has recalled all the meat from that batch -- more than 10,000 pounds, mostly hamburger -- but it is not known how much has been recovered.

Other measures announced by the USDA include a ban on a type of stun gun used to render cattle insensible before slaughter. Known as an air-injecting gun, it can splatter brain tissue throughout the animal. More-modern stunning systems can eliminate 90% of the contamination, according to Temple Grandin, a leading slaughterhouse expert and animal scientist at Colorado State University.

The USDA also plans to enforce stricter controls on mechanized systems designed to strip every last scrap of meat from a carcass. The new guidelines, which have not yet been written, will try to prevent spinal cord tissue from being accidentally mixed into processed meat.

“It is only prudent that we take these additional steps,” said Dr. W. Ron DeHaven, the USDA’s chief veterinarian. “None of these actions should be taken to mean that anything other than safe meat has been made available until now.”

Even as they unveiled their list of reforms, USDA officials said they did not plan to test every cow, or even a large percentage of the animals processed. The USDA tests only about 20,000 cows a year -- most of them downer animals. As downers will no longer be entering the food supply, it’s unclear how inspectors will select which animals to test. Veneman said only that they would focus on older cows; she promised the surveillance would be “aggressive.”

Japan, which imports $1 billion in American beef annually, has reportedly asked the U.S. to test every cow headed for slaughter. Thacker said each test costs about $13, but despite the expense, Japan has been testing every animal it sends to slaughter since BSE emerged in that country in 2001.

Agriculture officials said they’re confident that this country’s more limited surveillance will be sufficient to keep the U.S. beef supply safe. The key to the American system, they said, is that animal feed has been segregated since 1997. Cattle cannot eat any feed containing rendered remnants of other cattle. Feed contaminated with infectious prions from diseased cows is thought to have spread the disease widely throughout Britain in the 1980s.

Critics noted that poultry and swine can still eat feed made from rendered cattle remains.

They said they were worried about mix-ups in feed mills or on farms. “What do you do when the hired hands help themselves to a couple of garbage pails full of pig feed and take it home to feed the calf they just bought at auction for $5?” Grandin said. “It can be something real innocent like that.”

Along with the specific recommendations on the slaughtering and testing of animals, the USDA on Tuesday proposed a national animal identification system.

The goal is to permit authorities to more easily trace the route that any given animal has taken on the way to the dinner plate -- from farm to feedlot to slaughterhouse. But Veneman gave no details.

Beef industry officials also had sketchy information about the plan; they would not even say whether they expect the system to be voluntary or mandatory. Nor did they provide a cost estimate. They said only that they hoped to put in place some type of tracking system within the next three years.

“If it permits piecemeal or voluntary compliance, it’s just not enough,” said Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also expressed reservations about the new system.

“The USDA took a small first step in terms of meat tracking but still has a long way to go,” Schumer said in a statement. “The problem is not technology, it is will. The administration is going to have to tell the meatpacking industry that complete traceability from farm to grocery shelf is what safety requires and what the public demands.”

Schumer is proposing legislation that would require the USDA to assign a code to meat from the time of slaughter and at each new destination it reaches, enabling purchasers to track it in the event of a disease outbreak.

Agriculture officials said they are still tracing 81 other cows that, along with the infected cow, were approved for importation from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. in 2001. The infected cow was among a herd sold to a farmer in Mabton, Wash.

Neuman reported from Washington, Simon from St. Louis.