Looking for Trouble

In late April, a federal meat inspector at the Lone Star Beef processing plant in San Angelo, Texas, watched as a cow headed for slaughter staggered around and collapsed. The cow showed signs of a central nervous system disorder. The inspector, a veterinarian with the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, ordered that the cow be killed in a humane manner and tested for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, a degenerative neurological disease. BSE is commonly called mad cow disease because cows in the disease's advanced stages often exhibit erratic behavior as their brains deteriorate.

Under federal regulations, officials from the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service were to conduct the BSE test, which requires taking a brain sample and cannot be done on a live animal. The cow's carcass was to be withheld from processing until the test results were known, a necessary precaution because in rare cases, people eating meat contaminated with the infectious agent that causes BSE are believed to have contracted a human form of the disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurological disorder.

But for reasons officials at the Lone Star plant and the Agriculture Department have not been able to explain, the ailing cow was slaughtered and sent to a rendering facility. No brain samples were taken; no tests were performed. No one will ever know if the animal had mad cow disease or some other ailment. What is known is that the Lone Star plant specializes in processing older dairy cows-those most likely to have the disease, according to Michael Hansen, a senior research associate at Consumers Union, the independent nonprofit research and testing organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

"What appeared to happen in Texas is particularly upsetting," says Hansen, not just because the cow in question showed symptoms consistent with the disease, but because higher-ranking Agriculture officials reportedly overruled inspectors at the plant and prohibited them from testing the cow. Hansen's concerns stemmed from a May 5 story on Meatingplace.com, an industry Web site with a daily news service. The story cited two unidentified sources, one in government and one in industry, both of whom said an APHIS supervisor in Austin had intervened to halt the test. Jim Rogers, a spokesman for APHIS, said an independent investigation was being conducted by FSIS' investigative arm, the Office of Program Evaluation, Enforcement and Review. In response to the allegations, the Agriculture Department disseminated policy guidance to its field offices, "to reaffirm, unequivocally" that BSE testing should be done on any cow exhibiting signs of a central nervous system disorder.

Further troubling food safety advocates was that it wasn't until April 30, three days after the cow had been killed, that the Food and Drug Administration learned about it. By then, the animal had been rendered into meat and bone meal for use in animal feed. FDA, part of the Health and Human Services Department, regulates animal feed. Because mad cow disease is transmitted to cattle through contaminated feed, FDA since 1997 has restricted the use of bovine materials in feed for cattle and other ruminant animals. After learning about the incident, FDA investigators worked through the weekend to track down the material rendered from the cow. In a May 4 statement, FDA said it had tracked down "all the implicated material" and that the material would either be used in pig feed (swine are not susceptible to BSE) or destroyed.

Barbara Masters, acting FSIS administrator, and Ron DeHaven, administrator of APHIS, issued a joint statement on May 4, saying, "The rendered product from this animal did not enter the human food chain; it presents no risk to human health." Federal officials will "take appropriate actions once all information is available," the statement said.

Improving Surveillance

The April incident does not bode well as federal officials this month launch an ambitious plan to test as many as 250,000 cattle for mad cow disease over the next 18 months. The one-time surveillance effort is designed to document the prevalence of the disease in the United States. The plan, the details of which federal officials were still working out in May, will stretch the capacity of a surveillance system that until now has tested only about 20,000 cattle annually for the disease. Still to be decided is who exactly will conduct the testing and how those employees will be managed. The Agriculture Department has certified 12 laboratories to conduct BSE sample analysis, and current APHIS and FSIS employees will likely collect many of the samples, along with temporary employees trained specifically for the surveillance program, DeHaven said at a press briefing in March. In addition, state veterinarians and contractors may be tapped for the effort, he said.

The stepped-up BSE surveillance plan, which the agency will pay for by transferring $70 million from the Commodity Credit Corporation, is part of an effort to reassure consumers and U.S. trading partners that American beef is safe after officials discovered last December that a Holstein dairy cow in Lake Moses, Wash., was infected with BSE. It was the first known case of mad cow in the United States, and followed the discovery of a BSE-infected cow in Canada last spring. The disease devastated the British and European beef industries in the 1990s, a situation U.S. officials urgently want to prevent.

While federal officials and many independent scientists maintain that the threat to human health is statistically extremely low-and so far American consumers seem to accept that-the economic threat is another matter, as other nations have blocked imports of American beef and cattle products. Immediately after Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced the discovery of BSE in the United States two days before Christmas, the beef market plummeted. More than 40 nations closed their borders to U.S. beef. Four months later, according to the American Meat Institute, an industry group, U.S. beef exports remain 90 percent below what they were on Dec. 22.

By testing more thoroughly for the disease in the United States, federal officials hope to prove scientifically that American beef is safe. But increased testing also raises the possibility that more diseased cattle will be found, which is likely to further damage the beef industry, at least in the short-term. For Agriculture officials, whose job is both to protect public health and to boost American agriculture, the situation creates a dilemma. Some beef industry officials have steadfastly rejected increased surveillance proposals in the past and have fought recent efforts among some specialty meat producers to test all cattle for the disease, as Japan does. Only reluctantly have most cattle producers agreed to support the one-time surveillance effort, which will test fewer than 300,000 of the 3.7 million cattle slaughtered in the United States each year. Consumer groups maintain that Agriculture officials don't want to know the scope of the disease, because the discovery of more cases inevitably will hurt the American beef market.

In a briefing for reporters in March to outline the government's plan for increased disease surveillance, DeHaven acknowledged the possibility that more infected cattle will be found: "We need to recognize that there is a chance that we could find more positive cattle. I think it's critically important that we keep it in perspective."

Targeting High-Risk Cattle

An international committee of scientific experts with experience handling BSE cases in Britain and Europe concluded in February that it is "highly likely" that there are more cases in the United States. Veneman organized the committee to evaluate the Agriculture Department's handling of the discovery of BSE in December. The panel praised officials' efforts to trace the history of the infected cow and recall meat and rendered products from the animal (although the panel concluded the risk to human health was exceedingly small). But panel members said the department needed to improve disease surveillance.

That recommendation was the impetus for the one-time surveillance plan. Under the effort, Agriculture officials will focus on cattle deemed at highest-risk for the disease-those that exhibit symptoms of a central nervous system disorder or die of unknown causes on the farm, along with so-called downers, those that have difficulty standing or walking. In addition, they say they will randomly test about 20,000 seemingly healthy cattle older than 30 months (the disease has only rarely been detected in younger cattle). Department officials estimate there are about 446,000 cattle that fall into the high-risk group annually.

"The goal is to test as many of those animals in that targeted high-risk population as possible in a 12- to 18-month period," said DeHaven, adding that sampling would be geographically representative of the cattle population.

Testing downer cattle raises particular challenges, however. After the first infected cow was discovered in December, Agriculture prohibited downer cattle from being slaughtered for human consumption. The ruling angered many producers and some state officials, who say many downer cattle have injuries, such as broken legs, that pose no threat to human health. More significantly, by eliminating downer cattle from most slaughter facilities, federal officials have made it almost impossible to find those cattle.

"There's a real concern that people are going to be burying these cows on the farm," says Felicia Nestor, a food safety analyst with the nonprofit Government Accountability Project. That's especially likely if they believe their cows actually may have the disease, she says, because the stigma and economic losses that could be incurred as a result of having a BSE-infected cow actually discourage farmers from reporting cows that are potentially ill. The international review committee warned Agriculture officials that they may need to give farmers and cattle-processing facility officials financial incentives to participate fully in disease surveillance.

Assuming that most or all of the cases of BSE in the United States are present in the high-risk population, DeHaven says, "If we are able to collect 201,000 samples, this would allow us to detect BSE with a 95 percent degree of confidence if the prevalence of the disease is just one positive cow in 10 million adult cattle." A collection of 268,000 samples would yield a 99 percent degree of confidence in the same prevalence level.

But DeHaven declined to give a specific estimate of how many animals officials would actually test, leaving open the possibility that far fewer cows will be involved. DeHaven said the department was deliberately not "establishing a specific number that we are targeting to test," but he said Agriculture officials would test as many as possible in the high-risk group. European nations test all cattle older than 30 months, while Japan tests all cattle destined for human consumption. DeHaven said there is no scientific justification for testing all cattle (the international review committee agreed) and that safeguards put in place previously in the United States made the European model unnecessary.

"The steps we have already taken assume that there is the potential for infected cows in the U.S., and these measures provide the necessary safeguards for the protection of our public," DeHaven said.

Credibility Gap

Cattle get mad cow disease by eating feed that has been contaminated with the agent that causes BSE, which is found mainly in the brain and spinal column of the cow-parts humans generally don't eat. The disease spreads among cattle when parts of an infected cow are rendered into material that is then used in feed or protein supplements for cattle-a common practice until the mid-1990s. In 1997, as the disease was raging in Great Britain and Europe, the Agriculture Department banned the use of rendered cattle parts in cattle feed, although no cases of BSE had yet been discovered in North America.

While the BSE infectious agent never has been found in the muscle tissue of cattle, which is consumed as meat, meat can become contaminated during the slaughtering process. After the first case of BSE was detected in December, the Agriculture Department tightened slaughter regulations and published an expanded list of materials from cattle carcasses that cannot be used in meat products. Likewise, the Food and Drug Administration expanded its list of materials prohibited from food, including dietary supplements and cosmetics regulated by the agency. The FDA also tightened restrictions on materials that can be used in animal feed.

Those steps have been insufficient, Hansen and Nestor say. They and other food safety experts advocate testing all cattle above the age of 20 months for the disease, and say that those that test positive need to be removed from both the human and animal food chains. Currently, animals that test positive for the disease can be rendered into pet food and other nonruminant animal feed.

In addition, they question whether Agriculture can be trusted to implement its own regulations. The department's investigation into the botched BSE test in Texas is the second internal investigation into the agency's handling of matters relating to BSE. When the first case of BSE was discovered last December, Veneman said the infected cow was tested for the disease because it was a downer animal. She said that the positive test result, while lamentable, showed that the department's disease surveillance program was working. But three people who actually observed the cow the day it was slaughtered said it did not have trouble walking and that it was randomly selected for testing. Affidavits and slaughterhouse documents obtained by the Government Accountability Project directly contradict Veneman's statements.

According to one department veterinarian familiar with the circumstances surrounding the testing, chance, not an effective surveillance program, led to the cow's discovery: "It was only by dumb luck that we found that cow at all."

In a letter to Veneman following the disclosure of those documents relating to the test of the cow, Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va., and Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman and ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, said the information "raises questions about USDA's credibility" and demands explanation.

Hansen is not convinced federal officials really want to know how prevalent BSE is, especially in light of the testing failure in Texas. "They don't appear to be very serious. We think the sampling program is totally inadequate. And they haven't said how many animals they will test."

Even more troubling, he says, was an Agriculture ruling in April that prohibits companies from conducting their own BSE testing-authorization that some companies have sought in an effort to retain their export market to Japan. Thirteen consumer and food safety organizations have petitioned Veneman to reconsider the decision, but the majority of large cattle producers in the United States are vehemently opposed to the idea.

"Essentially, USDA is telling companies that they cannot voluntarily meet higher standards that another country sets," Hansen says.USDA's rationale is that if some companies do their own testing, consumers may become concerned about the safety of beef from cows that are not tested. Hansen compares the logic to limiting car safety standards: "It would be like saying manufacturers cannot exceed safety standards because consumers would get the impression that cars meeting the minimum standards were not safe. It's bizarre logic."