Senator challenges USDA mad cow testing plan

Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, challenged Agriculture Secretary Veneman Monday to prove to him the Agriculture Department's plan to test cows for mad cow disease is statistically valid.

In a letter to Veneman, Harkin said he had "fundamental questions" about whether the department's testing plan for mad cow disease that is supposed to begin June 1 "is properly designed according to scientific and statistical principles."

Harkin noted that after a single case of mad cow disease was discovered in Washington state in December, an international panel of experts on the disease -- known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- recommended that USDA increase testing.

USDA announced it would move from testing a total of 20,000 animals per year to testing between 201,000 to 268,000 cattle over 30 months of age, considered high-risk, and 20,000 younger cattle, considered a lower risk. The goal is to detect BSE at prevalence as low as 1 in 10 million.

"The plan seems to be dictated primarily by how many cattle USDA wants to test, rather than by the number that would have to be tested, using statistical methods, to reach accurate and reliable conclusions," Harkin said.

He also charged that USDA "seems to have assembled an ad hoc mixture of somewhat increased testing, but less than the expert panel recommended, along with principles from the Harvard Risk Assessment."

Some scientists and veterinarians have suggested 20,000 may be too few to test to yield any statistically valid conclusions regarding the existence or prevalence of BSE in such a sub-population of apparently healthy cattle, Harkin said. "Previously, you and other USDA officials repeatedly stated that 40,000 tests would be 47 times the international standard, but that was plainly not true," Harkin said.

Harkin also said USDA needs to come up with a clearer definition of so-called downer cows. USDA officials said the BSE-infected cow in Washington state was a downer, meaning nonambulatory, but workers at the plant have said the cow was able to stand.

Harkin's letter followed substantial criticism of the USDA effort on mad cow disease at the Consumer Federation of America's annual conference Friday on food safety.

Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel Prize-winning University of California scientist who discovered the prion -- the agent that causes BSE and its human form -- has said all cattle should be tested for BSE.

Peter Fernandez, the associate administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said USDA officials consider Prusiner "a fine scientist and a fine businessman" because he has his own BSE test kit.

Fernandez said USDA would defer to the World Organization for Animal Health -- known by its French acronym, OIE -- and has been trying to arrange a meeting for Prusiner at the OIE.

But food safety advocate Carol Tucker Foreman said Fernandez's statement about Prusiner showed the USDA "only wants to talk about animal health, not human health." Foreman said she did not believe in a food safety "crisis" over mad cow disease, but USDA has not been conducting itself in a manner to reassure consumers.

Foreman said Creekstone, the Kansas meat processor that wants to test all its cattle for mad cow disease so it can re-enter the Japanese market, should be allowed to do the tests. USDA has refused to give Creekstone a license for the tests.