The United States is pressing the 50 countries that banned American beef imports because of mad cow disease to lift the restriction. The Agriculture Department plans to increase ten fold the number of cows it tests each year for the disease.
But that number is still well short of the 100 percent testing requested by Japan, a major market for U.S. beef. In an effort to woo back international customers, Creekstone Farms, a small Kansas meatpacker, has proposed testing all of its beef. Creekstone is proposing to pay for the testing itself, and passing the costs -- as much as $20 per head -- along to its customers. Creekstone Vice President Kevin Pence concedes that it's purely a marketing move. The company's cattle are all under 30 months old, and only cattle older than 30 months are considered at risk for mad cow disease. The import ban on U.S. beef has cost Creekstone some 20 percent of its business. Pence says another year like this would put Creekstone out of business.
My, this whole thing just gets more and more impressive.
Creekstone Farms (and, I gather, one or two other private producers) wants to test every single one of its cattle bound for market for Mad Cow. A really good thing, you'd think.
Other firms don't want Creekstone to do this. Not surprising, because the other firms don't want to be required to do so, either by law or as a way to compete with Creekstone. They don't want the additional cost or hassle, and they don't want to lose customers who might trust Creekstone's fully tested herds more than they would trust others' 28-percent tested herds.
It turns out that the USDA isn't terribly thrilled by the idea, either. They are unthrilled to the point that they may not allow Creekstone to test all their cattle or to significantly exceed testing guidelines. This despite the fact that Japan, a principal export market, has repeatedly and flatly stated that it will not allow US beef back into its markets until every single head is tested.
The really surprising thing is that Creekstone has to petition the USDA to be allowed to do this. You would think that Creekstone could simply just do it. Normally this sort of federal testing requirement is a minimum, along the lines of you MUST test AT LEAST 28 percent of your cattle bound for market for this disease. If individual companies want to exceed federal requirements, the government normally says, go ahead, knock yourself out.
Part of the problem seems to be the issue of who, exactly, does the testing. The cattle can only be certified disease free by the USDA itself, and the USDA will not allow (and, to be honest, does not have the staff or inspectors for) more than its set percentage to be randomly sampled and tested by its own people. Private companies have not yet been certified for these tests ... and to be somewhat fair, there is cause for the USDA to be wary of allowing private companies to perform and certify their own tests; if they allow firms to self-certify their own tests, there's nothing to stop them from doing an impressive amount of falsification. That is, after all, part of what got the world-wide beef industry into this mess in the first place. Logically, what they really should do is to allow independent companies -- companies with no connections to either the beef industry or the government -- to be certified.
There's also the issue of individual states' requirements. For example, California wants to require all beef in the state to be tested.
A week after federal officials announced plans to increase testing for mad cow disease, two California legislators introduced a bill to require all cattle in the state to be tested for the disease. If passed, SB 1425 could pit California against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is considering whether to allow anyone other than its scientists to test for mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. [...] The measure would require all beef and beef-based meat products sold or processed in California to come from cattle that have tested negative for the brain-wasting disease. It would also require that all cattle slaughtered in the state be tested.
While this may get around the issue of beef-industry self-interest, it still leaves the question of who, exactly, will perform and certify the tests open. All of this also leaves open the possibility that companies interested in the export market -- and not all producers are -- may wind up testing 100% of their cattle, and companies only interested in the domestic market may stick with the USDA's mandated percentage. Thus, we would wind up bearing a much higher risk of getting untested beef into our food.
All that said, the USDA has not been completely idle on this issue. They've certified the use of rapid-assay testing for the first time:
The Department of Agriculture has licensed two rapid tests for use in detecting mad cow disease, known technically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The tests, made by Bio-Rad Laboratories in Hercules, Calif., and Idexx Laboratories in Westbrook, Maine, produce results in four to five hours.
USDA had announced in mid-March that it would for the first time use rapid assays in its BSE testing program, which aims to examine brain tissue from 201,000 to 268,000 slaughtered cattle over a 12- to 18-month period (C&EN, March 22, page 7). USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa, as well as NVSL facilities in 25 states, will use the Bio-Rad and Idexx kits for the testing. The program is expected to start in June.
The Bio-Rad kit is the most widely used BSE assay in Europe and is used almost exclusively in Japan to test all its slaughtered animals. The Idexx kit has been submitted to the European Union for approval.
So our results will at least be as accurate as those used in Europe and Japan. They just won't be as comprehensive.
For now, anyway.
Posted by iain at March 31, 2004 01:44 PM
