After the nation’s first case of mad cow disease was discovered, government regulators and industry officials worked quickly to reassure consumers it was safe to eat a steak. A year later, you would never guess there was any concern at all - the nation’s appetite for beef has remained strong.

But consumer advocates say there’s a problem with that lack of reaction from the public - it might have diminished the impact of the mad-cow case on improving food safety. Aside from several steps taken shortly after a single cow in Washington state was found to be infected with the disease, reforms that were promised remain unfulfilled.

Federal regulators, trying to reassure U.S. consumers, promised to strengthen the country’s food-safety rules. For the most part, it didn’t happen, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center of Science in the Public Interest.

“Consumers didn’t react very much, so (regulators) don’t feel the need to take action, and I think that is unfortunate,” Smith DeWaal said.

Certainly, significant changes were made to strengthen existing safeguards already in place.

Some consumer groups say the most important was the banning of so-called downer cattle - animals too sick to stand - from slaughter for human consumption. Regulators at the U.S. Department of Agriculture believe new rules that forbid potentially infectious material, such as spinal cords, from being incorporated into food are the most significant reform.

The government’s testing program for mad cow - formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE - was expanded. It is to include more than 221,000 animals, 10 times the number tested in 2003, by the time it is done. The surveillance program went into effect June 1 and is to be completed in a year to 18 months. As of Sunday, the agency had tested 152,984 animals.

In Colorado, mad cow disease has affected both operations and sales, said Jim Herlihy, spokesman for Swift & Co., the state’s largest meatpacking plant, in Greeley.

“It has changed the entire industry and our ability to export our product,” Herlihy said, noting that Japan and South Korea, two of the industry’s biggest trading partners, still have at least partial bans on U.S. beef imports. Mexico recently lifted its ban on U.S. beef.

Like the rest of the industry, Herlihy said, Swift has sought to improve its meatpacking procedures. It increased employee training and the number of people working on the production line, and segregated specific cow parts that are susceptible to infection.

But animal feed rules designed to prevent future cases of mad cow have not been strengthened. And a national animal identification system designed to track individual cattle - in the works before the BSE discovery but supposedly expedited after its discovery - has yet to be fully implemented.

Other proposed changes, food-safety advocates said, were made not to benefit U.S. consumers, but rather those overseas, whose countries quickly closed their borders to American beef imports after the mad-cow discovery.

For example, Smith DeWaal said, during recent trade talks with Japan, U.S. negotiators seemed willing to apply stricter regulations to cattle 20 months or older that would be marketed to Japanese consumers. The regulations would start at 30 months for cattle aimed at the domestic market.