Mad cow fears spark review of ‘vegetable-only’ livestock feeds

A series of secret tests on cattle feed conducted by the federal government earlier this year found that more than half the feed tested contained animal parts not listed on the ingredients, according to internal documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun.

The test results raise troubling questions about whether rules banning the feeding of cattle remains to other cattle – the primary way in which mad cow disease is spread – are being routinely violated.

According to internal Canadian Food Inspection Agency documents – obtained by The Sun through the Access to Information Act – 70 feed samples labelled as vegetable-only were tested by the agency between January and March of this year. Of those, 41 (59 per cent) were found to contain “undeclared animal materials.”

“The presence of animal protein materials [in vegetable feeds] may indicate … deliberate or accidental inclusion of animal proteins in feeds where they are not supposed to be,” said an internal memo to the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency last April that described the test results as “worrisome.”

The memo, from Sergio Tolusso, feed program coordinator for the CFIA, said the contamination could also have been caused inadvertently – for example, through the transporting of different feeds in the same trucks.

Controlled experiments have shown an animal needs to consume as little as one milligram of infected material – about the size of a grain of sand – from an animal with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to develop the brain-wasting disease.

Michael Hansen, an expert on mad cow disease with the U.S.-based Consumers Union, the independent research institute that publishes Consumer Reports, said the CFIA tests are troubling.

“The fact that stuff that is labelled as vegetable feed, that 59 per cent of it has animal material, that’s incredibly high,” said Hansen, who has a PhD in biology. “This should be a wake-up call to CFIA. It doesn’t look good.”

Michael McBane, national co-ordinator for the Canadian Health Coalition, a watchdog group, said the tests suggest the feed ban is not being adequately enforced.

“It demonstrates the fact that the [feed] ban is basically meaningless,” McBane said. “It’s pretty well recognized that we have mad cow disease in Canada because of contaminated feed. It’s the frontlines in the battle to stop the spread.”

Consumption of beef from cows infected with BSE has been linked to the development in humans of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a deadly brain-wasting illness.

In the 1990s, the United Kingdom suffered an outbreak of BSE that was followed by more than 100 people dying of vCJD.

In 1997, as a precaution, Canada implemented a ban on feeding ruminants – like sheep and cattle – to other ruminants. However, ruminant remains can still be fed to chicken and pigs, and chicken and pig remains can be fed to cattle.

With the discovery of a lone Alberta cow with BSE in May 2003, the feed ban took on added importance.

“Compliance with the existing ban is a critical factor in preventing the disease from spreading to other animals,” Tolusso wrote in January in an internal memo to CFIA president Dick Fadden. “Major non-compliance with the feed ban cannot be tolerated, and measures to address the risks of domestic ruminants being exposed to prohibited animal proteins must be initiated promptly.”

CREDIT: John Lucas, CanWest News Service
A majority of the first batch of 70 ‘vegetable-only’ cattle feed samples were found to be contaminated with animal protein.