USDA: More mad cow testing will demonstrate beef’s safety

By AMY LORENTZEN, Associated Press Writer

AMES — Although critics say the United States lags behind other nations in testing for mad cow disease, scientists and the cattle industry say they are working to ensure that the nation’s beef supply is safe.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tested more than 138,000 cattle since June for the brain-wasting disease and plans to test another 130,000 over the next six months to a year, said Randall Levings, director of the USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames.

“Basically, the plan says we’ll test everything we can get a hold of,” he said.
The increased testing comes after the nation’s first case of mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was confirmed last December in a Canadian-born dairy cow in Washington state.

BSE attacks a cow’s nervous system. A person who eats contaminated meat could contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, nearly always fatal.

Chris Waldrop, spokesman for the Consumer Federation of America, said he’s not convinced the USDA surveillance program can rule out the risk of BSE in the United States.

The consumer group advocates testing all cattle older than 30 months, as well as sampling some healthy animals. Currently, only high risk animals are tested — those older than 30 months and showing some sign of illness.

Other countries, including Japan, check all domestically bred cattle entering the food chain. In October, Japan recorded its 14th case of BSE.

The European Union requires tests on cattle older than 30 months destined for slaughter.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, believes the USDA also could do more.

“We can do more … to give a higher level of assurance to people about their food and what they’re eating. We have just not been as rigorous as some other countries in this area,” he said.

Harkin has asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the surveillance program, citing worries about accuracy and the breadth of the testing.

“We keep getting anecdotal stories about a steer or something coming in and they’re hobbling a little bit and, so what, they push them through anyway,” he said. “It has to be almost downed and frothing at the mouth before they take it out. We need better surveillance.”

Levings said testing only a percentage of the nation’s high-risk cattle — about 446,000 of the 45 million cows in the United States — meets World Organization for Animal Health standards.

“It’s been shown in Europe and in other places that if you have the disease, you’re much, much more likely to pick it up in a downer animal … than just if you went out and tested a lot of animals,” he said. “I feel really good about the pool.”

Some agriculture experts and politicians have advocated for the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration to establish a national livestock tracking system as a way to protect consumers.

Gary Weber, executive director of regulatory affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Association, said more than a decade of testing combined with the higher number of animals being tested means a safe beef supply.

“This leads us through all of these years of analysis and testing to be very confident that the risk of BSE in the United States is very low,” he said.