April 19, 2004, 8:20 a.m.
Mad About Mad Cow
Food-safety critics should calm down.

By Dave Juday

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced a plan to increase the number of tests it conducts for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as Mad Cow disease. Several critics of the current testing regime, however, are still not satisfied. Perhaps they never will be.

Those critics include Japan, the second largest importer of U.S. beef. But this week Vice President Dick Cheney and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met to discuss the issue of BSE and Japan reopening its market, as Mexico, the largest importer of U.S. beef, already has. Japan had been insisting on the impossible standard of 100-percent testing of our 95 million U.S. cattle (Japan has less than four million head of cattle, by comparison), and contends that the new U.S. plan is insufficient.

Indeed, USDA's testing plan will not add much in terms of food safety — but that's only because the system is so safe already. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the chance of human infection from BSE is about ten billion to one. Even one of the most outspoken domestic proponents of increased testing, the not-for-profit Government Accountability Project (GAP) — whose self-appointed mission is in part to expose "the flaws in the current meat and poultry inspection systems" — admits to the safety of the current system. Says the group's spokeswoman, Felicia Nestor, of BSE risk, "The odds are low, but I think the public thinks the odds are zero. With more testing we could make those odds a whole lot lower."

The question that should be asked of GAP is: How much lower is "a lot?" A study from Harvard University concludes that the human-health risk from BSE "is as close to zero as you can get." How much more testing is enough? Critics complain that USDA tested "only 40,000" cows last year — but that's 47 times the level recommended by the Organization of International Epizootics, the standard-setting scientific body for animal health. Now, according to USDA, testing will expand more than six-fold, to about 260,000 cows over the next year to 18 months.

According to the advocacy group Consumers Union "that's not enough." Their concerns, however, are specious. Indeed, there's an important food-safety point lost in the media debate over how much testing is enough — that is, what, in fact, the testing is for. With the new safeguards that USDA has implemented, the most high-risk cattle for BSE, non-ambulatory or "downer" cattle, will be completely excluded from the food system. Moreover, all tissue considered "specified risk material" (SRM) — that which is capable of transmitting the infectious agent, known as a "prion" — will be barred from the human food system, whether it's from at-risk cows or not. These SRMs include brain tissue and tonsils, the latter of which have less than a one-percent chance of carrying the prions, even in a BSE-infected cow. In other words, the threat of BSE has been excluded from the food system; the testing is a matter of surveillance.

Meat and muscle tissue do not carry prions, even in infected cows. Scientifically speaking, therefore, meat from a "Mad Cow" should be considered safe. Nonetheless, in what USDA rightly characterizes as an "abundance of caution" USDA has banned from the food chain not just infected cows, but any cow that even fits the category of being at-risk for infection. Also banned from the food chain is non-meat tissue from — even healthy cows, as such tissue is where the prions could be carried in infected cows.

Testing in Europe, still home to almost all cases of Mad Cow (in fact the United Kingdom is home to more than 180,000 cases of an approximate 190,000 cases discovered worldwide since 1986), has revealed that virtually all the cows shown to have Mad Cow are from an equivalent to our "downer" category and are on average more than eight years old.

Therefore, besides banning the downer cows, USDA will also increase the testing of older animals — those over 30 months of age — and specifically target animals who are seven years or older under the supervision of trained USDA veterinarians who inspect slaughter houses. This testing category will be expanded to more than 20,000 cows. It should be noted that about 75 to 80 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the U.S. are under 30 months of age, and that as the U.S. enters its ninth straight year of a shrinking cattle herd, there are fewer and fewer of those old timers around (cattle of that age as a percent of the national herd are perhaps fewer in the U.S. than anywhere in the world).

For context, consider that in the aftermath of the discovery of a cow infected with Mad Cow, an intense seven-week effort conducted by U.S. federal and state officials and Canadian food-safety officials identified more than 75,000 animals who could have been associated with the infected cow's birth herd in Canada. That led to 189 distinct investigations on 51 farms in three states, which further led to 255 suspected at-risk animals, all of which were destroyed, and all of whom tested negative for BSE. If another case of BSE were found in the U.S. — and, under the new testing regime, it is almost a statistical certainty that if there are five cases here at least one will be discovered (according to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which reviewed the plan) — it would not be an indictment of the food-safety system. It would most likely confirm the safeguards that keep infected cattle out of the beef supply.

Ironically, the rationale behind the "more testing" lobby was a report by an international panel of experts convened by USDA Secretary Ann Veneman to review the U.S. response to BSE. The panel mostly lauded USDA's handling of the situation. Where it did recommend more testing, it was highly specific: for cattle over 30 months of age, from at-risk populations, for a one-year duration only, and primarily to provide surveillance for BSE from animals outside the food supply. Those are exactly the criteria adopted by USDA — and, accordingly, the international panel fully endorses the plan. Yet critics remain.

To be sure, many critics have ulterior motives beyond a strict food-safety rationale. The Japanese, for example, had their own outbreak of Mad Cow in 2001, which cost their small-cattle industry dearly, in favor of imports. Japan is now using the two BSE cases in North America as a means to protect its own market by trying to rebuild demand for domestic beef. There are plenty of homegrown motives here in the U.S., too. John Kerry, for example, when the news of the BSE-infected cow was made known last December, said he wanted "to increase the testing and inspections overall," and added, "I urge President Bush for once not to listen to the demand of corporate America and act on behalf of the health and economic needs of all Americans." Two more proponents of increased testing are the Organic Consumers Association, which eschews meat from traditionally raised livestock, and the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, a vegetarian advocacy group.

Despite these and other groups' efforts against the USDA plan, most individual consumers are not so critical. As Ann Veneman recently noted at the National Press Club, "the Japanese consumer has begun to rely on the high quality U.S. beef that we send" to them, and restaurants in Japan "are now pressuring their government to allow the market to open." Here at home, a survey of consumers from the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University found that the median score, on a scale of 1 to 10, rating the government's actions was an eight — and that was before the increased testing regime was announced last week. In short, the U.S. has sound regulations, backed up by safeguards and surrounded by firewalls, when it comes to BSE prevention and food safety. Judging by the continued demand for beef and the Rutgers polling results, consumers feel confident, even without more testing. And by any objective scientific standard they should.

— Dave Juday is a commodity-market analyst.

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