MAD COW DISEASE!!

[Timber Loftis]

Originally posted by MagiK: who thinks PETA stands for People for the Eating of Tasty Animals ;D

[img]graemlins/whackya.gif[/img]
Let me do that once more so you don't forget. [img]graemlins/whackya.gif[/img] Besides, what if Animal doesn't want to be eaten?

Why not People for the Enjoyment of T & A?

Umm I belong to that one too TL [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Lanesra]

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing, for American cattle farmers ?

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...55E401,00.html

[Timber Loftis]

Today's NY TIMES - Essay on a "Captured Agency" and on how the USA is repeating the mistakes of other countries, mistakes rooted in capitalist greed.

January 2, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Cow Jumped Over the U.S.D.A.
By ERIC SCHLOSSER

Alisa Harrison has worked tirelessly the last two weeks to spread the message that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, is not a risk to American consumers. As spokeswoman for Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman, Ms. Harrison has helped guide news coverage of the mad cow crisis, issuing statements, managing press conferences and reassuring the world that American beef is safe.

For her, it's a familiar message. Before joining the department, Ms. Harrison was director of public relations for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the beef industry's largest trade group, where she battled government food safety efforts, criticized Oprah Winfrey for raising health questions about American hamburgers, and sent out press releases with titles like "Mad Cow Disease Not a Problem in the U.S."

Ms. Harrison may well be a decent and sincere person who feels she has the public's best interest at heart. Nonetheless, her effortless transition from the cattlemen's lobby to the Agriculture Department is a fine symbol of all that is wrong with America's food safety system. Right now you'd have a hard time finding a federal agency more completely dominated by the industry it was created to regulate. Dale Moore, Ms. Veneman's chief of staff, was previously the chief lobbyist for the cattlemen's association. Other veterans of that group have high-ranking jobs at the department, as do former meat-packing executives and a former president of the National Pork Producers Council.

The Agriculture Department has a dual, often contradictory mandate: to promote the sale of meat on behalf of American producers and to guarantee that American meat is safe on behalf of consumers. For too long the emphasis has been on commerce, at the expense of safety. The safeguards against mad cow that Ms. Veneman announced on Tuesday — including the elimination of "downer cattle" (cows that cannot walk) from the food chain, the removal of high-risk material like spinal cords from meat processing, the promise to introduce a system to trace cattle back to the ranch — have long been demanded by consumer groups. Their belated introduction seems to have been largely motivated by the desire to have foreign countries lift restrictions on American beef imports.

Worse, on Wednesday Ms. Veneman ruled out the the most important step to protect Americans from mad cow disease: a large-scale program to test the nation's cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

The beef industry has fought for nearly two decades against government testing for any dangerous pathogens, and it isn't hard to guess why: when there is no true grasp of how far and wide a food-borne pathogen has spread, there's no obligation to bear the cost of dealing with it.

The United States Department of Agriculture is by no means the first such body to be captured by industry groups. In Europe and Japan the spread of disease was facilitated by the repeated failure of government ministries to act on behalf of consumers.

In Britain, where mad cow disease was discovered, the ministry of agriculture misled the public about the risks of the disease from the very beginning. In December 1986, the first government memo on the new pathogen warned that it might have "severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for humans" and thus all news of it was to be kept "confidential." Ten years later, when Britons began to fall sick with a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, thought to be the human form of mad cow, Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg assured them that "British beef is wholly safe." It was something of a shock, three months later, when the health minister, Stephen Dorrell, told Parliament that mad cow disease might indeed be able to cross the species barrier and sicken human beings.

In the wake of that scandal, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Japan banned imports of British beef — yet they denied for years there was any risk of mad cow disease among their own cattle. Those denials proved false, once widespread testing for the disease was introduced. An investigation by the French Senate in 2001 found that the Agriculture Ministry minimized the threat of mad cow and "constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures" that "might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri-foodstuffs industry." In Tokyo, a similar mad cow investigation in 2002 accused the Japanese Agriculture Ministry of "serious maladministration" and concluded that it had "always considered the immediate interests of producers in its policy judgments."

Instead of learning from the mistakes of other countries, America now seems to be repeating them. In the past week much has been made of the "firewall" now protecting American cattle from infection with mad cow disease — the ban on feeding rendered cattle meat or beef byproducts to cattle that was imposed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1997. That ban has been cited again and again by Agriculture Department and industry spokesmen as some sort of guarantee that mad cow has not taken hold in the United States. Unfortunately, this firewall may have gaps big enough to let a herd of steer wander through it.

First, the current ban still allows the feeding of cattle blood to young calves — a practice that Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the proteins that cause mad cow disease, calls "a really stupid idea." More important, the ban on feed has hardly been enforced. A 2001 study by the Government Accounting Office found that one-fifth of American feed and rendering companies that handle prohibited material had no systems in place to prevent the contamination of cattle feed. According to the report, more than a quarter of feed manufacturers in Colorado, one of the top beef-producing states, were not even aware of the F.D.A. measures to prevent mad cow disease, four years after their introduction.

A follow-up study by the accounting office in 2002 said that the F.D.A.'s "inspection database is so severely flawed" that "it should not be used to assess compliance" with the feed ban. Indeed, 14 years after Britain announced its ban on feeding cattle proteins to cattle, the Food and Drug Administration still did not have a complete listing of the American companies rendering cattle and manufacturing cattle feed.

The Washington State Holstein at the center of the current mad cow crisis may have been born in Canada, but even that possibility offers little assurance about the state of mad cow disease in the United States. Last year 1.7 million live cattle were imported from Canada — and almost a million more came from Mexico, a country whose agricultural ministry has been even slower than its American counterpart to impose strict safeguards against mad cow disease.

Last year the Agriculture Department tested only 20,000 cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, out of the roughly 35 million slaughtered. Belgium, with a cattle population a small fraction of ours, tested about 20 times that number for the disease. Japan tests every cow and steer that people are going to eat.

Instead of testing American cattle, the government has heavily relied on work by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to determine how much of a threat mad cow disease poses to the United States. For the past week the Agriculture Department has emphasized the reassuring findings of these Harvard studies, but a closer examination of them is not comforting. Although thorough and well intended, they are based on computer models of how mad cow disease might spread. Their accuracy is dependent on their underlying assumptions. "Our model is not amenable to formal validation," says the Harvard group in its main report, "because there are no controlled experiments in which the introduction and consequences of B.S.E. introduction to a country has been monitored and measured."

Unfortunately, "formal validation" is exactly what we need. And the only way to get it is to begin widespread testing of American cattle for mad cow disease — with particular focus on dairy cattle, the animals at highest risk for the disease and whose meat provides most of the nation's fast food hamburgers.

In addition, we need to give the federal government mandatory recall powers, so that any contaminated or suspect meat can be swiftly removed from the market. As of now all meat recalls are voluntary and remarkably ineffective at getting bad meat off supermarket shelves. And most of all, we need to create an independent food safety agency whose sole responsibility is to protect the public health. Let the Agriculture Department continue to promote American meat worldwide — but empower a new agency to ensure that meat is safe to eat.

Yes, the threat to human health posed by mad cow remains uncertain. But testing American cattle for dangerous pathogens will increase the cost of beef by just pennies per pound. Failing to do so could impose a far higher price, both in dollars and in human suffering.


Eric Schlosser is author of "Fast Food Nation" and "Reefer Madness."

[Timber Loftis]

Today's NY Times

January 5, 2004
Mad Cow Forces Beef Industry to Change Course
By MICHAEL MOSS, RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SIMON ROMERO

Jeffrey Behling, a dairy farmer in Washington State, used to burn the carcasses of his hobbled "downer" cattle until he found there was a market for their meat. Even so, selling damaged cows for human consumption never sat well with Mr. Behling, who in 2001 briefly had in his feedlot the Holstein cow identified last month as the downer with mad cow disease.

"It's an absurd practice," Mr. Behling, 44, said in an interview. "Foolishness caused by maybe a certain amount of greed."

The financial motive that drove the industry to defend practices like selling downers has been turned on its head by the discovery of mad cow disease. Now, in an attempt to rescue the market for American beef, the industry is being forced to accept regulation it has long fought.

But some large American companies that process and sell beef had already abandoned those more controversial practices, which had been a rallying point for food safety advocates since mad cow disease appeared overseas nearly two decades ago. While a schism developed in the industry, the current crisis reveals how government regulators sided with companies that adhered to those methods of operation.

When an animal rights group, Farm Sanctuary, and an individual, Michael Baur, sued the government to force a ban on using downer animals for food, government lawyers persuaded a federal judge to dismiss the case on the ground that mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had not appeared in the United States.

"The threat of B.S.E. from downed livestock is not `real and immediate,' " the lawyers argued. "B.S.E. has never been found in the country's livestock, and there is no reasoned basis to expect that it ever will be considering the measures being taken against it." An appeals court reinstated the case on Dec. 16, 2003 — one week before the announcement that the disease had been discovered.

For years, the industry had a simple strategy: Fight proposals that would crimp its ability to squeeze as much revenue as possible from each cow. The finances were compelling.

At least 150,000 downer cattle — those who because of injury or illness cannot walk — were sold annually for human consumption for as much as a few hundred dollars apiece, extra money for cattlemen struggling with low prices. Food safety advocates warned that these cattle could carry disease, but the political power of the industry was evident in 2002 when its lobbyists helped defeat legislation banning the commercial slaughter of downer cattle even after it had been approved by the House and the Senate.

In the 1990's, meatpackers bought machines that were able to strip a few extra pounds off carcasses while saving millions in labor costs. Critics tried to limit the use of the so-called advanced meat recovery systems, citing studies showing that the extra meat was sometimes laced with nerve tissues, where mad cow disease can incubate. But by one consultant's account several years ago, getting rid of the machines would mean a loss to the industry of more than $130 million a year.

Now the money saved by fighting those changes is dwarfed by the billions the industry stands to lose unless it can convince consumers, especially overseas, that its beef is safe.

"They played a high-risk, high-stakes game, and they lost their bet," said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, a New York Democrat who pushed for a ban on the commercial slaughter of downer cows. "Now the perception among millions of people is that this product isn't safe, and they can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

It Was the Best of Times

As part of the campaign to restore consumer confidence, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman last week banned the use of downer cattle for meat and imposed further regulation on advanced recovery systems. Still, after the disease was detected last month, cattle prices plunged about 20 percent, while the $3.6 billion export market for beef, veal and variety meats largely evaporated, according to Cattle-Fax, an industry research firm. This came after United States beef prices had reached record highs, partly because of the restriction of imports from Canada after the mad cow outbreak there and the rising popularity of beef-friendly eating trends like the Atkins diet.

"The last year had been heaven on earth for beef producers," said Don Stull, a co-author of "Slaughterhouse Blues," a study of the meat industry.

But even in the best of times, meatpacking remains a cutthroat business. Steve Kay, the publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, estimates that profit margins rarely climb above 2 percent as companies deal with fluctuating cattle prices and relatively higher labor costs.

Those financial constraints, which led meatpackers to harvest every last pound of meat, also caused consolidation in the industry.

Five meatpackers now slaughter more than 80 percent of the nation's steers and heifers: Tyson, Excel, Swift, National Beef Packing and Smithfield. Bigger slaughterhouses have cut processing costs by as much as 40 percent, according to Agriculture Department data. Wholesale beef prices have declined almost every year since the early 1980's.

"We have the cheapest food supply in the world in terms of what we spend on food as part of our incomes," said Dean Cliver, a professor of population health at the University of California at Davis.

Affordable beef has helped make for easy relations between the industry and federal regulators. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group, a dozen top officials of the Department of Agriculture have worked or lobbied for the industry or for industry trade groups. They include Jim Moseley, the deputy agriculture secretary, who was managing director of Infinity Pork LLC, a hog farm; Dr. Chuck Lambert, the deputy under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, who was chief economist of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association; and Mary Waters, the assistant secretary for Congressional relations, who was senior director and legislative counsel for ConAgra Foods. "It's not surprising the industry has so much influence given the number of U.S.D.A. officials who have been hired directly out of the meat industry," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, the center's food safety director.

Alisa Harrison, the department's press secretary, said Secretary Veneman set policy by consulting a wide range of advisers and interest groups. "To make a sweeping charge that her decisions are influenced just because she has people from industry on her staff is very disingenuous," she said. She also noted that the department's top food safety official, Dr. Elsa A. Murano, had been director of the Center for Food Safety at Texas A&M University.

Ms. Harrison also said the department had been attentive to the dangers of mad cow well before last month. "We were able to make the quick announcement that we did last week because a lot of the groundwork had been going on" since the discovery in May of a cow in Canada with the disease, she said. "These are things we have been looking at."

But the debate over the advanced recovery system shows how the industry and regulators have resisted pressure from safety advocates since the disease appeared in Britain in 1986 and then spread to 18 other European countries.

New Process, New Concerns

The technology, developed a decade ago, uses hydraulic pressure to force extra pounds off cow carcasses, producing filler for processed foods like hamburger, hot dogs and pizza toppings. Consumer groups initially complained that bone was getting into the advanced meat recovery product and argued that the product should not be labeled as beef. Then, in 1997, federal agriculture officials announced that they had found spinal cord tissue in some of the meat.

Concerned that the nerve tissue could increase the public's risk of contracting mad cow disease, consumer groups asked the government to ban the technology, said Linda Golodner, president of the National Consumers League.

But both the industry and government regulators resisted, arguing that the absence of the disease in the United States showed that there was no problem. "For us, so far, it's a non-public-health issue because we have no B.S.E.," Kaye Wachsmuth, who was then deputy administrator for public health science at the Agriculture Department, said in 1998.

There were other arguments against the ban. The machinery replaced workers who could suffer crippling injury from trimming the carcasses by hand; one consultant study estimated that 394 workers would be injured if slaughterhouses returned to hand-trimming.

Companies that sell the machines say such beef poses no threat. "The accepted science essentially states that there is not any relationship between B.S.E. and A.M.R.," said Harold T. Hodges, vice president of government relations and product quality for the BFD Corporation, one of the distributors of the machines. "We've never had an issue."

Proponents of the technology argued that proper enforcement of the technology, rather than a ban, could prevent contamination.

"It's always been a legitimate enforcement compliance issue to ensure that what you call beef is beef," said Robert Hibbert, a lawyer who represented meat processors that used the technology. "There is no justification for banning something on the basis that it has been removed by a machine rather than by hand with a knife."

But some industry officials worried that not every processor used the machinery properly. At an American Meat Institute conference in Chicago in 1997, an executive of a major beef producer warned that applying too much pressure would force bone material into the beefy mush. In addition, the spinal cord has to be carefully removed before the cow carcass is fed to the machine.

Second Thoughts

As federal officials continued to find traces of nervous-system tissue in recovered beef, some companies determined that the potential cost of these practices outweighed the gains.

With consumer groups pressing for a boycott of meat produced using advanced recovery technology, a host of restaurants and producers announced they were advanced meat recovery free, including General Mills and McDonald's, which swore off downer-cow meat as well.

In a fact sheet, McDonald's says, "These policies meet or exceed all government requirements, and have been reviewed by our international scientific council on B.S.E., made up of renowned experts in this field."

Meanwhile, some slaughterhouses had other reasons to stop using the machines. In late 2002, Shapiro Packing, a processor in Augusta, Ga., produced tainted beef using the machinery system. The contaminated material was destroyed, but the company had to spend a lot of money to shore up its operation, said Dane Bernard, vice president for food safety at Keystone Foods, which manages Shapiro Packing.

Additional workers were placed on the line to ensure that the carcasses were properly stripped of their spinal cords, and the company's inspections became nearly continuous, Mr. Bernard said. The new measures increased expenses while big beef buyers were boasting that their food was not processed using advanced meat-recovery systems. So last summer, Shapiro mothballed its machinery and returned to manual trimming.

"I can't say we had a crystal ball," Mr. Bernard said. "Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good."

The discovery of mad cow disease is likely to increase the debate over the technology. Dr. Wachsmuth, the agriculture official who defended the technology in 1998, said in an interview on Saturday that the absence of the disease had been an important factor in that defense. "The mere threat of it wasn't enough," said Dr. Wachsmuth, who is now retired. "Now that we do have B.S.E., maybe it should be revisited."

Dan Murphy, a spokesman for the American Meat Institute, the meatpackers' trade group, said the number of processors using the technology had recently fallen to fewer than 30 from 35. He said that the machines once produced several hundred million pounds of meat a year, but that a survey in late 2002 found the number had dropped to 45 million.

Even so, he said, "We're confident that this is a safe, wholesome product that doesn't trigger any concern or carry any danger in its use." But he acknowledged that some members of the association were less supportive: "There are companies that would just as soon we said nothing."

In her announcement last week, Secretary Veneman imposed regulations intended to further keep unwanted tissue from the food supply, but she stopped short of a ban on the technology.

Mr. Murphy, the industry spokesman, acknowledged that a further review of the technology was possible, especially if there is pressure from overseas trading partners. "Nobody is going to give up $1.2 billion in beef trade for a handful of A.M.R.," he said.

In Washington State, Mr. Behling, the onetime holder of the diseased cow, said that in the days since the discovery of mad cow, the industry has learned that lesson in global economics. Mr. Behling, who has a few thousand cows in his operation, said that when the occasional downer cow appeared, a slaughterer would drive out to his farm with a hoist and give him $100 for the hobbled animal.

But in the wake of the mad cow crisis, he said, "My feeling is that any money that dairy farmers might have made from downer cows, they gave it all back this week."

Hmmm. well i've given up on the way FDA had been inspecting the beef AND i've given up beef also. looks like seafood and poultry unless those animals get mad too.

the description of how the beef industry works to "squeeze as much revenue as possible from each cow" is reminiscent of what the nazis did to maximise the returns from their genocide of jews.

[wellard]

Originally posted by sultan: the description of how the beef industry works to "squeeze as much revenue as possible from each cow" is reminiscent of what the nazis did to maximise the returns from their genocide of jews.

I'm sorry Sultan. As an avid animal rights supporter and a strict vegetarian of fifteen years till recently, I find the mistreatment of animals upsetting to say the least. But to compare this with what the Germans did is very much over the top. Without getting too much off topic, I find the whole use of calling things nazi or the like demeans the horror and numbs the reaction to the human suffering during those evil times.

This is about ignorance, greed, and incompetence or worse from the government and its acceptance of morally corrupt and compromised agencies.

Originally posted by wellard: This is about ignorance, greed, and incompetence or worse from the government and its acceptance of morally corrupt and compromised agencies.

you're right, wellard. i cant see where i drew the analogy to nazis. thanks for putting me straight.

[ 01-06-2004, 09:59 PM: Message edited by: sultan ]

[Timber Loftis]

Drawing analogies to Nazis is laughable. I always regret it when I do it, and I reserve the right to laugh at you when you do it. [img]graemlins/biglaugh.gif[/img]