January 16, 2004

 

 

No Mad Cow Tests In Washington First 7 Months Of 2003

 

Federal agriculture officials did not test any commercial cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, through the first seven months of 2003 in Washington state, where the first U.S. case of the disease was detected last month, according to records obtained by United Press International.

 

UPI reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's records of mad cow screenings, conducted on 35,000 animals between 2001 to 2003, also reveal no animals were tested for the past two years at Vern's Moses Lake Meats, the Washington slaughterhouse where the mad cow case was first detected.

 

In addition, the report said, no mad cow tests were conducted during the two-year period at any of the six federally registered slaughterhouses in Washington state. This includes Washington's biggest slaughterhouse, Washington Beef in Toppenish, the 17th largest in the country - which slaughters 290,000 head per year - and two facilities in Pasco that belong to Tyson, the largest beef slaughtering company in the U.S., the UPI story said.

 

Nearly every test conducted in Washington over the two-year period was on animals from Midway Meats in Centralia, the packing plant where Vern's Moses sent the infected cow carcass, UPI reported. The meat was distributed to several states where some people apparently consumed it, raising concerns about the possibility of contracting the human equivalent of mad cow, an always-fatal, brain-wasting condition known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, UPI said.

 

The USDA said the meat posed little risk to consumers because the most infectious parts - the brain and spinal cord - had been removed, the UPI report said.

 

The testing records, obtained by UPI under the Freedom of Information Act, which the USDA delayed releasing for six months, also show a number of other gaps in the agency's national surveillance strategy for mad cow disease.

 

"I can't believe that," Felicia Nestor, food safety program director of the whistleblower organization the Government Accountability Project, in Washington, D.C., said of the USDA's lack of testing in Washington, UPI said.

 

Nestor questioned why the USDA would not implement more testing after the finding of a case of mad cow in Alberta, Canada, in May of 2003, in a border state such as Washington. The records show after May and through July, however, no commercial cows in Washington state were tested, UPI reported.

 

"It's right near Alberta ... and everybody knows a lot of cattle cross over the border from Canada into the United States," Nestor told UPI. Approximately 1.7 million Canadian cattle entered the U.S. in 2002.

 

GAP has followed the mad cow surveillance program closely for several years and Thursday is to release statements from current USDA inspectors, who said the surveillance system is not administered uniformly across the country, UPI said in the report.

 

In some cases, the inspectors said, the plant personnel - not USDA veterinarians - are in charge of selecting which animals go for testing, UPI said.

 

"In the interest of transparency, USDA needs to answer the obvious questions raised by these findings," Nestor said.

 

USDA spokesman Jim Rogers told UPI that some states, such as Washington, may not get tested during some periods of the year because the agency's system is based on sampling from eight regions of the country rather than each state.

 

Asked if the agency tries to sample from all slaughterhouses, Rogers said in the UPI report: "Not necessarily." Some plants do not take downer cattle so the USDA will not conduct much, if any, testing at these facilities because the agency wants to target the high-risk animals," he said.

 

In addition, Rogers said in the UPI report, the samples taken each year by the USDA are adequate to detect mad cow if it is present at the rate of one-in-a-million animals.

 

"As long as they take the required number of samples, they're OK," he said.

 

Nestor said the failure to screen any animals for a two-year period at Vern's in Moses Lake, Wash., where a Holstein cow tested positive for mad cow on Dec. 22, raises questions about the ability of the mad cow surveillance program to focus on cows most vulnerable to the disease, the UPI report said.

 

Vern's Moses Lake is known for slaughtering older and injured dairy cows, which are considered the cattle most at risk of developing mad cow disease. The cow that tested positive was a 6.5 year old dairy cow.

 

Many of the top dairy slaughtering plants around the country either do not appear in the testing records at all or are listed only a couple of times, UPI said.