February 9, 2004

 

                       

US Animal-Tracking System Still Far Off

 

A national electronic-tracking system that could locate any cow, pig or chicken in America within 48 hours is still years away even though Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has promised to speed development.

 

The system would help authorities track down livestock that were exposed to infectious disease. They could be quarantined or killed, which would prevent the spread of diseases and keep slaughterhouses from processing the animals into food for people or feed for other animals.

 

December's first U.S. case of mad-cow disease highlighted the need for such an identification system. Spotty livestock records and the lack of a national tracking process have stymied investigators trying to determine the scope of America's possible exposure to mad cow.

 

So far, only the one Washington state Holstein with bovine spongiform encephalopathy has been found. An international committee of experts has concluded there probably are other cows with the disease.

 

Because the likely source of the brain-wasting infection was contaminated feed, authorities scrambled to find other cattle that could have shared the feed.

 

The Agriculture Department considers 25 cattle born with the Holstein on a farm in Alberta, Canada, to be most likely to have shared feed. But only 14 have been found.

 

Officials acknowledge they may never know what happened to the rest, and they suspect some may have been slaughtered.

 

Because mad cow is very rare, however, officials say they have little suspicion that the animals were diseased.

 

They plan to end their search possibly as early as next week.

 

Veneman told the Senate Agriculture Committee in January that the department "will be expediting the implementation of a verifiable system of national animal identification."

 

But members of a department-industry committee working on the project have not completed the plan. Veneman last week said, "I don't have a timeline."

 

The animal-ID program initially was created to respond to possible agricultural terrorism and to fast-spreading diseases such as foot and mouth. Mad-cow disease, which can lay dormant for years, "has added in some variables to what we may need identification for," Veneman said.

 

Planners had set up a series of timelines, however, and not all of them require final decisions on how to identify individual animals.

 

Officials expect to have systems in place in July to let states, which will administer their parts of the national system, give identification numbers to every facility that raises livestock, said Ohio cattleman Gary Wilson, a member of department's Animal Identification Steering Committee.

 

The next steps will be more difficult. Planners are working toward a goal of July 2005 to have systems ready so producers can label their animals with national ID numbers. The tagging itself would be phased because the planners intend to require IDs only as animals go to market, he said.

 

The committee does not expect immediate full compliance. "Two or three years down the road, we assume an individual (producer) will show up at a sales barn and, when you ask them for their ... number, they are going to say, 'What?' " Wilson said.

 

The program could affect all livestock in commerce by July 2006, said John Meyer, chief executive officer of Holstein Association USA of Brattleboro, Vt., which has a pilot-identification program.

 

Tagging itself has a lot of problems yet to be solved. For instance, the committee has to decide whether to start by requiring identification only for older cows that are at highest risk of mad-cow or for all cattle going to market, Wilson said.

 

How to pay for the system also is a question.

 

Presumably, producers will buy their own tags, but states and the federal government will shoulder other costs as a service to the public health, Wilson said. In the case of mad-cow disease, experts say people who eat contaminated meat can contract the rare but fatal brain-wasting condition variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.

 

Other livestock industries have to work out methods for their animals. For instance, while cattle might wear individual electronic tags because they are sold individually or in small groups, hogs and poultry might get a single ID for an entire lot because they move from birth to slaughter in large groups.