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Should U.S. follow U.K. on mad cow?

By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter

	ZACK SECKLER / AP Fresh meat hangs from hooks at a packing business in the Chelsea section of New York. An international panel of experts said yesterday that the United States needs to significantly tighten its feed rules, while also improving enforcement and expanding testing for mad-cow disease.
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Achieving that goal took nearly 10 years and several false starts, but today, the United Kingdom and the European Union have some of the world's strictest rules to keep both livestock and human diets free of the brain-wasting disease.

Mad-cow protections in the United States continue to fall short by comparison, even after the federal government announced stronger feed rules last week, including a ban on the use of cattle blood in cattle feed.

Federal and feed-industry officials say there's no reason to match the drastic European measures here. Hundreds of thousands of animals were sickened in the United Kingdom. So far, only a single Holstein, infected in Canada, has turned up in the United States.

But consumer advocates and some researchers have been insisting for years that this country should learn from the British experience and eliminate all risky practices that contributed to mad cow's spread and more than 140 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob, the fatal human form of the disease.

Coming Sunday Mad cow in the beef and mercury in the tuna. Frankenstein genes in the corn and pesticides on the produce. Facing toxins, risks, cruelties and injustices, we ask, "What's an Earnest Eater to do?" See the story in Sunday's Pacific Northwest magazine.

Yesterday, an international panel of experts agreed, concluding the United States needs to significantly tighten its feed rules, while also improving enforcement and expanding testing for mad-cow disease.

"The lesson from Britain is that partial measures don't work," said John Stauber, author of the book "Mad Cow USA."

Feed practices banned in Europe but still allowed in the United States include:

• Feeding slaughterhouse waste from cattle to poultry, pigs, horses and fish, then feeding meal made from those animals back to cows.

• Using high-risk materials like dead and "downer" cattle, cattle brains, spinal cords, eyes and intestines in chicken, pig and pet food.

• Feeding cow blood to pigs and pig blood to cattle and calves.

• Using deer and elk, which can be infected with a mad-cowlike disease, for chicken, pig and pet food.

Stauber and other activists say the dangers are twofold: Tissue from sick cows could contaminate feed for other animals, then the infection could be indirectly passed to cows when they eat protein supplements made from those other animals.

And inadequate enforcement of the rules could allow unscrupulous or sloppy farmers and manufacturers to undermine the most important safety measure: a ban on feeding cow parts directly back to cattle.

British officials had the same concerns in mind when, in 1996, they made it illegal to feed animal protein, regardless of source, to any livestock species, including chickens, pigs and horses.

The move came after several partial bans, similar to those in the United States, proved impossible to enforce and failed to stop the epidemic, said Roy Smith, of the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Britain's first feed ban, adopted in 1988, was similar to the one the United States adopted in 1997. It prohibited meat and bone meal made from cattle, sheep and related animals called ruminants to be fed back to those animals.

Experts think Britain's mad-cow epidemic was fueled by that practice, which was widely adopted as a way to turn massive amounts of slaughterhouse waste into protein supplements that boosted milk and meat production.

But many English sheep were infected with scrapie, a mad-cowlike disease. Feeding cattle protein supplements made from infected sheep could have sparked the epidemic, which was amplified when infected cows were rendered into meal and fed back to cattle.

In theory, the United Kingdom's 1988 feed ban should have shut down the disease, but it didn't.

More than 18,000 new mad-cow cases were confirmed in animals born during the next two years, with the actual number of infections probably much higher.

The problem, Smith said, was poor compliance and lax enforcement. Some farmers and feed manufacturers flouted the rules, while others inadvertently contaminated cattle feed in plants that also produced feed in which cow parts were allowed.

"A feed mill would do a line of feed for pigs and immediately afterward do a line for cattle, so cross-contamination was taking place," said Tony McDougal spokesman for the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Britain tightened its rules in 1990 with a complete ban on any human or animal feed uses of cow brains, spines, intestines and other organs where the mad-cow infection concentrates — something the United States hasn't done yet, but which the international panel recommended yesterday.

While the measures did slow the pace of the epidemic in the United Kingdom, more than 6,000 head of cattle born over the next two years became infected.

Researchers discovered that it took only a tiny amount of infectious material — less than the size of a peppercorn — to infect a cow. Then, after years of denying any link between mad cow and human health, the British government in 1996 acknowledged that a fatal condition called variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease was caused by eating infected beef.

"When we realized how high the cross-contamination risk was, and when the link was revealed with vCJD, we banned mammalian meat and bone meal right across the board," Smith said.

Nearly 1,000 new cases in cattle in 1995 plummeted to 34 in 1997.

The EU followed suit with a comparable ban in 2000.

The radical move made sense in Britain, where more than 4 million cattle were destroyed during the decade-long epidemic, said George Gray, director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

It would be overkill here, he believes.

"We have one mad cow," said Gray, whose 2001 risk analysis for the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded that America's partial feed ban was sufficient to prevent the spread of mad cow here.

But the same study also found that the small risks could be lowered more than 80 percent if animals that die on farms and high-risk tissues such as brains were excluded from all animal feed.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said last week that the administration may consider tighter feed regulations, including a U.K.-style ban.

His comments came as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the use of blood meal in cattle feed, along with the practice of using cattle blood as a milk substitute for dairy calves separated from their mothers. The FDA also outlawed restaurant waste and waste from chicken farms from use in cattle feed. The former can contain beef scraps, while the latter includes spilled chicken feed made with beef.

To the feed industry, even those steps seem out of proportion to the risk. A total ban on animal products in livestock feed would be economically disastrous and completely unwarranted, said Richard Sellers, vice president of the American Feed Industry Association.

About 18 million pounds of meat and bone meal are produced each day in the United States, and most farm animals receive it at some point in their lives.

An analysis conducted for a rendering association concluded a total ban would cost farmers and the feed industry more than $1 billion, Sellers said.

And if animal protein were banned from feed, what would happen to the millions of tons of animal waste generated each year?

"The average cow has 28 pounds of intestines, and we slaughter about 36 million cattle a year in this country," Sellers said. "That's a lot of product to get rid of."

In Britain, high-risk tissues are incinerated. Meat and bone meal is used as an ingredient in some types of concrete and burned as a fuel in power generating plants. It's banned in fertilizers.

The economic arguments might be more convincing if mad cow and a multitude of related diseases weren't so terrible and poorly understood, said Dr. Michael Hansen, senior analyst for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports.

One of the main arguments against a U.K.-style feed ban is that pigs and chickens don't get any version of mad-cow disease. So there's no risk, some experts say, in feeding cow parts to those species.

But the history of mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is filled with examples of "species barriers" being crossed. Scrapie, the sheep disease, passed into cows. Cows passed the disease to humans. Mink, deer, elk, cats, goats and raccoons can all develop diseases that eat holes in their brains, just like mad cow.

In laboratory experiments, researchers have passed the diseases between many improbable species — including cows and pigs, even though pigs have never been known to become naturally infected.

Some of the most chilling work, conducted with hamsters and mice, showed that some animals can be silent carriers of the disease: not sick, but able to pass the infection on to other species. In related experiments, the disease seemed to adapt to the new species and become more virulent with each generation.

Britain's partial feed ban was doomed by poor enforcement; the 1997 U.S. ban has had similar problems. Two General Accounting Office studies were sharply critical of the FDA, saying it didn't conduct enough inspections of feed plants and didn't keep good inspection records.

Today, almost all of the nation's 1,900 rendering plants, feed manufacturers and feed processors are in compliance, FDA officials say.

A new requirement that plants have separate production lines for feeds that contain cattle parts and those that don't will further reduce the risk of cross-contamination, said Dan McChesney, director of surveillance and compliance for the agency.

The Bush administration has requested an additional $8 million in next year's budget to boost the FDA's mad-cow enforcement.

But the FDA focuses mainly on paperwork — whether plants have records to prove their products are safe. Inspectors don't test cattle feed to make sure it's free of cattle parts, because they don't have a test that can distinguish banned cattle protein from gelatin or pig protein, which are perfectly legal.

When inspectors looked under a microscope at samples from 73 loads of feed grain shipped from Canada to the United States over the past nine months, they discovered 22 of the shipments were contaminated with animal muscle, blood, hair or feathers — but couldn't say whether the muscle and blood came from cows.

Inspectors also rarely venture onto farms, to see if the feed rules are being followed.

According to the Harvard risk analysis, farmers who ignore the rules and manufacturers that mislabel feed are the main avenues for increasing the mad-cow risks in the United States.

"All of this is why we need an absolute ban on any slaughterhouse waste products in livestock feed," Stauber said.

The international panel stopped short of that, recommending instead that all animal protein be banned only from cow feed.

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company