Mad-cow testing gets scathing review

By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter

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The review, released yesterday, also found that testing is not random, and that USDA is not requiring rendering plants and other facilities to participate, but relying instead on voluntary agreements. And the program assumes that only old, sick animals are likely to be infected, despite the fact that nearly 300 healthy-looking cattle have tested positive for the disease in Europe, the report says.

"It appears the department's new surveillance plan for mad-cow disease has major flaws," said U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who posted the draft report on the Web site of the House Committee on Government Reform.

A second investigation by the inspector general questions USDA assertions that the Washington dairy cow diagnosed with the nation's first mad-cow infection was a "downer," too sick or injured to walk to slaughter, Waxman said in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman.

Veneman and other agency officials will answer questions about mad-cow testing today at a joint hearing of the House Government Reform and Agriculture committees in Washington, D.C.

USDA officials defended the program, launched June 1. It is designed to test at least 220,000 animals nationwide in the next 12 to 18 months to determine whether the brain-wasting disease is present in the U.S. herd.

"We are ... testing precisely the population of animals that we should be testing," Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said in a media briefing.

Mad-cow testing faulted An audit by the USDA's inspector general noted several flaws in the agency's expanded program: • As recently as this spring, many of the highest-risk animals were not tested. • Many high-risk cattle that die on farms are still not being tested. • Testing is not random, and assumes that only sick cattle will be infected. • A separate report questions whether the infected animal diagnosed in Washington last year was a downer, as the USDA has said.

Washington's "downer"

Waxman accused Veneman of misleading the public when she repeatedly said discovery of the infected Washington cow proved that the testing program in place then, which focused on downers, was working well to protect the nation's beef-eaters from the deadly disease, which can be passed to humans through infected meat.

Waxman said three new witnesses corroborated the story first told by the owner and workers at the Moses Lake slaughterhouse where the animal was killed in December: that the Holstein was walking.

The USDA veterinarian at the slaughterhouse said there was a "distinct possibility" the animal was able to stand, though she was not on her feet when he examined her. An internal agency e-mail said the cow was considered a downer only because she arrived in a load with other cattle that couldn't walk. "If she had arrived by herself, it is very likely she would not have been tested," said the e-mail from one USDA staffer to another.

Waxman wrote, "These disclosures indicate that what you described as a success story for USDA policy could more accurately be depicted as a fortuitous event."

However, the investigation found no evidence that any records about the infected cow were falsified or altered.

Expanded testing

USDA revamped its testing program after the mad-cow discovery, increasing the number of animals screened by a factor of 10 over last year's total of 20,000. The expanded program is intended to focus on "high-risk" animals: older, sick animals and animals that die on the farm.

Sick animals are targeted because their symptoms might be caused by mad-cow infection; older cattle are considered more likely to test positive because the disease must incubate for several years before being detectable.

But the inspector general's investigation found that many animals that are stumbling or exhibiting other symptoms of a central-nervous-system disease like mad-cow — also called BSE and bovine spongiform encephalopathy — have not been routinely tested, though agency rules say they should be.

Of 680 cattle condemned at slaughter for nervous-system symptoms between 2002 and this spring, only 162 were tested for mad-cow disease, the report says.

The problems persisted at least as late as April, when a staggering Texas animal was not tested.

After that incident, USDA ordered its inspectors to test every condemned animal for mad-cow disease, DeHaven said.

The report also faults USDA for failing to devise a system to collect another category of high-risk animals: those that die on farms.

But DeHaven said 70 percent of the 11,000 animals tested in June were dead farm animals that wound up at rendering plants or facilities called salvage plants.

He also said those facilities have cooperated well with the government program, which means USDA hasn't had to use its regulatory authority to force them to participate.

The inspector general's report said reliance on voluntary cooperation will skew the surveillance program, removing the randomness that is so critical to statistically valid sampling. Also, the assumption that only sickly animals will be infected with mad cow could underestimate the disease's prevalence.

"The problems disclosed during our review may negatively impact the effectiveness of USDA's overall BSE surveillance program, impair its ability to perform risk assessments and reduce the credibility of any assertions regarding the prevalence of BSE in the United States," the report says.

DeHaven said USDA has already corrected many of the flaws pointed out in the audit, such as failure to test animals with nervous-system disorders.

"We're not focusing on the past but ensuring that ... in the future we do collect those samples," he said.

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

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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