Congress Focuses on Mad Cow, Beef Trade
Posted on: Wednesday, 21 January 2004, 06:00 CST
While the first U.S. case of mad cow disease has done little to alter American dining habits, limits on U.S. beef imports remain in effect around the world, including in Japan and Mexico - the largest markets for U.S. beef.
Restoring the U.S. beef trade is expected to be a top concern Wednesday when Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman makes her first appearance before Congress since the Dec. 23 mad cow diagnosis. Veneman probably will face a friendly audience at the House Agriculture Committee, where many lawmakers represent cattle and dairy producers and had resisted some of the measures she announced in response to the mad cow outbreak.
The Bush administration has moved on several fronts in the past month to try to reassure American consumers as well as international trading partners that U.S. beef is safe.
The Agriculture Department has banned the sale of meat for human consumption from animals too sick or injured to stand or walk assisted, and has strengthened regulations to keep central nervous system tissue - which scientists say is most likely to carry the infection - out of the food supply.
The Washington state Holstein that had mad cow disease was a downed animal. Officials recalled the meat from the sick cow and others slaughtered with it as a precaution. USDA has found 22 of the 80 animals that came from the same Alberta, Canada, farm as the sick Holstein and entered the United States together in 2001. Another 17 cows from the same herd came to this country at a later date, Canadian records indicate, but U.S. officials have so far found just three of those animals.
The animal parts from the Holstein most likely to carry the infection - the brain, spinal cord and part of the lower intestine - were kept from the human food supply.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), eats holes in the brains of cattle and is incurable. Humans can develop a brain-wasting illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, from consuming contaminated beef products.
Most of the testing for mad cow has been done on downed animals that were inspected at slaughterhouses. Under the new regulation, those animals will no longer reach the slaughterhouse.
"One concern I have is how are we going to determine that we have a BSE problem in the future if we don't test for it," said Rep. Charlie Stenholm of Texas, the senior Democrat on the committee.
USDA officials have said they plan to increase testing and will work with farmers, veterinarians and renderers who use animal parts for pet food and other purposes.
A Democratic lawmaker, meanwhile, planned to introduce legislation Wednesday that would make the ban on downed animals a matter of law instead of regulation. The bill by Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., also would apply to other animals, not just cattle.
The Agriculture Department also is seeking to shorten the turnaround time between the killing of an animal and results of mad cow tests to as little as two days. Fourteen days elapsed between the Holstein's slaughter and the diagnosis, during which time the cow's meat reached some supermarket shelves.
And to speed the search for animals' herdmates and sources of feed, Veneman also promised to speed adoption of a national animal identification system. Such a system still is several years away from implementation.
Investigators determined within four days that the mad cow Holstein probably came from Canada, but confirmation through DNA testing took another nine days.
Tests on some of the animals in the Holstein's herd have turned up no additional mad-cow cases, but scientists have said they would not be surprised to find more diseased animals. The most likely source of infection is contaminated feed.
The Food and Drug Administration is considering changes to animal feed regulations that would tighten restrictions on feeding animal protein to other animals.
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On the Net:
USDA mad cow pages: http://www.usda.gov/BSE/
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