Mad Cow Alerts Began Years Ago

Enforcement of Feed Ban Was Assailed as Inadequate in 2000 

GUY GUGLIOTTA and CHRISTOPHER LEE / Washington Post 27dec03

[Also see: FDA Blasted Over Past Enforcement of Feed Ban Seattle Post-Intelligencer 27dec03]

For more than three years, consumer groups, members of Congress and scientists have warned of the inadequacy or insufficiency of government efforts to prevent the spread of mad cow disease into the United States.

The General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, in 2000 criticized poor enforcement by federal inspectors of a ban on certain types of cattle feed believed to cause the spread of the disease. Sixteen months later it issued a second report making similar criticisms.

This year the Senate passed legislation banning the slaughter of disabled "downer" cattle, only to have the provision eliminated in a joint Senate-House version of the measure. The 41/2-year-old Washington state dairy cow -- the country's first known case of mad cow disease -- was slaughtered Dec. 9 as a downer animal.

Also this year, neurologist Stanley B. Prusiner, who won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on prions, the cell proteins that cause mad cow disease, warned Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman that the frequency and methods of testing cattle were inadequate to prevent the disease's spread to the United States.

Lisa A. Ferguson, senior staff veterinarian at the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, defended the agency's testing program, saying statistical studies showed that it was best to focus on animals with obvious health problems.

"We are testing animals for surveillance for animal health reasons to try to identify if the disease is present in the U.S.," Ferguson said in an interview. "The best way to do that is to focus on where we are most likely to find the disease if it is here."

W. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinarian at the Agriculture Department, said yesterday that federal officials are "looking at any necessary modifications" to the feed ban and had already planned to nearly double -- from 20,526 cattle in 2003 to 38,000 in 2004 -- the number of animals to be tested before slaughter. DeHaven also said the USDA is "well on the road" to developing a system to trace cattle from the slaughterhouse back to their birth farms.

"I hope this is a wake-up call," said Nancy Donley, president of the consumer advocacy group Safe Tables Our Priority. "The government has to plan and enforce preventive measures to make sure that these problems don't recur."

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the brain malady known as mad cow disease, usually afflicts cattle that have eaten contaminated bone and protein meal made from the remains of other infected ruminants. Health authorities have linked a similar human disorder to the consumption of contaminated beef.

Although the Washington cow is thus far the only reported U.S. case, organizations and individuals for years have called for stronger measures to prevent the spread of the disease.

Chief among these criticisms is the Food and Drug Administration's enforcement of a 1997 ban against processing the remains of cows and other ruminants into feed that is, in turn, fed back to cows. This cannibalism is generally believed to the prime avenue for transmission of the disease.

Three years after the ban, the GAO in September 2000 found that 18 percent of the nation's rendering plants and feed mills were unaware that the ban existed. Twenty-eight percent of the firms that were making the prohibited feed failed to label it as unfit for ruminants, and 6 percent did not keep proper records of their customers' names and addresses.

The FDA did not contest the study, and it promised to improve performance. Sixteen months later, however, the GAO issued a second report concluding that the FDA "has not acted promptly" to enforce the ban, having sent only two warning letters between 1997 and April 2001. The GAO said some violators had not been reinspected for more than two years.

In recent days, the FDA has acknowledged that the early years of enforcement were flawed but said compliance has reached 99 percent. Several critics of the government's performance have noted that mad cow disease incubates for several years, and that the Washington animal was probably afflicted before rigorous inspections took hold.

George M. Gray, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health who conducted an analysis for the government showing that the risk of mad cow disease in the United States was low, said the feed ban is the crucial bulwark against the disease.

"It's the main thing that prevents the spread," Gray said yesterday. "Clearly, people were not following the rules, because this animal became infected during the period that the feed ban was in place. And that's a cause for concern. At the same time, I don't think there's any reason for widespread alarm about risks to human health or animal health."

Another longtime area of contention is the slaughter of downer animals. Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii) this year sponsored legislation to prohibit the practice, noting in a Nov. 5 floor speech that mad cow disease "routinely is not correctly distinguished from many other diseases and conditions that show similar symptoms."

Noting that Japan tests each of the 1.3 million beef cattle it slaughters every year, he urged U.S. officials "to address and reduce the real risks associated with BSE and similar diseases in the U.S. It is prudent for the United States to be proactive in preventing BSE and other animal diseases from entering our food chain."

Earlier this year Prusiner, the Nobel Prize winner, met with Veneman to warn that the department needed to increase vigilance, according to an associate. The meeting was first reported this week by the New York Times. Although the department has tested about 20,000 animals for each of the last two years and plans to test 38,000 in 2004, the number of animals tested before 2002 was only a few thousand per year.

Scott D. McKinlay, president of Prusiner's firm, InPro Biotechnology, said testing remains the best way to keep infected animals from the dinner table.

"Most health professionals understand bacteria and viruses," McKinlay said. "But prions are different. The disease doesn't spread by air or through microbes in water," he said, and many cases of mad cow disease develop "spontaneously" in an animal and have nothing to do with what it eats.

Spontaneous cases are good in a way, McKinlay noted, because a whole herd may not be infected because of its diet, but they are also bad, because more individual animals -- not just older cattle or the obviously sick -- may be infected: "Testing animals is the only fail-safe way to catch the disease."

Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32996-2003Dec26?language=printer 27dec03