FDA proposal seeks to reduce mad cow risks

More loopholes exist
Consumer groups and scientists said the government did not close all the loopholes because its new proposal bans just the brain and spinal cord of cattle 30 months and older and not all at-risk tissues, regardless of age, that could carry the disease.

Linda Detwiler, a former Agriculture Department veterinarian who led the department’s work on mad cow disease for several years, said removing 90 percent of the risk isn’t good enough.

“I’m disappointed that our government wouldn’t want to remove 100 percent, given that there’s emerging research that there may be more tissues that have infectivity,” she said.

Detwiler said the plan would still allow chicken, pig and pet feed to contain potentially infectious tissues from the highest-risk cattle, “downers” that can’t walk and dead cows.

“There is no question that we should not be feeding the remains of any mammals to food animals, and by not closing this dangerous loophole, we are exposing the American public to unnecessary risk,” said Michael Hansen, a biologist for Consumers Union.

Chris Waldrop, a spokesman for Consumer Federation of America, accused the agency of caving to pressure from the meat industry.

The FDA’s Sundlof countered that Tuesday’s proposal “is much more protective” than the earlier proposal.

“By removing the brain and spinal cord, you’ve taken out 90 percent of the risk,” he said, citing a risk assessment prepared by Harvard University researchers.

The meat industry applauded the new rules, saying a broader ban on at-risk tissues from cows of every age would have forced meatpackers to dispose of 1.4 billion pounds of materials annually.

The new plan “is the appropriate, science-based policy,” said Jim Hodges, president of the meatpacking industry’s American Meat Institute Foundation.

It will cost the industry about $14 million annually, according to FDA.

The new proposal would ban from livestock feed:

• Brains and spinal cords of cattle 30 months and older.
• Brains and spinal cords of all cattle not approved for human consumption.
• Entire carcasses of cattle not approved for human consumption, if brains and spinal cords have not been removed.
• Tallow derived from at-risk tissues, if it contains more than .15 percent impurities.
• Mechanically separated beef from at-risk materials identified in the new proposal.

Mad cow disease is the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. A rare but fatal form of the disease in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is linked to eating meat products contaminated with BSE and was blamed for about 150 deaths, most of them in Britain, beginning in 1995.

The first U.S. case of the disease, confirmed in December 2003, was in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state. The second case, a Texas-born cow, tested positive in June.

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