Blog post on Mad Cow: Now keeping us safe is illegal, too

Source: Effective Measure, a Science Blog.

The subject of a recent post, rabies, put us in mind of another rare, invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD). There is now pretty good evidence that the outbreak of CJD in Europe since the 1990s is caused by the same agent that causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The incriminated transmissible material is an unconventional agent, an infectious protein (now called a prion). When a prion from a BSE case in cattle is consumed it causes a disease very like CJD in humans. Technically it is called new variant CJD (nvCJD). The BSE prion is thought to stem from feeding cattle other cattle via feed, a practice which is now outlawed. As a result BSE is decreasing in Europe, where extensive testing of cattle is done prior to letting the meat into the chain of commerce. Only a few cases of BSE have been detected in the US, where allegedly stringent controls have been instituted to prevent BSE from occurring. But only a tiny fraction of US cattle is tested and the cattle industry has strenuously resisted any calls for better coverage. You would think that an enterprising meatpacker would test their own products and market it as safe, thus gaining a competitive advantage, especially in export markets highly sensitive to the BSE problem, like Japan. You would be wrong. Not because it isn’t a good idea but because the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) forbids the practice. We’ve discussed it three times here in the context of a Kansas company trying to test its own cattle and being told it cannot.

Our first visit to this ridiculous episode was over three years ago, January 2005. A second case of BSE originating in an 8 year old Canadian dairy cow had just been discovered but the US was planning to resume importing Canadian beef anyway after a brief interruption after another Canadian imported case. As a result Japan banned US beef because the US refused to require all cattle under the age of 30 months to be tested. A small packing house, Creekstone Farms, wanted to test all its cattle so it could export to Japan. It was told by the USDA it couldn’t. Creekstone had to lay off 150 workers and reduce the other 650 workers to a 32 hour workweek. Creekstone is located in Arkansas City, Kansas, a town of only 12,000, and is its main employer. The USDA’s reasoning is that the test in young cattle would not guarantee safety and thus the testing would be unfair marketing. As if the USDA cares about unfair marketing when it doesn’t affect the big meat packers, whom it consistently protects and shields.

If refusing to allow a company to test its cattle when it is required by a foreign government sounds stupid to you, you aren’t alone. It sounded stupid to a federal judge, too, who in April 2007 told the USDA it couldn’t prevent companies from doing what was obviously a sound business decision. But he put the decision to allow testing on hold pending government appeal. At the bidding of the meat industry the government did appeal and now their lawyers are arguing the case:

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC, the Kansas-based meat producer, shouldn’t be allowed to test beef for mad-cow disease on its own because it could hurt the U.S. cattle industry, a government lawyer told an appeals court.”They are creating a false assurance” because the test Creekstone wants to use can’t show that meat is completely free of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease, Justice Department attorney Eric Fleisig-Greene told the court at a hearing today in Washington.

“The test is not only unnecessary, but it has no value whatsoever,” Fleisig-Greene told the three-judge panel, adding that a “false positive” from the company’s testing would hurt the entire U.S. cattle industry. (Bloomberg)

Let’s think about this argument for a moment. Either the test is accurate or it isn’t. Suppose it isn’t. It could be wrong in either or both of two ways. It could produce false positives, that is, say cattle is diseased when it isn’t. That is relatively easy to check by a pathologic examination of the animal. It is of no particular value to Creekstone to show it’s cattle are diseased when they aren’t so there is no incentive to make the test come out that way either. Or it could produce false negatives, saying the cattle are healthy when they aren’t. But the USDA has already said US cattle are healthy, staunchly maintaining there is a very, very low risk of BSE in the US, hence the paucity of testing even older cattle. So an alleged negative test only ratifies what the USDA maintains as an official position. If there is no assurance it is true (how else could there be a false negative?) then the USDA is the one that is offering false assurances. Creekstone Farms would only be offering false assurances to the Japanese under the USDA scenario. The USDA would then be offering false assurances to the entire US population.

The threat that a positive test (real or not) could hurt the entire US cattle industry is what this is all about. This is an administration that claims to have kept us safe. It is Orwellian Newspeak at its finest.

What’s my beef? I’m mad as hell. 253 more days of this utter bullshit.