I was reading the Cattle News (yep) when I came across an interesting item:

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, at a news conference Thursday in Washington, D.C., announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to get permission to voluntarily test all of its cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

R-CALF USA supports Creekstone in this effort because voluntary testing for BSE likely would help reopen and maintain certain export markets for U.S. beef, which in turn, would certainly benefit the thousands of independent cattle producers this organization represents,” said R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard. “The U.S. economy is based on free enterprise, and Creekstone is simply trying to meet the demands of its customers – a key objective for any successful business.”

Almost two years ago, R-CALF USA called on USDA to permit cutting-edge packers like Creekstone Farms to voluntarily test for BSE 100 percent of the animals processed there.

Here is the situation.  Creekstone is a relatively small meat packing company which had hoped to do business with Japan, which requires that every single cow be tested for “Mad Cow” disease, known more scientifically as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).

In December 2003, a BSE-positive cow was found in Washington State and as a result Japan banned all beef imports.  Japan had discovered BSE-positive cows in its own herds a number of years ago and spent upwards of 65 million dollars to set up government testing centers so they could test every single cow in the country.  Every last one.

Japan still imports a lot of beef however and smaller operations like Creekstone wanted to get a piece of that business.  To do so, their Japanese customers required that Creekstone test every single cow for BSE even though it would mean the meat would be more expensive.  The Japanese customers were willing to pay for the increased cost and so Creekstone moved to test all of their animals.

The only problem was that the USDA prevented them from doing so in early 2004.  I know that sounds ludicrous but it is true.  An old law from 1913 (protecting farmers from improperly made serums) gives the USDA sole authority over the certification of all animal testing.  This means that Creekstone could conduct the tests for BSE but they wouldn’t be certified or official unless the USDA said they were.  And you cannot sell meat commercially without USDA approval.

Why would they do that?  Rep. Dennis Kucinich even proposed an amendment to the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2006 (which has since passed into law) to authorize any company to conduct BSE testing so long as the company paid for it.  In other words, it wouldn’t cost the government a penny.  Yet this amendment did not make it into the bill which was passed into law.

The USDA already does test for BSE.  Statistics from its own website here.  They’ve even authorized private companies including Abbott Diagnostics, Roche and Bio-Rad to to conduct what is known as “rapid” BSE tests, where the results are available in a matter of hours instead of days.  The problem is that only a tiny fraction of cattle are tested in the USA, something along the lines of about 1% of animals slaughtered for meat and the USDA wants to reduce that number.

The problem is that the big meatpackers, whose customers are primarily domestic (American), oppose testing of all animals in the United States for a number of reasons.  They say that if Creekstone and other “upscale” meat packers started doing it, customers in America might demand that all of their beef be similarly inspected.  This seems to me like a bogus claim, because if customers truly would demand their beef to be tested for BSE then they would pay more the meat, similarly to how people now pay more for certified organic fruit.

I should point out here that tests for BSE are not conducted on meat after it has been processed.  Instead, samples from a cow’s brain are taken before slaughter and then analyzed in the laboratory.  So technically speaking it is cows which are tested and not the meat coming out of the other end of the factory.

No, the real issue here is that if more testing for BSE was conducted, it is likely that more cases of BSE would be discovered, which would be devastating to the American beef industry.  After all, a single case in 2003 caused Japan (and South Korea) to ban all imports of beef (briefly lifted at the end of 2005 but re-instated shortly thereafter).

BSE or Mad Cow Disease is completely preventable but it gets a lot of attention because it can be transmitted to humans in the form of a disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) which is both fatal and has no known cure.  Hundreds of people, including 157 in Britain alone, have died from vCJD.

Ironically, BSE is a completely preventable disease.  It is caused when ruminant animals (including sheep, goats and cows) eat infected protein tissue from previously sick animals.  Considering that both cows and sheep are herbivores, or plant eaters, how is it that they are eating the flesh of dead, infected animals?  In a natural environment, the chances of such animals consuming flesh is practically zero.

The problem is that modern farmers often feed livestock meat and bone meal (MBM) as a protein supplement.  After those meatpacking factories have finished processing meat for humans and for pets, there is some excess flesh portions as well as bones.  These are ground up into a kind of powder that is very high in protein.  Ironically, MBM can be used to replace coal in certain industrial applications and has nearly the same energy value as coal.

A cow or sheep eating MBM made from an animal previously infected with BSE can then become infected themselves.  The maturation period of the disease is anywhere from 3-8 years, so it is difficult to detect in a living animal as they do not display obvious symptoms until the very end.  Because of the nature of BSE (i.e. that it is not a virus), cooking infected meat does not destroy it, so there is absolutely no way to safely consume meat of a BSE-infected animal.

Scientists have known since the mid 1980’s that MBM is the manner by which ruminant animals (cows and sheep) become infected with BSE.  Therefore the simple and easy solution would be to ban feeding MBM to all ruminant animals and reduce the threat of BSE to nearly zero.  The US passed such a law in 1997 but compliance is not very well-enforced.  The farmer out there trying to increase the bulk weight of his cattle will often turn to any source available, even if it is banned.

I should add here that BSE is not transmittable to certain other kinds of animals including chickens and pigs, therefore feeding them MBM is perfectly safe.  It can be very difficult to convince a farmer that he has to find a more expensive (usually soybean-based) protein feed for his cattle when he has a few thousand pounds of cheaper MBM on hand for his other animals.

As I said earlier, Japan now tests every single cow for BSE.  Britain took a two-prong approach, testing nearly all cows under 2 years old and banning all cows over 2.5 years from being processed into meat.  The theory behind this is that BSE takes a number of years to develop and therefore meat from younger animals is a much lower risk.  Not to disgust any of my readers, but a lot of the beef consumed comes from dairy cows who are processed after their usefulness as dairy product providers is exhausted.

Britain is only just now (March 8, 2006) able to export beef after a near-universal ban for the past 10 years, which was extremely costly.  Thousands and thousands of animals had to be destroyed.  Imagine what would happen if multiple instances of BSE infected cows were discovered in the United States.  The averag American eats about 67 pounds of beef per year.  There are currently about 95 million cattle in the USA, which produces approximately 26.2 billion pounds of beef per year.  The industry would suffer tremendously.

The “saving grace” for the beef industry is that very few people who contract vCJD are ever diagnosed with the disease.  You could be eating BSE-contaminated meat right now and never know it.  Britain has a governmental organization which monitors and looks for cases of vCJD while the United States has a much weaker surveillance program in place.  The problem is that vCJD can only be confirmed through a test run on the brain of someone after they are dead.  There are other tests docotrs can conduct on living patients such as an MRI of the brain, but these are not fully conclusive.  Another problem is that once the symptoms of vCJD manifest themselves, the victim usually dies within a matter of months.

A study in Britain in 2004 found that as many as 3,800 people may be harboring vCJD but have not yet manifested symptoms.  Even scarier, there are studies which show that vCJD can be transmitted from human to human via blood transfusions.  A person with a dormant case of vCJD could unknowingly infect thousands of people.  As a result, Britain has banned anyone who has received a blood transfusion since 1980 from donating blood.  In the U.S. there are no such restrictions.

Definitely scary.  I myself am vegetarian (for personal reasons).  Considering the number of illnesses that are contracted through consuming animal products, being vegetarian may one day become more of a health necessity than a lifestyle choice.

Cross-posted from the doubleplusungood crimethink website Flogging the Simian

Peace