Mad cow case looks at feed, 'leaky' defenses

Analysts said the infection of such a young animal -- born after 1997 when the United States stepped up measures to keep out mad cow disease -- shows compliance with the restrictions has been "leaky." The government banned the use of cattle parts in cattle feed, the most common way mad cow is spread, but the Food and Drug Administration estimated that a quarter of firms that process cattle remains violated the ban in its first year. The violation rate exceeded 3 percent when the cow was probably infected.

"There are a lot of people out there who are trying to do the right thing, but all it takes is a few bad actors and you have a mad cow," said George Gray of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. He said he stands by a 2001 report in which he concluded that mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is unlikely to spread widely in the United States, but he said the FDA may need to tighten regulations.

Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman said yesterday that the infected animal, slaughtered in Washington state on Dec. 9, poses little threat to human health. The slaughterhouse that killed the cow has voluntarily recalled all 10,000 pounds of meat it processed that day. The meat has not yet been recovered, but Veneman said the recall reflected an "abundance of caution" rather than a real risk.

Federal and state officials have quarantined the 4,000 cows at the dairy farm in Mabton where the infected animal lived. Assuming additional lab tests confirm the mad cow diagnosis, those animals are likely to be slaughtered and tested as well, Agriculture Department officials said at a press conference yesterday. Other cows at the same farm could have been infected if the sick cow contracted the disease at that farm, from common feed.

The investigation is likely to expand to include the dairy farm where the infected cow lived until it was sold on Oct. 1, 2001, once investigators identify that farm. Because animals with mad cow disease usually do not show symptoms for several years, Agriculture Department officials said it is likely the cow was infected while she lived with her birth herd.

"Once we have the birth herd, we'll want to know what animals have come into that herd and what animals have left that herd, and all the feeding practices for that herd," said Ron DeHaven, the department's chief veterinarian.

Mad cow disease ravaged the British beef industry in the 1990s as it became increasingly clear that eating animals infected with the condition can cause a similar disease in humans, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, in which the victim suffers progressive dementia and death. One medical monitoring group estimates that up to 137 people have died since 1995 in Britain from the disease, and many countries now routinely ban beef imports from countries that report a single case of mad cow. By yesterday, more than a dozen countries had banned imports of American beef, including the three largest buyers, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico.

The Washington state farmer who owned the infected cow never suspected mad cow disease, but instead sent the animal to the slaughterhouse because it became paralyzed after giving birth to a calf, said DeHaven of the Agriculture Department. Because it had been sick, the slaughtered cow was tested, revealing that it probably had bovine spongiform encephalopathy. But, by then, Verns Moses Lake Meats had already shipped its meat along with that of 19 other animals for further processing.

Now, federal investigators are talking to officials at four meat processing facilities believed to have received the recalled beef to determine whether the meat has since been shipped elsewhere, requiring a broader recall. "We're looking at when the carcasses were processed and what was done with them," said Kenneth Petersen of the federal Food Safety and Inspection Service.

It is unclear whether all of the meat processed at Verns on Dec. 9 will be recovered, but Veneman said that the meat is unlikely to contain the tiny particles called prions that are responsible for the human form of mad cow disease.

"The important point is that the high-risk materials -- that is, the brain and spinal column that would cause infectivity in humans -- were removed from this cow," she said on ABC's "Good Morning America." These parts are routinely removed at slaughterhouses.

However, critics said the fact that Americans face any risk at all illustrates weaknesses in the US crackdown against mad cow that began in 1997. From the beginning, FDA officials encountered resistance in getting feed producers to stop grinding up cattle parts for use in cattle feed -- the main cause of the disease's spread in Britain.

In January 2002, the General Accounting Office reported to Congress that feed processors continued to violate the rules, and the authors blamed the FDA for not doing enough to pressure the thousands of slaughterhouses and feed processors that handle cattle remains to comply with the feed ban.

"We identified some noncompliant firms that had not been reinspected for two years or more and instances where no enforcement action had occurred even though the firms had been found noncompliant on multiple inspections," according to the GAO report.

Stephen Sunblof of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine said that his agency knew they had compliance problems a few years ago, but that today, only two of the 1,826 US firms that the FDA inspected were violating the feed ban.

"We recognized that [75 percent compliance] was not sufficient," he said. "Since then, we have achieved about 99 percent compliance."

But some critics say American consumers won't truly be protected until feed processors virtually stop using animal parts as a protein source for feed to all animals. Under the current FDA ban, cattle parts can still be used in pet food, or in food for pigs or horses, raising the possibility of mix-ups at the feed processor or on the farm. For instance, feed processors often use the same equipment for different foods, raising the possibility that cow tissue from a batch intended for chickens could end up in cattle food, said James Cullor, director of the Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center at the University of California at Davis.

"The actual regulations themselves are in no way protecting American consumers," said Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a think tank in Minneapolis. "When the regulations themselves aren't adequate, you're starting in a very dangerous and difficult situation."

At a minimum, Harvard's Gray said the first US case of mad cow disease will speed the trend toward stricter precautions by government and industry alike. Already, major beef buyers like McDonald's are starting to insist on contracts that guarantee their cattle were not fed animal parts. And he said that the FDA is considering an outright ban on the use of potentially infectious animal parts in all foods.

Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com. Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe

.com.