MAD COW DISEASE

USDA ANNOUNCES NEW BSE SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced today that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will soon begin transitioning to an ongoing Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) surveillance program that corresponds to the extremely low prevalence of the disease in the U.S. "It's time that our surveillance efforts reflect what we now know is a very, very low level of BSE in the United States," said Johanns. "This ongoing surveillance program will maintain our ability to detect BSE, provide assurance that our interlocking safeguards are successfully preventing BSE, while continuing to exceed science-based international guidelines." The ongoing BSE surveillance program will sample approximately 40,000 animals each year. Under the program, USDA will continue to collect samples from a variety of sites and from the cattle populations where the disease is most likely to be detected, similar to the enhanced surveillance program procedures. The new program will not only comply with the science-based international guidelines set forth by the World Animal Health organization (OIE), it will provide testing at a level ten times higher than the OIE recommended level. USDA has an obligation to provide 30 days notice of the change to contractors who are performing the sampling and testing, so the earliest the new surveillance program would begin is late August. Once the ongoing surveillance program begins, USDA will periodically analyze the surveillance strategy to ensure the program provides the foundation for market confidence in the safety of U.S. cattle. In April, USDA released an analysis of 7 years of BSE surveillance data. This included data from an enhanced surveillance program, which began in June 2004, as a one-time effort to determine the prevalence of BSE in the United States. The analysis concluded that the prevalence of BSE in the United States is less than 1 case per million adult cattle. The analysis further revealed that the most likely number of cases is between 4 and 7 infected animals out of 42 million adult cattle. The analysis was submitted to a peer review process and a panel of outside experts affirmed the conclusions....

U.S. to Reduce Mad-Cow Testing After Few Cases

The U.S. will slash its mad-cow testing program by almost 90 percent after data collected over two years showed a ``very low level'' of the disease in the domestic herd, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said. The decision to reduce testing to about 40,000 animals a year was made after experts reviewed an analysis of data on about 700,000 screenings since June 2004, when an enhanced testing program was implemented, Johanns said today at a news conference in Washington. The new program may begin as early as next month after a mandatory 30-day notice period. Johanns said he has talked with Japan and other nations about the changes and doesn't expect they'll affect efforts to reopen markets to U.S. beef. Japan, once the biggest buyer of the meat, last month promised to resume imports after reaching an agreement on beef inspections. The decision came six months after Japan re-imposed a ban implemented when the U.S. found its first case of mad-cow disease in December 2003. Dan Vaught, a cattle analyst with A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis, said the USDA's decision ``is not too surprising since they've found so few cases.'' Representative Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, said mad-cow disease remains a concern and the USDA's decision to scale back testing ``defies logic'' and puts consumers at risk. ``We are all relieved that the enhanced surveillance program found few incidents of domestic cases of BSE, but these findings have not diminished the threat of this deadly disease,'' the Connecticut Democrat said today in a statement. Reducing screening will also save the government millions of dollars, Johannes said. The USDA spent $1 million a week to test about 1,000 animals per day during the enhanced screening period, he said. The total cost of the program since June 2004 was $157.8 million, while the new screening regimen will cost about $17 million annually, the USDA said....

Consumer Groups Criticize USDA Plan To Cut Mad-Cow Tests

The U.S. Agriculture Department's plan to reduce its tests for mad-cow disease by about 90% drew protests Thursday from consumer groups. Critics say now is not the time to scale back the testing, which has cost the government an estimated $1 million per week. "It surely will not encourage consumers in the U.S. or Japan to rush to the store to buy more beef," said Carol Tucker-Foreman, food policy director for Consumer Federation. "If you do testing of 100% of your animals, any ones that test positive never go into the food chain," said Michael Hansen of Consumers Union. "That's in part why they do it in Europe because they've seen animals that look perfectly fine and they catch them just before they go to slaughter." Johanns said testing has nothing to do with the safety of U.S. beef for consumers in the U.S. and abroad. From a food safety standpoint, the real key is removing at slaughter those cattle parts known to carry mad-cow disease, Johanns said. "Those who are trying to convince their consumers that universal testing or 100% testing somehow solves the problem really are misleading you," he said. "Consumers should feel better than ever about the meat that they are buying," Johanns said....

Scientific Criteria Used by USDA Support Claims Canada’s BSE Problem Underestimated

In order to convince the U.S. District Court District of Montana (Court) to rule against R-CALF USA’s lawsuit that seeks to strike down the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Final Rule in 2005, the agency enlisted a team of renowned scientific experts to submit to the Court written declarations, in which these scientists provided the criteria they used to conclude that the Final Rule was supported by sound science. USDA’s Final Rule is titled “Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE): Minimal Risk Regions and Imports of Commodities,” which relaxed U.S. import standards for Canadian cattle and beef. “However, by applying today’s circumstances to the criteria USDA and its experts used to reach their decisions, it is clear the agency had insufficient facts with which to accurately assess the risk of BSE in Canada,” said R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard. “R-CALF argued to no avail that USDA needed to obtain more testing data from Canada so it could conduct a proper risk assessment before drawing premature conclusions about the scope of Canada’s BSE epidemic. Now that trade has been resumed without first gathering this additional information, the unfolding evidence shows USDA underestimated Canada’s BSE problem, and that the key assumptions supporting the Final Rule were not valid.” USDA and its experts asserted to the Court that they had sufficient evidence to conclude that Canada’s BSE problem was waning. USDA experts stated that: “If Canadian animals were exposed later in life to a dose sufficient to cause disease, it would imply that the Canadian feed ban was ineffective and in-feed infectivity amplified greatly after 1997. In that case, however younger animals, born in 1999 and 2000, would have been exposed to the larger dose and also would have been detected with BSE. This has not happened and indicates the Canadian feed ban is adequately protecting animal health even though it was not absolute precisely at the time of implementation.” “This has now happened and today’s facts show even more clearly than when R-CALF USA first filed its lawsuit that this conclusion lacked sound scientific support,” Bullard explained....