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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Monday, June 20, 2005
Mad about mad cow
The USDA promised 18 months ago to close a loophole in current policy that could let mad cow disease sneak through. To prevent mad cow, we must stop feeding cows tissue and blood from other cows; the loophole is that cattle are fed chicken litter (from chickens that, in turn, have been fed cow blood and other cattle proteins), cattle blood, and restaurant leftovers, all of which could transmit the deformed protein (or prion) that causes mad cow disease.
The loophole has not yet been closed. "Once the cameras were turned off and the media coverage dissipated, then it's been business as usual, no real reform, just keep feeding slaughterhouse waste," said John Stauber, an activist and co-author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, to the Associated Press. Stauber adds, "The entire U.S. policy is designed to protect the livestock industry's access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed."
Given that we may have a second case of mad cow in the U.S., the issue deserves more than what Rep. Rosa DeLauro describes as "a lot of talk, a lot of press releases, and no action."
Government inaction on mad cow may well stretch back to the early to mid 1990s. Federal investigators have been probing allegations from a former USDA veterinarian that the USDA was covering up concnerns about mad cow from the very beginning of USDA's mad cow surveillance program in 1990. Moreover, Canadian news uncovered recently that the USDA may have mishandled two 1997 tests of suspected mad cow. In one, an independent university lab concluded that the cow "had a rare brain disorder never reported in that breed of cattle either before or since – not the dreaded bovine spongiform encephalopathy." CBC discovered, however, that "key areas of the brain where signs of BSE would be most noticeable were never tested. The most important samples somehow went missing."
Posted by Robert Shull
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