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Fort Worth Star-Telegram / Knight-Ridder News - - - Tuesday - - - April 18, 2006 Latest mad cow case renews criticism of rules By BARRY SHLACHTER STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER The Canadian case of mad cow disease confirmed Sunday is the country's fifth. Stirring concern is that it's the second such Canadian animal born after a 1997 ban on feed made with cattle remains, thought to be the main means of transmission. And it gives ammunition to critics who say the American program also has gaps. "This shows that the feed restrictions in place in Canada, and similar restrictions in the United States, are simply not adequate to control the spread of this disease," said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union, the nonprofit watchdog group behind Consumer Reports. "There is no firewall. The safety of both Canadian and American beef is at risk." U.S. and Canadian officials argue that stout firewalls have in fact kept diseased cattle out of the North American food supply. But why are diseased animals younger than the feed ban still being found? George Luterbach, a senior veterinarian with Canada's food inspection agency, said that the latest case might be linked to tainted feed in circulation before the ban was imposed nine years ago that somehow remained on the market. Just one milligram of contaminated feed is enough to infect an animal with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Luterbach told the Canadian Press news agency. Scientists believe that BSE-contaminated beef is the cause of a rare human form of the ailment, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. About 150 cases have been discovered, mainly in Europe, although two people who lived in Britain when tainted meat was sold were diagnosed in Florida and Texas. The Calgary Herald quoted Luterbach as saying his agency is drawing up a proposal to further tighten the feed plan as well as to enhance inspection. But one Canadian critic called the move too little, too late. "Any new measures they come up with now are 10 years too late," said William Leiss a risk-management expert with the universities of Ottawa and Calgary and an author of several studies on the mad cow crisis. "This only shows the feed ban was not effective," Leiss told the Herald. "When they brought it in, they didn't even pull the old feed off the market. It's scandalous." R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America, a Montana-based ranchers' group unsuccessful in its attempt to have a ban on Canadian beef imports reimposed, agreed with Consumer Union that both countries should prevent horse, hog or chicken feed from containing remains from slaughtered cattle, because feed sacks could be mislabeled or bought by mistake and fed to herds. Cattle are ruminants. Canada and the United States has banned products known as ruminant-to-ruminant feed since 1997. But both countries allow cattle remains to be used in chicken and hog feed, and pig and chicken remains to be used in cattle feed. "As was demonstrated in Europe, the mere ban of ruminant-to-ruminant feed is inefficient to halting the disease," said Bill Bullard, R-CALF's chief executive. "We now have scientific evidence that the Canadian feed ban was not effective." http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/14367656.htm Barry Shlachter, (817) 390-7718 barry@star-telegram.com |
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