Critics say "don't test, don't find" is rule for mad cow disease

After the country's first mad cow case was found in 2003, the federal government ramped up testing cattle for the fatal disease.

But three years later, citing the "extremely low" incidence of the disease in the United States, officials all but eliminated that extra testing, scaling the costly program back by 90 percent.

Today, about 40,000 -- or 0.1 percent -- of the 37 million U.S. cows slaughtered each year are tested, a number that consumer groups say is too low, especially when compared to testing programs in other countries.

"Don't look, don't find" might be a more apt way of describing this country's testing program, said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union.

But officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which oversees mad cow testing, say the fact that only two infected cows were found during the heightened testing -- which cost $158 million -- made it difficult to justify continued testing at those levels. No cases have been identified since 2006.

"We're finding it at extremely low levels," said Karen Eggert, a spokeswoman for the inspection service.

Concerns about mad cow disease resurfaced in late January when the Humane Society of the United States released undercover video showing workers at Chino's Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. jabbing cows with forklifts and shooting water up their noses to get them to stand.

Federal rules ban so-called "downer" cows from being slaughtered for food because they carry an increased risk of mad cow disease and other food-borne illnesses.

The video's release prompted the largest-ever beef recall in the nation, sparked local and federal investigations, and triggered a series of food-safety hearings in Washington.

By all accounts, mad cow cases in humans are extremely rare in the United States, with only three reported over the last decade. Those individuals were believed to have acquired the disease in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

People can become infected with the human form of the disease when they eat diseased tissue from cattle. The illness is marked by increasingly severe mental and physical degeneration. It is always fatal.

Rules adopted over the past decade amply protect consumers from the disease, federal officials say. One rule requires slaughterhouses to separate brains and spinal cords, the tissue most likely to be infected, from cow carcasses. Another rule bans feeding protein from cows to other cows.

The first mad cow case in the United States was detected in December 2003 in an adult Holstein in Washington state. The cow had been imported from Canada.

In response, the USDA boosted its testing for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which is the scientific name for mad cow.

The results -- two mad cow cases found from tests of the brain tissue of 787,000 cows between 2004 and 2006 -- dimmed fears that the disease had a foothold in the country. As a result, then-Agriculture secretary Mike Johanns announced testing would rolled back.

But consumer groups say the animal-feed ban has holes that still allow contaminants to be fed to cattle. And critics also contend the sampling of cows to test was flawed.

A 2006 USDA Inspector General report noted that because the testing program was voluntary and not random, it could not be determined whether the government had tested a representative sample of the highest-risk cattle, such as non-ambulatory cattle and those showing signs of a central nervous disorder.

The report also faulted sample collectors for not determining the health histories of the animals.

Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service spokeswoman Eggert took issue with that report and said high-risk cattle were -- and are -- adequately being sampled.

Jim Cullor, director of the University of California-Davis' veterinary medical teaching and research center, agrees, saying, he is comfortable with the reductions in testing.

But Hansen, of Consumers Union, said other nations, such as Japan, with more stringent testing nations overseas have detected more disease. Since Japan started blanket testing in 2001, it has found 31 cases of mad cow disease in cattle. Before that, none had been found.

"Once they start testing in a large way, they start finding," Hansen said.

E-mail Douglas Quan at dquan(at)PE.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)