U.S. government prevents meat packer testing for mad cow disease

In what is being seen by many as a curious and in some ways surprising move, the U.S. government is trying to prevent a Kansas meat packer from testing all of their animals for Mad Cow disease.

The company, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, are keen to test all of their own animals for the presence of Mad Cow disease - bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - a progressive neurological disorder of cattle that results from infection by an unconventional transmissible agent.

Under current regulations, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tests less than one percent of all slaughtered cows for the disease; the meat from affected animals is fatal to humans if it is eaten.

BSE first appeared in Europe in 1986 and caused a major epidemic in cattle; more than 183,000 cases of BSE were confirmed in the UK alone in more than 35,000 herds through to the end of November 2003.

The epidemic in the UK peaked in January 1993 at almost 1,000 new cases per week and experts believe the outbreak may have been the result of feeding sheep meat-and-bone meal which contained scrapie, to cattle.

Experts in the UK agree that the evidence suggests that the outbreak was exacerbated by the feeding of rendered bovine meat-and-bone meal to young calves.

By 2004, 157 people acquired and died of a disease with similar neurological symptoms subsequently called vCJD, or (new) variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

It is estimated that 400,000 cattle infected with BSE entered the human food chain in the 1980s in Britain and although the BSE epidemic was eventually brought under control by culling all suspect cattle populations, people are still being diagnosed with vCJD each year.

This is because the disease can have a long incubation period and it can be decades before symptoms appear.

As a result the full extent of the human vCJD outbreak is still not clear.

To date, there have only been three cases of Mad Cow disease in the United States, and the USDA who regulate the test, say widespread testing could lead to false positives that could potentially harm the meat industry.

If the company do test all of their own animals for the presence of BSE, Creekstone Farms will have a huge advantage over the bigger meat packers, who apparently have not considered such a move.

Even though a federal judge has ruled in favour of Creekstone, the USDA has said it will appeal, which means in effect that the meat packer will not be able start to tests until the appeals process is exhausted.

In a report in 2005 the consumer group Public Citizen found more than 800 Mad Cow safety violations at U.S. meat packing plants, 460 of which occurred because slaughter plants had inadequate systems for dealing with BSE in their food safety plans.

Of those 460 violations, 60 percent apparently had plans that did not even mention Mad Cow disease.