http://consumerist.com/tag/moos-from-the-swamp/?i=5010931&t=bush-administration-to-meatpackers-please-stop-testing-for-mad-cow-disease

Bush Administration To Meatpackers: Please Stop Testing For Mad Cow Disease

The USDA has appealed a district court decision that would allow meatpackers to conduct their own tests for mad cow disease, alleging that such testing would only create "false assurances." The original plaintiff, Creekstone Farms, wants to test all of its cattle for mad cow but the USDA has prevented it from buying the testing kits.

As we wrote a year ago, when the district court decision was handed down, the current USDA testing scheme for mad cow tests only the cattle that the USDA has dubbed "high risk," which ends up being less than one percent of America's beef. Creekstone Farms claimed that it has lost business in Japan and South Korea due to the mad cow scare in the U.S. a few years ago, and that it would like to reassure its domestic and international customers by testing all of its cattle. To that end, the company built its own testing center and was prepared to begin testing its beef, but the USDA, which regulates the sale of mad cow testing kits, blocked the sale. The lower court case turned on an interpretation of the Virus-Serum-Toxin Act, which regulates, among other things, products "intended for use in the treatment of domestic animals." The district court pointed out that there is no treatment or cure for mad cow disease, and the tests are only performed on dead animals, thus the tests should not be regulated by the USDA under this act.

For its part, the meatpacking lobby ("Big Meat") opposes Creekstone Farms, citing fears that if Creekstone tests all its beef, consumers will force other meatpackers to do so, leading to more expensive beef.

Damn those consumers and their demands.

I've followed this case since the very beginning. The safety of American beef has been on a downward spiral ever since the USDA handed meat inspection over to the industry. The approved testing regimen, namely the testing of "high risk" cows, which in the industry means that they are not ambulatory makes no sense given the most current information about Mad Cow Disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis). It is a prion-associated disease that may have an incubation period of 30 years or more in cows, even longer in humans. And we haven't stopped the practices that get cows infected in the first place, incorporating cow parts into their feed.

Feeding cows other cows is a natural, beautiful thing. Who are we to question it?

Uhhh, yes we have. That ban has been in place for quite some time.

Actually we don't. The final rule, which does not go into effect until April 2009 bans:

...the brains and spinal cords from cattle 30 months of age and older. The entire carcass of cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption is also prohibited, unless the cattle are less than 30 months of age, or the brains and spinal cords have been removed.

http://www.wtop.com/index.php?nid=116&sid=1392359
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/08-1180.pdf

And as we've already seen passage for human consumption does not mean that the meat has been tested for BSE. Further, the separation of parts from cows less than 30 months old from older cows is not perfect in rendering facilities. Even the industry admits that cross-contamination is a problem for which they have no good solution.

MOAR SAUSAGES

This is merely adding to the current Ruminant Feed Ban passed in 1997. This rule is only expanding the ban to prohibit ruminant SRMs in all animal feed, not just those produced for feeding to other ruminants. In general, ruminant origin protein has been prohibited from cattle feed since the initial rule was finalized on Aug. 4, 1997. That's why I said we haven't been including "cow" parts in "cow" feed for some time. But you're right, this full prohibition just got passed.

On the whole, this is a tough topic. On the one hand, how can you attempt to keep a private company from running and paying for diagnostic tests that it and it's clients feel are appropriate? On the other hand, if Creekstone Farms turns up a positive or two, our export market for beef will slam shut yet again, as the business of agricultural import/export doesn't give a damn about solid evidence of low prevalence. It's really a no-win for the feds. They're going to be blamed either way.

Oh, and this is one time where I wouldn't place all the blame on Bush's administration. You could put a Dem in office and I'm confident this battle would still be going on.

I agree with you about the Feds. They have no good solution to the legal bind that they are in unless Congress takes a stand and helps them out. As it is, I believe that the South Koreans are still refusing American beef shipments despite having lifted their ban on American beef, and Japanese consumers aren't exactly happy with the current arrangement.

But actually what I was trying to point out is that both the South Koreans and the Japanese would be much happier if we simply didn't feel any "cow parts" to our cows. We've deemed that a cow under 30 months old is unlikely to have contracted BSE; therefore, they can be safely fed to other animals, including brains and spinal cords. In Britain this is a practice that was banned in 1996. It may take as little as 100ug of infectious material to infect a cow and neither chemical rendering nor heat "kills" the infectious material. And there is no treatment for variant Cruetzfeldt-Jacob Disease.

Oh, I wasn't passing judgment on the new rule. I don't really have any big issues with making the ban more strict. But, since there hasn't been a case of BSE in any cattle born after 1997 within the United States, I also understand the argument that it looks like the current ban is already doing it's job, so why change it? There's going to be a lot of landfills being filled with 1200lb Holsteins once this comes into effect.

As a whole, BSE is blown out of proportion. For the number of positives there have been in the UK, the link to cases of vCJD is incredibly low. Now, if there's a simple way to make a possible disease risk even lower, I'm all for it, I just think there's far more important diseases we should be focusing on. Just they don't get the media coverage that "mad cows" do. I mean, it's funny. We've known of a highly prevalent TSE in sheep for decades. There's constantly positives, yet nobody cares, because we can't prove a link to any human disease. Of course, we have no idea why we can't prove that link. Prions are an odd, odd thing.

I'm suing my neighbor. His kid is making her lemonade with real lemons, so no one will buy mine!!!

This isn't very conservative Mr. Bush...

I think that the problem is not the small chance of catching the disease, but the fact that there have been enough cases in the UK for which the link between vCJD and BSE is well-established. There's less than a 0.1% correlation between BSE cases and vCJD cases in the UK, but the research is quite clear-cut. So should all precautions be taken to ensure that BSE is not transmitted? Well, it's pretty much up to the industry to make the standards work.

To me the one thing that is most disturbing about the disease is the possible long incubation period. Most cows don't live long enough to manifest symptoms of BSE and become "downer" cows.

Here's an interesting paper:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/6/1965

This is a controversy that's raged for a long time. I guess will continue for awhile.

The high infectivity of comparable, isolated virus-like particles that show no intrinsic PrP by antibody labeling, combined with their loss of infectivity when nucleic acid–protein complexes are disrupted, make it likely that these 25-nm particles are the causal TSE virions that induce late-stage PrP brain pathology.

I don't know the specifics, but one criticism of this. First, pathogenesis is often poorly understood, even in laboratory models. So isolation of a virus-like agent in which disruption of nucleic-acid protein complexes renders it without infectivity wouldn't be unexpected. Did they treat the crude material similarly and also render it non-infectious?

And other researchers have found that neither heat nor chemical treatment that should inactivate DNA or RNA renders crude material non-infectious. Obviously, all of this is subject to the conditions of each individual's experimental method, but there are many skeptics who've become convinced. And of course, there's this:

Prions are unconventional infectious agents responsible for transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) diseases. They are thought to be composed exclusively of the protease-resistant prion protein (PrPres) that replicates in the body by inducing the misfolding of the cellular prion protein (PrPC). Although compelling evidence supports this hypothesis, generation of infectious prion particles in vitro has not been convincingly demonstrated. Here we show that PrPC --> PrPres conversion can be mimicked in vitro by cyclic amplification of protein misfolding, resulting in indefinite amplification of PrPres. The in vitro-generated forms of PrPres share similar biochemical and structural properties with PrPres derived from sick brains. Inoculation of wild-type hamsters with in vitro-produced PrPres led to a scrapie disease identical to the illness produced by brain infectious material. These findings demonstrate that prions can be generated in vitro and provide strong evidence in support of the protein-only hypothesis of prion transmission.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1585 ... d_RVDocSum

This isn't very anything.

It's quite liberal actually. Ya know, the government interjecting itself into private business where it has no business being in the first place.

What do you call it when the government injects itself into one private business at the behest of a consortium of other private businesses?