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Consumers may have a beef with cattle feed
(Tuesday, June 10, 2003 -- CropChoice news) -- Elizabeth Weise, USA Today, 06/09/03: If you don't finish your steak at a restaurant, did you know the leftovers
might be dinner for a cow? Or that calves, instead of drinking their
mothers' milk, are fed formula made from cows' blood?
These practices, all perfectly legal, have come to light with the discovery
last month of North America's first homegrown case of "mad cow" disease.
Rocked by the specter of spreading infection on the continent, the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture have turned their
attention to ways of keeping deadly agents that spread the disease out of
cattle and cattle feed.
But opening this delicate topic could have unappetizing consequences for
consumers who rarely think about what those sizzling steaks and burgers went
through on the way from feedlot to backyard grill. When they do, they might
not want to pay higher prices to change the system.
Americans have a bucolic image of cows happily chomping grass in fields.
Many don't know that modern animal husbandry practices have provided cheap,
plentiful meat through such standard practices as feeding cattle not only
pieces of their herd mates (before the practice was banned in 1997) but also
chicken litter, leftover restaurant food and out-of-date pet food.
Cleaning up this act could be costly, and Americans demand cheap meat, says
Janice Swanson, an animal behavior specialist who studies cattle at Kansas
State University.
"The consuming public needs to understand that it's not just the fault of
the producers. The pressure on them is to produce a product that's so cheap
that they have to capture every possible efficiency," Swanson says. "The
average consumer doesn't care, and they're not going to pay one penny more."
For now, that choice seems far away. Authorities have found "mad cow"
disease in only a single cow in Canada, although it was reported Wednesday
that five steers that once were part of that cow's herd had been shipped to
Montana and later sent to slaughter. Officials caution that there's no
reason to believe the bulls were infected because all other animals from
that herd have tested negative.
Even so, the authorities have taken no chances: The United States closed the
border to Canadian cattle and beef products after the discovery, and teams
of USDA and FDA investigators descended on Canada and Montana.
Government reaction
Even if this case is contained, authorities want to head off disaster.
Scientists know there's only one way a cow -- a natural herbivore -- can get
bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the brain-wasting disease that in
its human form has killed at least 150 people worldwide since 1996 and
devastated the British beef industry. It has to be given feed by its human
handlers that contains infected animal byproducts. In short, someone has to
feed it ground-up cow.
The FDA tests 600 domestic and 600 import feed samples a year for prohibited
materials, which include ground-up ruminants -- animals that chew their cud
such as cows, sheep and goats -- in cow feed. Consumer groups say this is
woefully inadequate.
On Nov. 6, the FDA published an "advance notice of proposed rulemaking,"
federal-speak indicating that the agency might change meat industry
regulations. The FDA notice was couched as the beginning of a discussion on
whether it was even necessary to change the rules on cattle feeding
practices.
The leisurely nature of this discussion is gone. Industry leaders agree
current U.S. rules on the feeding of cattle -- the mostly likely source of
the infection in Canada -- will undergo a major overhaul, though no one can
say when.
"Before this thing in Canada happened, I really doubted there would be much
change," says Rex Runyon of the American Feed Industry Association. "But now
... it's going to happen; they're going to make some changes."
The five areas of discussion the FDA delineated in its November notice
include:
¬Excluding brain and spinal cord from animal byproducts. Before the outbreak
of mad cow in Britain, cows were given feed that included the ground-up
remnants of cows. The most dangerous of these byproducts are the brains and
spinal cords, the tissues that harbor the most infectious agents. Mad cow is
caused by prions, proteins that for unknown reasons fold into the wrong
shape and wreak havoc.
As for using the parts of animals that we don't consume, the rendering
industry was considered an ecological success until mad cow, says Will
Hueston, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Animal Health
and Food Safety and a BSE expert.
"You were cooking the material, reducing the bulk, extracting the fat which
could be used in soaps, candles, fuels and a whole range of industrial uses,
and the rendered protein material turned out to be a great protein
supplement. It looked like a win-win situation," Hueston says. "And remember
that prior to BSE, everyone believed that the high-temperature cooking in
rendering kills all the disease organisms."
What happened in Britain in the late 1980s was a cycle of infection in which
a sick animal's parts went into the feed and infected more animals. Britain
eventually banned the feeding of meat and bone meal to animals, which
stopped the disease in its tracks.
In response to the outbreak in Britain and other European countries, the
United States and Canada in 1997 made it illegal to feed cows meat and bone
meal made from ruminants. The feed bans in both countries do allow use of
that feed for poultry and pigs.
But the larger concern since the inception of that ban has been that there
were too many loopholes, too many ways for material that can transmit mad
cow to get to cows and then possibly to humans.
The crisis "calls for some pretty drastic measures if we're going to try to
ensure the safety of the beef industry," says Larry Hollis, an extension
veterinarian at Kansas State University. To him, and to many in the
industry, a total ban keeping all mammal by-products out of animal feed
might be the only way to protect consumers. "Some people are so hung up on
low-cost production that they will violate whatever rules are there," Hollis
says. "Unless we keep it out of the feed stream for any purpose, we could
have trouble."
Says John Stauber, author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?:
"What we need to do is obvious but economically painful for the livestock
industry. That's to implement exactly the same regulations that exist in
Britain and Europe and ban all feeding of slaughterhouse waste to
livestock."
New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle, author of Safe Food:
Bacteria, Biotechnology and Bioterrorism, says: "There are lots of reasons
why cannibalism isn't a good idea. This is a real wake-up call about the way
we've been feeding animals."
¬The use of poultry litter in cattle feed. In parts of the country where
cattle are raised near poultry production areas, it's not uncommon to feed
them poultry litter -- basically excreta, bedding, spilled feed and feathers.
This practice is not allowed in Canada.
Chickens can't get any diseases similar to mad cow, so they can legally be
fed meat and bone meal made from cattle. But there is concern that spilled
feed as well as partially digested feed might end up back in cattle troughs,
resulting in the same potential cycle of infection that caused the British
outbreak of mad cow.
"It's gross," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the Center
for Science in the Public Interest. "Until BSE, this was this hidden issue
of what the animals were eating."
But it makes sense from a nutrition stance, says Neil Lamming, a BSE
educator with the Washington state Department of Agriculture. Cows have four
stomachs that can digest this material and extract nutrients in a way that
animals with one stomach cannot.
Because Washington isn't a major poultry producing state, the practice isn't
common there. But Ali Kashani, who manages the state's feed program,
acknowledges that there's a public relations problem. "The main reason it's
not so widespread is because of consumer reaction to it." Kashani says.
¬Eliminating the restaurant-plate waste exemption to the feed ban. The 1997
law that banned most mammalian remains from cattle feed has an interesting
provision that clears a path from cuisine to cow. The "plate waste"
exemption allows restaurants to sell plate scrapings and leftovers to
renderers, which turn them into cattle feed, among other things.
The American Feed Industry Association's Runyon defends the exemption: "How
can you tell the consumer 'Hey, you've just eaten a T-bone steak and it's
fine for you, but you can't feed it to animals'? "
¬The use of pet food in ruminant feed. Retail pet food frequently contains
ruminant meat and bone meal, but unlike agricultural animal feed, there's no
requirement that it be labeled "Do not feed to cattle or other ruminants."
However, out-of-date dry cat and dog food is sometimes sold as salvage and
ends up being fed to cattle. The FDA is wondering whether all pet food
should be labeled, just in case.
¬Preventing cross-contamination of feed. A Government Accounting Office
report found that at rendering and feed plants where both ruminant and
non-ruminant meat and bone meal were made, cross-contamination could occur.
FDA is considering whether it should require that rendering and feed plants
be allowed to do only one or the other, but not both, to guard against
cross-contamination.
It's in the blood
Spray-dried cow and pig blood is used in feed to provide protein, as a
soluble product to mix in animals' drinking water and, most commonly, as a
milk replacement for calves. Blood serum is especially effective as a
supplement for calves that are removed from their mothers at less than 24
hours after birth.
Though scientists have been able to transmit the sheep version of mad cow
via blood, no one has been able to do it in cattle.
But Stauber, author of the Mad Cow book, finds it laughable that while U.S.
regulatory agencies are cautious enough about the human blood supply that
they don't allow anyone who lived in Britain in the 1980s to donate blood,
they feed cow blood to cows every day and then allow them to be eaten. "The
question is whether it can be transmitted by oral feeding. But those
experiments involve years, if not decades," he says. "We have to err on the
side of caution."
What's ahead?
In the end, some change is likely, whether from scientific, practical or
political necessity.
"I believe there's always going to be folks out there who are maybe going to
be trying to cut corners and get ahead of the game," says Shane Sklar,
executive director of the Independent Cattleman's Association of Texas. "But
we can't risk the entire United States beef industry on a few bad apples
that are toying around with trying to make a quick dollar."
But Mad Cow author Stauber, who has followed the disease for more than a
decade, says he'll believe in the reforms when he sees them. "Every time
there's media attention to this issue, every time consumer and producers
start asking questions, we get this lip service out of USDA and FDA that
'Yes, we need to do the right thing; it's just going to take time.' But
they're just not ready to bite the bullet -- it's too economically painful
for the livestock feed industry."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-06-09-beef-cover_x.htm
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