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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (33878)	12/30/2003 10:50:10 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Mad-Cow Crisis Spurs Rule Change Bush Administration Bans Slaughter of Sick Cattle In Reversal of Its Position By SCOTT KILMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL To keep any unsafe meat from entering the food supply, the Bush administration is banning the meatpacking industry from slaughtering sick cattle -- a measure scuttled only last month by the administration and the meat industry. The step is the first in a wave of regulation tightening that the federal government is being forced to consider in the wake of the Dec. 23 announcement of the finding of a mad-cow-infected Holstein in Washington state. Unclear is how many such steps the government will have to take to win back the $3 billion-a-year export business that disappeared within hours of last week's mad-cow announcement. Despite nearly a week of U.S. lobbying, not a single trading partner has lifted its ban on U.S. beef, and the nation's trading partners had no immediate official reaction to Tuesday's move. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the beef industry -- the fortunes of which the agency is charged with promoting -- have long resisted calls by food-safety advocates and animal-rights groups for a ban on the killing of cattle too sick or injured to walk to their deaths at meatpackers. These cattle are known as "downers," and the USDA and beef industry have said that a ban on their slaughter would be financially onerous to processors. Last month, the Bush administration, along with the dairy and cattle industries, lobbied successfully to kill legislation, which was already in House-Senate conference committee, that would have banned the slaughtering of downer cattle. Tuesday, however, the USDA switched positions, saying the cost of the downer ban would be minimal. Indeed, the meatpacking industry pegged the annual costs of the USDA's announcements Tuesday at just several million dollars. Out of about 35 million U.S. cattle slaughtered each year, about 200,000 are downers. The government is also banning the consumption of brains -- a delicacy for some ethnic groups -- from cattle slaughtered at more than 30 months of age. Finally, the government announced the launch of a national cattle identification system, but it offered only sketchy details. Mad-cow disease, technically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, causes holes to form in the brains of its victims, precipitating loss of coordination and eventual death. People can contract a similar form of the disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, by eating contaminated beef products, especially brain and spinal-cord tissue. Downer cattle are the group most likely to carry mad-cow, since the neurological affliction in its late stages makes it hard for the animals to walk. The USDA has had a mad-cow surveillance strategy of collecting brain samples from about 10% of the roughly 200,000 downer cattle that federal veterinarians inspect in the holding pens of meatpacking plants each year. But the government has allowed the meatpacking industry to slaughter those animals, and to sell their meat long before the results of laboratory results become available -- a process that typically takes weeks. The Mabton, Wash., cow was a downer. Her owner sold her to a small Moses Lake, Wash., meatpacker, where she was slaughtered on Dec. 9, because her injuries from the difficult delivery of a calf had made it hard for her to walk. The government's sole mad-cow testing laboratory, which is in Ames, Iowa., didn't learn of the positive results until Dec. 22. While the ban on downer cattle is a concession from the Bush administration, it still falls far short of what food-safety critics have long called for, and what some trading partners want to see happen, such as broad testing of cattle. Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman said Tuesday the government is considering how to screen older cattle for the disease, but she didn't provide any details about scope or timing. What's more, some of the moves unveiled by the USDA merely ban practices that meatpacking officials say their industry has already abandoned. For instance, the USDA is banning use of air-injection stunning devices as a way to kill cattle in a meatpacking plant because the equipment can splatter brains onto meat. A spokesman for the meatpacking trade group, the American Meat Institute, said Tuesday that it had asked its members to stop using the equipment more than five years ago, and doesn't know of any meatpacker still employing the device. --Amy Merrick contributed to this article. Write to Scott Kilman at scott.kilman@wsj.com Updated December 31, 2003