Mad cow scare revived as feed found tainted
Federal agency finds animal parts in samples

Chad Skelton
CanWest News Service

Thursday, December 16, 2004

VANCOUVER -- A series of secret tests on cattle feed conducted by the federal government earlier this year found more than half the feed tested contained animal parts not listed in the ingredients, according to internal documents obtained by the Vancouver Sun.

The test results raise questions about whether rules banning the feeding of cattle remains to other cattle -- the primary way in which mad-cow disease is spread -- are being routinely violated.

According to internal Canadian Food Inspection Agency documents -- obtained through the Access to Information Act -- 70 feed samples labelled as vegetable-only were tested by the agency between January and March of this year. Of those, 41 samples (59 per cent) were found to contain "undeclared animal materials."

"The presence of animal protein materials (in vegetable feeds) may indicate ... deliberate or accidental inclusion of animal proteins in feeds where they are not supposed to be," said an internal memo to the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency last April that described the test results as "worrisome."

The memo, from Sergio Tolusso, feed program co-ordinator for the CFIA, said the contamination could also have been caused inadvertently -- for example, through the transporting of different feeds in the same trucks.

Controlled experiments have shown an animal needs to consume as little as one milligram of infected material -- about the size of a grain of sand -- from an animal with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to develop the brain-wasting disease.

Michael Hansen, an expert on mad-cow disease with the U.S.-based Consumers Union, the independent research institute that publishes Consumer Reports, said the CFIA tests are troubling. "The fact that stuff that is labelled as vegetable feed, that 59 per cent of it has animal material, that's incredibly high," said Hansen, who has a PhD in biology. "This should be a wake-up call to CFIA. It doesn't look good."

Michael McBane, national co-ordinator for the Canadian Health Coalition, a watchdog group, said the tests suggest the feed ban is not being adequately enforced. "It demonstrates the fact that the (feed) ban is basically meaningless," McBane said. "It's pretty well recognized that we have mad cow disease in Canada because of contaminated feed."

Consumption of beef from cows infected with BSE has been linked to the development in humans of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a deadly brain-wasting illness.

Earlier this month, the CFIA announced it would ban the parts of cattle most susceptible to BSE infection -- such as the spine and brains -- from all feed, including that destined for pigs and chickens.

Tolusso acknowledged the agency's tests were one reason for stricter regulations. "If we recognize there are lots of opportunities for the wrong kind of protein to get in the wrong kind of feed ... then perhaps the more prudent thing to do is to remove some of these higher-risk tissues altogether," he said.

Some experts have argued Canada should go even further and keep cattle remains out of feed altogether, as is done in Europe. "What they need to do is cut out the loopholes (and) stop feeding mammalian protein to food animals," Hansen said.

Tolusso said the CFIA believes a ban on just the riskiest materials -- like cow brains -- will eliminate most of the risk of BSE spreading in Canada.

But he said the agency hasn't ruled out a total ban on cattle remains in feed.

"At this point, we've put our best guess forward (on) the most appropriate approach," he said.