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Other cattle from 'mad cow' farm possibly eaten
141 animals are being traced by food inspectors

Hanneke Brooymans and Sean Gordon
Edmonton Journal and CanWest News Service

Saturday, January 08, 2005

OTTAWA -- Cattle born at the same farm and around the same time as the latest confirmed mad cow could have ended up on people's plates, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The agency is tracing 141 cattle born on the same farm as the infected cow.

That cow tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy last Sunday, four days after the U.S. announced it would re-open its border to Canadian beef and young cattle.

CFIA senior veterinarian Dr. Gary Little said Friday there is evidence that some of the 141 cattle being traced have entered the rendering stream and "... at least a small number of them have been slaughtered and would have entered the human food system, potentially."

That said, Little added people should not be unduly concerned.

"The safeguards we have in place -- and what we know about BSE here in Canada and the broader North America -- confirms that those animals, having entered the human food system, would be a very low risk."

That view was echoed by Paul Mayers, acting director general of the food directorate in Health Canada.

"At this point, we certainly can not say that animals might not have entered the food supply, but we can say the potential risk associated with those animals entering the food supply would have been very low."

Officials said they will euthanize nine other cows born at the same farm between 1995 and 1997.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether any other cows from the farm were exposed to the disease, or whether any diseased animals made it into the food chain, even as it appears that at least one animal from the herd was likely exported to the United States.

The infected animal, an eight-year-old dairy cow and so-called "downer," did not enter the human food chain or the animal feed process.

And though the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says it is exceedingly rare for two cows in the same "birth cohort" to fall prey to the brain-wasting disease, they are tracking down all 141 animals -- 93 dairy cows and 48 beef cattle -- who were born in the year before and 12 months after the infected cow.

Of the 93 dairy animals, 55 were bull calves who would have been slaughtered before two years, eliminating fears that they could have developed BSE. The disease usually develops after four or five years.

Nine of the remaining dairy cows were found at the farm of origin and at a second Alberta location. They have been quarantined and will be destroyed starting Monday.

Health Canada officials sought to assure the public about the risks to the human population -- mad cow disease has been linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurological disorder -- and that there was "a very low risk potential."

Officials said that while the investigation into Canada's second confirmed case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or BSE) is proceeding rapidly and according to plan, it may be difficult to determine whether the cow contracted the disease from feed containing the remains of other infected cows.

"We've found that food records often are not consistent and that after eight years the information can get fragmented," said Little.

VANCOUVER SUN
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Other cattle from 'mad cow' farm possibly eaten

Opposition agriculture critic Diane Finley praised CFIA officials for their quick handling of the investigation, but urged the government to "harmonize and standardize" feed standards with the United States so as to remove all doubt that Canadian beef is safe.

On Friday, CanWest News Service reported that the CFIA has identified possible violations of the 1997 ban on rendering ruminants to be used in cattle feed. According to an internal report, testing found four brands of cattle feed had animal material in them despite sold as being animal-free.

Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
January 8, 2005

As the latest plot twist in Canada's mad cow melodrama unfolds, it's worth remembering that this is just the first of the reruns.

That's because bovine spongiform encephalopathy is likely now established in the North American beef herd. BSE -- the clinical acronym for the malady that eats holes in cows' brains -- has now been transmitted in a variant form to at least 159 humans who ate contaminated meat.

I say "at least" because a British study that tested tonsils and appendixes routinely removed during surgeries and autopsies suggests the disease, which has a long incubation period, might affect as many 120 people per million population in the U.K.

True, only a few human victims have thus far emerged on this side of the Atlantic and it's thought that they were exposed in Europe, not here. Scientists and statisticians note that with only three confirmed cases of BSE in cattle in Canada and one in the U.S., the risk to Canadian and American consumers remains "infinitesimal."

However, perceptions are relative. What's a minuscule margin of risk to a statistician may seem quite a bit larger to a mother contemplating what to feed her toddlers. And I fear it's just a matter of time before more BSE cases present themselves in the beef herds of both Canada and the U.S.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration refers to the World Organization of Animal Health's guidelines for such determinations. They grant minimal risk status if fewer than two cases of BSE per million cattle over 24 months of age occur during each of the previous four years. About 5.5 million cattle in Canada's beef herd of 13.5 million fall into this age cohort. So that means that between now and 2009, more aggressive and effective testing could turn up as many as 44 cases of mad cow disease and we'd still be given a clean overall bill of health by the Americans who provide our biggest export market.

This might be comforting news for the exporters whose losses reached $11 million per day when international markets closed to Canadian beef after the discovery in May 2003 that a single cow in Alberta was sick with BSE.

Nevertheless, how tolerant will consumers here continue to be if many more cases are found?

Particularly if BSE should appear in cattle born since 1997, the year Ottawa finally banned the use of cattle fodder supplemented by protein derived from carcasses unfit for human consumption. In terms of risk assessment and statistical probabilities, the Canadian government points out that the incidence of BSE cases in Canada remains below one in a million.

Critics argue that the one-in-a-million odds are deceptive. In real terms, it's around three in 20,000, since that's how many cows have actually been tested and how many cases have been confirmed.

Of course, cost-benefit models based on similar statistically based risk projections lay behind the decision to permit the continued feeding of Canadian livestock with fodder manufactured from other sick and dead cattle long after such bans were in place in Europe. Which brings me to the crux of the problem for the industry, which is that the market is not necessarily rational when it comes to deciding what risks are acceptable in the food supply.

What deserves to be remembered is that BSE-related marketing problems for North American beef producers began in the fall of 2001, when Japanese authorities identified a case of BSE in a cow they thought had been infected by contaminated feed imported from Europe.

It proved the first of only nine cases identified in Japan between 2001 and 2003, but there, as in Europe, beef evaporated from consumers' shopping lists. A $1.2-billion US export market was blindsided. Beef exports spiralled by a third before U.S. producers knew what had hit them. There's no guarantee that future cases of BSE in the Canadian and American herd won't trigger similar flights from beef as a consumer staple here, too.

Which is why everyone should welcome Ottawa's plans to strengthen regulations governing the disposal of slaughtered animal parts associated with BSE and to extend prohibitions against the use of animal protein in animal feed to include both pet food and fodder for any livestock intended for human consumption.

For those prohibitions to mean anything, however, they will have to be accompanied by strict monitoring and ruthless enforcement.

Yet, as The Vancouver Sun's Chad Skelton recently discovered, federal documents confirm that more than half the samples of animal feed labelled vegetable matter it tested were found to include unidentified animal remains.

Almost immediately, I note from a Canadian Press report, two prominent U.S. politicians were asking that the ban on Canadian beef imports be continued on grounds that the inspections reported here by Skelton had found "major non-compliance issues" at seven feed mills and that three were failing to prevent contamination of cattle fodder.

Which brings us back to the original Alberta-born BSE-infected cow. It never entered the human food chain. However, the caucus was processed at a rendering plant and the meat and bone meal were added to pet food and fodder for other livestock and poultry.

A federal investigation tracked the distribution of feed possibly contaminated by its remains.

The reach of that one tainted cow was stunning. The feed went to 1,800 farms. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency did find that 99 per cent of the farms sampled had complied with the ban on feeding their cattle with fodder that contained the remains of other ruminants. But one per cent had not.

Contaminated feed intended for poultry had been fed to cattle which subsequently had to be destroyed.

What about ranchers and feed lot operators who have bought fodder they believe to be strictly vegetable in content when half of it, in fact, may have contained unlabelled, unidentified animal remains?

So the substance of Skelton's reports on contaminated animal feed couldn't be less fortunate. This is just the kind of development that can dramatically undermine an already fragile public confidence in the political will of government and its under-resourcing of food inspection agencies when it comes to public safety. Anybody who doesn't think there's potential here for a shattering paradigm shift in meat consumption should take a closer look at the growth of two trends.

First, a Harris Interactive survey conducted for the Vegetarian Resource Group in 2003 found that the number of people in the U.S. abandoning meat in their diet has grown sixfold since 1999.

Second, Carolyn Dimitri and Catherine Greene of the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in 2002 that retail sales growth in the organic foods market has equalled a stunning 20 per cent per year since 1990.

Just because Canadians and Americans eat a lot of beef now is no guarantee that they always will. If public confidence in the beef supply is to be maintained in the face of more cases of BSE, the industry will have to stop tinkering with regulations, set conservative standards for food safety and demand that government restore to inspection agencies the resources necessary to do their jobs.