Although food safety officials testified to a House subcommittee that two new regulations will enhance existing rules to make an effective firewall against mad cow disease, a new report reveals that the rules mainly protect the meat industry and are not strong enough to prevent contamination of the food supply. According to the report by the href="http://www.progressiveregulation.org">Center for Progressive Regulation, the centerpiece of the mad cow regulation is a so-called "zero tolerance policy" for the introduction into the food chain of certain cattle parts that are at highest risk of spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). However, the report reveals that the zero tolerance policy actually allows the meat industry to opt out of a stringent hazard prevention approach and instead adopt less stringent industry-designed standards. Report Reveals Weaknesses in Food Safety Policy Prior to the outbreak, the federal government regulated the contamination of the domestic meat supply through (1) a ban on imports from countries that had suffered BSE outbreaks, (2) a surveillance program that tested a small number of downer cattle, and (3) partial restrictions on feeding animal protein to cattle. With the discovery of a BSE cow in Washington state last December, the USDA and FDA have stepped up existing regulation and also initiated two new pieces of regulation designed to act as a firewall against the contamination of the human food supply. However, according to a report released on July 22 by the Center for Progressive Regulation, the new regulations act to quell public fears and protect the meat industry rather than actually prevent high-risk substances from entering the food supply. The primary example of loopholes in the new regulation regards preventing specified risk materials (SRMs) from entering the food supply. SRMs, which include brain, ganglia, and spinal cord tissue, are the animal parts most likely to contain the mad cow disease "prion" (a protein particle that lacks nucleic acid). According to Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, preventing SRMs from entering the food supply is the best way to prevent the threat of BSE to humans. As she stated in a July 14 government reform subcommittee hearing, "When you remove the Specified Risk Materials from the food supply, as the chairman of the International Committee said to me, that is the most important thing that you do to protect public health." The new USDA regulation claims a zero tolerance policy on SRMs. However, as the CPR report uncovers, the regulation allows industry to choose one of two methods for meeting the requirements. Either companies can apply the existing standards of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, a preventive approach to food borne hazards currently used to control the spread of contaminants such as salmonella and E.coli, or industry can use what is called a prerequisite program. This program option, favored by industry, allows companies to come up with their own standards for preventing SRMs from entering the food supply. The prerequisites program requires no oversight or approval from the USDA or FDA and provides no punitive measures for violations. Prerequisite programs are generally used for basic sanitation or other contaminations that are seen to be low risk. Companies are not required to release their prerequisite plans for SRMs, but the food safety department at the University of Nebraska has released href=http://foodsafety.unl.edu/newpdf/BSE%20Slaughter%20SOP%20and%20Log.pdf>standard operating procedures for the control of specified risk materials that best approximate the level of scrutiny required of a prerequisite program. According to the plan, "grossly identifiable spinal cord material spread by the splitting process will be trimmed from the carcass with a knife." The guidelines also require that the meat be inspected by "visual observation" once per day. With such imprecise guidelines, it seems likely that SRMs will continue to pass into Americans' food supply. Furthermore, these policies clearly do not meet the zero tolerance level mandated by the regulation. The industry position is that there is no need to use the more stringent HACCP strategy because the chance that the meat will contain the mad cow disease prion is relatively low. However, the regulation seeks to eliminate the presence of the SRMs, and not that of the mad cow prion. Therefore, the industry methods are wholly inadequate for dealing with the regulation and render the firewall flimsy at best. Another regulation bans the feeding of mammalian proteins to ruminants, including bovines. However, the regulation allows for the feeding of chicken litter to cows. Since the chickens are fed cow proteins, it is possible that the chicken litter is contaminated with cow protein, which is then fed back to the cows in the form of chicken litter. Ruminant-to-ruminant feeding is the only known way that BSE spreads from cow to cow. USDA Defends Surveillance Plan Although these two significant problems weaken the mad cow regulation, the USDA was called upon by a House government reform subcommittee to defend only its surveillance program. The USDA's plan, which took effect in June, will concentrate testing on high-risk cattle. The vast majority of the 265,000 cattle that will be tested over the next twelve to eighteen months will come from cattle most likely to have BSE, including nonambulatory "downer" cattle and cattle showing signs of a disorder of the central nervous system. Because BSE rarely occurs in cattle less than thirty months of age, the test will only be administered to cattle over thirty months old. The USDA believes that by targeting high-risk cattle, it can increase its chances of finding potential cases of BSE and therefore better calculate the prevalence of BSE in the bovine population. The USDA asserted that by targeting high-risk cattle for testing, it would be able to find one case of made cow disease in ten million. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and food safety experts charged that the claim was based on faulty assumptions. The current surveillance program is largely voluntary; therefore, the population sampled will not be arbitrary. Furthermore, though less likely to occur, cases of BSE have been found in young and healthy-looking cattle. The surveillance program is not intended to be a public health safeguard. Rather, the surveillance program is designed to indicate the prevalence of BSE in the domestic bovine population. Although it does not protect against the spread of BSE, the testing is still crucial because accurate knowledge of the prevalence of BSE can establish the effectiveness of current safeguards. Fearing the market repercussions of a positive result, many farmers lack incentive to test their cattle. By allowing industry avoid testing cattle, the USDA sacrifices accuracy in order to protect industry interests. Though most of the program is voluntary, BSE testing is mandatory for all nonambulatory cattle going to slaughter. However, since new regulations prohibit such "downer" cattle from entering the food supply, many of these never reach the slaughterhouse, and therefore are not required to be tested. That gap in the testing requirement leaves a large number of high-risk cattle out of the tested group. Instead, farmers often bury these cattle on their property. Though the hearing focused on the accuracy of the surveillance techniques, href=http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/Testimony7-2004.pdf>testimony by the USDA inspector general revealed the weaknesses of the system prior to the 2004 tightening of regulations by the USDA. Cattle ranchers and meat packers were often unclear on which animals to test and what organization is responsible for testing. In the case of the Washington state cow, discrepancies existed as to which cow was actually the BSE positive cow and whether or not the cow was ambulatory at the time it reached the slaughterhouse. The issue is important because only nonambulatory cattle are required to be tested at the slaughterhouse. As Rep. Waxman pointed out, the recent discovery of a BSE-infected cow in the United States appears to have been due to luck rather than improved regulation. The risk of mad cow disease here is still very low. However, the USDA's and the FDA's approach, while appearing to provide strong protection, instead has gaping loopholes that may protect industry, but not public health.