Two new cases of mad cow disease found in Canada serve as a dramatic reminder of the need for improved safeguards against the disease here in the U.S. Though only one cow has tested positve for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the new cases nonetheless highlight the need to close loopholes in our public protections against mad cow disease. What You Should Know In response to the case of mad cow in Washington state in December 2003, the USDA increased the number of cows it surveys for mad cow from 20,000 in 2003 to 265,000 this year. The USDA's plan, which took effect in June, concentrates 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 cow currently being tested was part of this high-risk group. Loopholes in the System The risk of mad cow disease to humans 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. Voluntary Surveillance May Miss Potential Cases The USDA asserted that by targeting high-risk cattle for testing, it would be able to find one case of mad cow disease in ten million. However, the current surveillance program is largely voluntary; therefore, the population sampled will not be random. Furthermore, though less likely to occur, cases of BSE have been found in young and healthy-looking cattle, which are not included in the high-risk category. 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 to 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. Instead, farmers often bury these cattle on their property. That gap in the testing requirement leaves a large number of high-risk cattle out of the tested group; as a consequence, inspectors do not gain an accurate picture of the prevalence of BSE in the population. Protecting Our Food Supply USDA officials said that the cow that recently tested positive was not allowed to enter the food supply. The question remains, however, whether the agency is doing enough to ensure that mad cow is prevented from entering the food chain. Keeping infected cows out of the food supply is critical to protecting humans from BSE. The primary way to keep the food supply safe is to prevent 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) which, in turn, can cause the deadly variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) in humans. 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." A new regulation promulgated this year aims to do just that. Although the new USDA regulation claims a zero tolerance policy on SRMs, the Center for Pregressive Regulation has discovered weaknesses in the policy. According to a CPR report, the regulation allows industry to choose one of two methods for meeting the requirements: either (1) 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 (2) 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 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. Containing the Disease Another necessary component for a mad cow firewall is to ban ruminant-to-ruminant feeding. The only known way that BSE spreads from cow to cow is through proteins, as when blood or meat from an infected cow is fed to an uninfected cow. Although there is an FDA regulation that bans the feeding of mammalian proteins to ruminants, including bovines, the regulation still 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. The regulation also allows for formula containing blood protein from cows to be fed to calves. An FDA plan to close this loophole was quietly delayed. Although the FDA and USDA announced with great fanfare their efforts to strengthen protections against BSE, their announcement concealed FDA's decision to renege on its promise to close the ruminant-to-ruminant loophole. FDA promised back in January 2004 that this loophole would be closed, but it decided in July 2004 only to issue an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, with an uncertain schedule for any actual rule to be issued. The new case highlights the need for FDA and USDA to close this important loophole in regulation.