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Appeals Court Rules US Can Block Mad Cow Testing
fahrbot-bot tips a story of mad cow disease, a private meat packer that wants to test all of its beef for the disease, and the USDA, which controls access to the test kits and just won an appeals court ruling that the government has the authority to block testing above and beyond the 1% the agency performs. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef sought to test 100% of its beef, in order to reassure its export markets, especially Japan and South Korea, that its beef is safe. Large meat packers opposed any such private testing, because they feared they would be forced into 100% testing and would have to raise prices. The appeals court ruled, 2 to 1, that under a 1913 law, test kits that are used only after an animal is killed still constitute "diagnosis" and "treatment" — this for a disease that has no treatment and is 100% fatal — and therefore fall under the USDA's authority to regulate.
Well some countries seem hell bent on importing the USA beef against the wishes of their citizens. So it is possible (but not proven) that the same forces preventing small supplies from doing 100% testing will smooth the way for the 1% tested beef to be sold to those countries.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
[The "rapid" BSE test in question] can detect abnormal prions only if they exist in a relatively high concentration, and abnormal prions typically reach detectable concentrations only two to three months before an animal exhibits observable symptoms. The incubation period for BSE (i.e., from infection to observable symptoms) is two to eight yearsâ"the average being five yearsâ"and cattle younger than thirty months are rarely symptomatic. Because most cattle for slaughter in the United States go to market before they are twenty-four months old, it is unlikely that the rapid BSE test will detect the disease. In light of the rapid BSE testâ(TM)s limited efficacy, USDA believes that the routine use of the test on âoeclinically normal young cattle is not practical[], offers no food safety value,â is âoelikely [to] produce false negative resultsâ and is âoemeaningful and reliable . . . when used for surveillance purposes on . . . animals exhibiting some type of clinical abnormality that could be consistent with BSEâ (e.g., cattle that cannot stand or walk, show signs of neurological disorders or die from an unknown cause).
From the court's opinion PDF in TFA. I'm inclined to agree with the USDA here. The only way this test is going to pop positive on a cow that isn't already exhibiting symptoms but is infected, is if that cow is in that tiny window of being infected for greater than 21 months, AND 3 months from symptomatic concentration levels. Earlier and it won't detect the prions (and the "100%" BSE free beef goes out and gives someone CJD, destroying all confidence in their current and, possibly, future assurances); later than that window, and it sounds like the cow would be tested as part of that 1% anyway.
That's my read, am I missing something?
I've seen this story pop up in several places, and it seemed too absurd to be true, so I skimmed through the actual decision.
Unsurprisingly, it is too absurd to be true, and does appear to be very misrepresented. The USDA actually has a reasonable argument against allowing testing for marketing purposes, though the argument also seems to call into question their own testing program.
Essentially, the USDA claims that the rapid testing method the packer wants to use is only able to detect the disease after its incubation period, right before symptoms start to appear in living cows. Since the incubation period is several years, and most cows are slaughtered before they are two years old, the USDA claims that testing 100% of young cows without symptoms wouldn't be useful, and would give inaccurate results. If such results, with possible false negatives, were to be used for marketing, they could end up making all testing in the US look bad, as it could be found that "tested" beef was actually contaminated.
What I don't understand, however, is why the incubation time vs. slaughtering age argument doesn't call into question the USDA's entire testing regime. What is the point of testing 1% of cows with a test that isn't going to work in most cases anyway?
That's a myth. Correlation doesn't equal causation. The early-puberty trend was observed *before* rBST was used in dairy cows, and on top of that, there is no known mechanism by which the hormones could have such an effect.
http://mygreenage.blogspot.com/2007/07/please-dont-fear-milk.html
Caution is good. Exposing health threats is good. Fearmongering is not good!
It's sort of inbetween; the exporter wants to buy their own BSE test kits, but the USDA regulates who they can be sold to, and won't grant the exporter permission to get them. I think the USDA is right in this situation, they're tasked with monitoring BSE, and the test the exporter wants to use is pretty much useless:
A real question here is *why* the FDA is so hell bent on blocking testing for mad cow disease... and I think we all know the reason why... the tests would reveal that mad cow disease is rampant within the US Beef supply.
As additional support for this theory, I offer this factoid: The US response to mad cow disease was to institute new regulations that mandated cows be slaughtered before they could reach the age that mad cow disease can first exhibit symptoms. This regulation does nothing to stop the spread of mad cow disease, of course, but it is very effective at sweeping the problem under the rug.
RTFA:
Because most cattle slaughtered in the United States are less than 24 months old, the most common mad cow disease test is unlikely to catch the disease, the appeals court noted. If the government does not control the tests, the USDA is worried about beef exporters unilaterally giving consumers false assurance.
The actual decision (PDF) made it clear that the company wanted to use the test that won't work. Not letting them use a test that will only give a positive result, accurate or not, is not sweeping things under a rug.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
is the "most common" mad cow disease test the one that was going to be administered?
Yes.
You understand how MCD is spread, right? You also understand that it's illegal to feed cattle beef protein, right? You understand there have been 3 (1 imported from Canada) cases in the US in all of history, right? You understand there are some 35 million cattle brought to market yearly in the US, right?
Do the math. We have the safest bovine industry on the planet.
Not letting them use a test that will only give a positive result, accurate or not, is not sweeping things under a rug.
The test fails to detect the presence of the disease. Failing to find evidence of the disease is a negative result, not a positive one, in this context. Sorry.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
Yes, that would be the politicians.
Who are themselves lawyers for the most part.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/29/skorea.beef/index.html
Until the 2003 ban, South Korea was the third-largest market for U.S. beef exporters. The U.S. beef industry has lost up to $4 billion since the market closed, according to the U.S. Meat Export Federation.
While there is the possibility that the USDA is doing a good thing by doing this, you have to consider the impact this may have on foreign markets concerned about the beef they are importing.
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness. The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing. Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit. If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
Um, is it just me or did the USDA just say that their mad cow test doesn't work?
What's the point of the little bit of testing they are currently doing if the test is "unlikely to catch the disease" for "most cattle slaughtered in the U.S."?
Knowledge != Intelligence
Because I live in S. Korea, this issue was huge just a few months ago. Everyone was talking about it.
Then one of my co-workers tried to convince me that NZ beef was safer than US beef because there was more grass in NZ.
Misinformation from the local media.
Then more told me that the US wants to send SK old beef that Americans are unwilling to eat because it's too dangerous. Only beef over three years, they said. In reality, the trade agreement was exclusively for beef under three years (which has the lowest likelihood of being infected).
Also misinformation from the local media.
Finally, several people I talked to wanted to know if I was brave enough to eat US meat because they had been told that Americans are afraid of their own beef.
The media. Meh.
Put identity in the browser.
Here's the thing, if a single cow shows evidence of BSE, many countries stop importing our beef for a long period of time.
So you want to test 35,000,000 cows a year? If the test is 99.999999% accurate, it'll produce 35 false positives each year. And countries are going to stop importing our beef on those false positives.
On top of that, some portion of cows are going to test as positive (even accurately) spontaneously. BSE had to start somewhere, there's no reason that even if we wipe it out in cows it can't show up again. And we'll lose sales based upon those too.
So yeah, it's an effort to keep from having positive results. But with 1% testing, we can apprently tell that there currently isn't a higher level of BSE in cows in the US than there has ever been. So the number of lives lost to BSE from cows isn't going to be any different than it has been in the past. And it hasn't seemed to be a problem before.
As to the idea that testing will help us internationally, well, there's nothing forcing the South Koreas to buy our beef right now, and they're still buying it. There's no reason I can see to think that sales will go up further in that country with more testing.
I'm not sure why Americans act like we have the worst problem with this in the world. It has not been legal to feed cow parts to cows (which can lead to spread of prion-based diseases) for my entire life. This is unlike Canada, for example where it was only banned a few years back based upon BSE fears.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Very true. That said, if a company wants to do something perfectly safe with their product that they feel will generate more sales, they ought to be able to do so.
Funny how the same Republicans who *love* the free market when it suits them start crying foul when it's used in a way that makes big companies sad.
No, it was failure to recognize the disease as a threat that lead to those people dying. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and scrapie have been known about for centuries. But until the first C-J cases were traced, it was thought that those diseases couldn't be transmitted to humans.
If the only disease we had to worry about were BSE, then you'd be right. Unfortunately there are thousands of diseases we have to test and monitor for. You can't test 100% of all food for all of them - it would be prohibitively expensive. So you have to resort to partial testing in proportion to the prevalence of the disease and the magnitude of its deleterious effect on humans. 100% safety is an unattainable goal, and failure to achieve it should never be assumed to be evidence of negligence or malfeasance.
'Add in salaries of lab technicians, the cost of grinding up and delivering cattle brain samples for testing, and the tab would be $30 to $50 per animal, industry experts say. The average U.S. cow slaughtered for food yields meat with a retail value of $1,636.
Each year in the U.S., about 35 million cattle are slaughtered. About 10 million of these animals -- those over 30 months of age -- would be tested for BSE if the U.S. were to adopt European standards, because age is associated with infection.
The grand total to test about 10 million cows in the U.S. would be $300 to $500 million a year. Considering that Americans spend more than $50 billion on beef annually, that would add between six cents and 10 cents per pound.
"Cost should not be a prohibitive factor," says Scott McKinlay, president of InPro Biotechnology Inc., South San Francisco, Calif., a test-kit maker founded by Nobel Prize-winning researcher Stanley B. Prusiner.
"Look at Canada as an example," says Mr. McKinlay. "They have suffered about a $600 million loss already" in lost beef exports and consumption.'
http://www.rense.com/general47/cost.htm
I understand what you're saying, but certainly if you are claiming to have tested for mad cow with a test that is completely ineffective, it would take a severely autistic judge to rule that context, in that case, did not matter.
claiming you tested for mad cow would have to include a basic good faith effort to actually, you know, test for mad cow. Not just use a test that is intended to test for mad cow.
I could take the test and throw it at you. I did not, in fact, test you for mad cow, though I did use a test for mad cow disease. I could not label you "tested for mad cow disease".
Administering the test when it is known to be ineffective would be improperly utilizing the test; exactly as my throwing it at you is an improper administration of the test.
The problem with Mad Cow disease is that it is extremely rare. If you slaughter 35 million cows annually, and only 1 in 10,000,000 cows have the disease, then a 1% testing regime is essentially guaranteed to never find the problem. With the numbers given, the 1% testing regime has only a 3.4% chance of detecting a 1 in 10,000,000 problem. Worse, some sample bias is likely present in the 1%, because it will be weighted disproportionately on the younger cattle, as meat cattle are often slaughtered young and young cattle are less likely to have mad cow disease. On the other hand, a 100% testing regime will almost certainly detect mad cow disease, as everything will be tested. Of course, if you find the problem, then it will be a big issue for the meat industry, which will then have to do something about it. This type of strategy is what made the problem so massive in Britain before it was finally caught and dealt with.
From everything I have read, there almost certainly was trace quantities of mad cow disease in the North American meat supply, and these trace quantities will be undetectable with current sampling methods. As such, we cannot really be certain that mad cow is definitely not present anymore, because we are not testing the meat supply effectively enough to find out.
Thats roughly true. Red states are socialist, and the blue ones pay for their programs. If the GOP is anything its a wealth redistribution system that would make the old soviets drool.
Seriously, hire a private testing firm and certify that your beef is 100% safe and tested from Mad Cow. The FDA is a minimum safety standard, not the maximum, and there's nothing that precludes a firm from adopting voluntary and more stringent measures.
Yes there is.
The whole issue is that the USDA regulates the test kit and controls who can buy them and how many test kits they can buy.
Since the Test kit is used to "diagnose" the slaughtered cow to determine if they have a disease or not. The court's ruling means the USDA has the full power to regulate the test kit.
They forbid the sale of the kit to the firm, AND they even prevent the firm from developing and using a test kit of their own, to do their own private testing and reporting.
This regulatory power has nothing to do with who is doing the testing. It doesn't matter that the product won't be marketed as USDA tested, only "privately tested".
The USDA can still restrict and/or ban any testing it wishes (even effective testing).
Hence the reason this ruling is so horrid....
That depends on the test. Some test return false positives because the tests check for a marker that although strongly follows the incidence of the malady/item you are testing for but can also be present without the actual malady/item. An example is the guy who was accused of having a bottle of GHB, because the test said so. But the bottle was actually full of soap (even labeled as such), and that "GHB" test produces positive tests when run on soap (not detergent, which further muddied the issue). They could run that test until the cows came home and it would still have returned positives. As you mention, there may be other (presumably more expensive or longer) tests that do work though.
As to me being an idiot, you are missing my point. It isn't about me here. I am saying that there are large groups of people who matter (unlike me) who will react to the initial results and not wait around for the retest, they'll stop buying US beef. This actually happened once before, when 6 cows were found with BSE in the US. Nations immediately banned US beef. But the cows were found to have been imported from Canada, and were tracked back to another group of Canadian cows with BSE, seemingly proving they contracted it in Canada, under Canadian rules which allowed cows to be fed ground up bits of other cows until 1997.
I'm saying others don't act rationally, and the FDA is seemingly trying to take away trigger events which can cause others to do so.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95