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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.
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?
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)
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.
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.