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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.
What?
Could not they just outsource testing to a non-US company? Or would that be much more expensive?
and it's businessmen who buy the laws. Don't insult the messenger in order to obscure the point. Just as it's whiny and greedy people - not lawyers - who are responsible for frivolous lawsuits, it's businesses that are focused on profits by all means necessary that are responsible for this result.
Don't worry, us people elsewhere in the world aren't buying US meat anyway. We know that BSE is out of control in American herds,
Don't worry- BSE is dying. Netcraft confirms it!
A private meat packer company wants to test all of it's beef products for safety and health issues and to reassure their export customers that their products are safe. Ok, that's a good thing.. right? RIGHT? and the USDA will NOT allow them. uh.. that's a bad thing.. right? BAD? UH?
Let's see, what's wrong with this picture? I mean, for pete's sakes, shouldn't we applause any company wishing to ensure their food products are 100% safe? Let's give Creekstone Farms Premium Beef credit and a hand folks!
Now, you would think that the USDA would instead do the following:
This is one of the many and many cases where money is more important than people, remember that folks! The government wants your taxes, not your health!
The USDA has been a bane to freedom in agriculture since its inception.
One trick the USDA pulls is crop scheduling. When you join the USDA's system, they will tell you what crops to grow at what times, and they will also subsidize you. Joining their system is optional - but unless everyone in your region joins, no one gets the subsidies.
Therefore, you join and plant what they tell you, or you get lynched by your neighbors.
That I don't eat beef and, especially, pork. While the conditions in packing plants and slaughterhouses may be 'monitored', they are simply not 100% (or as close as humanly possible).
Sig this!
The Constitution is a living document... otherwise the federal government wouldn't have this power.
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.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat a bacon cheeseburger. Mmmmmm.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
This is clearly an attempt to protect the industry from being compelled to institute 100 per cent testing for all material due to competitive pressure. Not only is this repugnant from a purely "what kind of inhuman bastard would allow people to become infected with a horrible disease" perspective, it's also in direct violation of the free market mentra these soulless creatures swear by. Truly loathsome behavior.
Ah yes. More disease, death and destruction brought to you by our good friends at Monsanto. When the Four Horsemen get riding, they will have the Monsanto corporate logo on their flags.
Or, to modify Bill Hicks a little: "By the way, if there is anyone here who works for Monsanto - kill yourselves. There is no excuse for what you do. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves."
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The phrase has also been used in reference to mad cow disease. More than 30 countries banned beef imports from Canada after one of Albertan farmer Marwyn Peaster's cattle tested positive for the illness. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, in frustration over the situation, said that any "self-respecting rancher would have shot, shovelled and shut up"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting,_shoveling,_and_shutting_up
USDA, brought to you by the "Living" constitution.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
judges and lawyers aren't the problem. the problem is the political culture of our nation. judges and lawyers aren't the ones that make the laws, they just have to work with them. i believe there are judges and lawyers on both sides of the coin, but the laws favor corporate interests over public interests. also, lawsuits cost money, and corporations also happen to have the most money. so they tend to be the ones who abuse the system.
our court system certainly has its problems, but the issue at hand here is much, much bigger. for instance, several states have long since passed industry-sponsored legislation to censor the media from criticizing the agricultural industry or even giving negative reports on industry practices--such as the use of bovine growth hormone. so what this particular article talks about is just one small part of the bigger problem, which is the disproportionate influence and political power that corporations hold in our society.
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
At least one government agency has pulled a little trick like this every single day for the past eight years. Just look at the EPA for example.
[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:
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.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Sooner or later the extent of BSE contamination in US herds is going to come out, and consumer reaction will be so swift and devastating that it will likely take decades for the industry to recover.
So, expert, what is the extent of BSE contamination in US herds? What evidence do you have that it difference significantly from what the statistical testing currently done tells us?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.
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
The USDA's job has, and always will be to protect the interests of the largest agriculture companies.
Sometimes that means doing a few BSE tests to convince the population their beef is safe. Sometimes it's running small meat processors out of business by flat out refusing to have the USDA send inspectors out to the plant (Operating without one would be illegal). Not too long ago they engaged in a campaign of banning all Canadian Beef after a single case of mad cow was discovered in an animal that never entered the food chain. They still claimed Canadian beef was unsafe even after multiple unrelated cases of BSE had shown up inside the US.
Big-Agriculture benefits from the minimum amount of testing and the USDA will ensure that it stays that way. Giving smaller processors the freedom to test more and that would put the big guys at a disadvantage.
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.
Yet, if you test 100% of the meat, you'd effectively stop any chance of mad cow disease making its way to market.
By the way, if you were to take 300,000,000 Americans, 0.17% ends up being 510,000 people.
'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
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.
I would argue that it's hardly negligent to offer consumers the opportunity to purchase tested products, even if those tested products cost more (this is the same argument used with regard to "organic" products). For people like you, who are happy to assume an admittedly small risk in return for cheaper meat, feel free. For people like me, who would gladly pay a little extra for products that have been tested, why shouldn't I have the opportunity?
You can call this marketing if you wish; having seen the results of human infection with BSE I would gladly pay an extra nickel for my hamburger...
"under a 1913 law, test kits that are used only after an animal is killed still constitute 'diagnosis' and 'treatment'"
"Quick, man, that cow is stone dead! Treat it!"
"There is no treatment for death, sir."
(cow explodes; clip of Ladies' Auxiliary Club applauding)
You do understand that mad cow disease is result from factory farming? Its fatal and non-curable.
Avoid factory farmed meat, try your local farmers... Food on a national recieved basis will always be the worst the world has to offer.
Food on the local level is the safest food available. Support your local farmers.
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.
You're (rather idiotically) assuming that a positive test wouldn't be followed up with further testing, or even just a repeat test.
Please help metamoderate.
"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."
It's all good an well from a statistical point of view, but do you really want to be in 0.17% that gets mad cow disease? If the public wants to pay more for safer meat why not let them, and who are you to say that the public is misguided in wanting that.
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....
First, the FDA is violating its charter. They're not allowing a company to test its product for a disease that, if present, will kill anyone who consumes it.
The FDA doesn't really have a choice in the long run. Their sole purpose for existing is to keep our food and medicines safe for human consumption. This is a counter-intuitive action.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Perhaps this is proof the Mad Cow Disease has spread into the judiciary.
Yet Another reason to go vegan. Why you ask? Because this is another example of how animal exploitation industries use misinformation to give consumers warm fuzzes. The difference is this time the judicial inquiry, and that's only because the FDA was involved.