The US only requires meatpackers to test a small fraction of their cows for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease. Literally. They cannot test a larger fraction. Does that sound stupid? It sounded stupid to a federal judge, too:
The federal government must allow meatpackers to test their animals for mad cow disease, a federal judge ruled Thursday.Kansas meatpacker Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all its cattle for the disease, a move that larger companies feared. If Creekstone is allowed to advertise its meat as tested and safe, that could essentially force the larger companies to test, too.
The Agriculture Department currently regulates the test and administers it to about 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease. The department threatened Creekstone with prosecution if it tested all its animals.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the government lacks the authority to regulate the test. Robertson put his order on hold until the government can appeal. If the government does not appeal by June 1, he said the ruling would take effect. (International Herald Tribune)
There have been very few cases of mad cow in US cattle, three to be exact: one in Washington state (2003, imported from Canada), one in Texas in 2005, and the most recent in 2006 in Alabama. The USDA knows the easiest way to keep this figure low is not to test.
After the first case of mad cow disease heightened worries about the disease, the department increased its testing for the disease to about 1,000 tests a day.
Last July, the department cut its testing by about 90 percent. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said testing should reflect "a very, very low level" of the disease in the United States.
The Agriculture Department's argument is that since the risk was "very, very low" any false positive would harm the meat industry. I'm not making this up. I don't have that much imagination. When last we wrote about this (on our old site, more than two years ago), the US was ready to resume Canadian imports just after Canada had discovered another BSE case. It was also at the time that the plaintiffs in this case, Creekstone Farms, laid off 150 workers and reduced the remaining 650 workers to a 32-hour workweek. In a town of 12,000. What happened to Creekstone? They lost their Japanese export market:
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has refused Creekstone's request to test all of its cattle for BSE as required by the Japanese, who have banned US beef imports (see "Let them eat sushi" here). The USDA claims that the test does not guarantee cattle under 30 months are BSE-free and therefore the use of this test would be an unfair marketing maneuver. (Effect Measure, January 3, 2005)
Wait a minute. In 2005 their argument was the test might give false negatives? If the test the USDA uses is unreliable because there are too many false negatives and false positives, why should we rely on the USDA's claim that the risk of BSE is "very, very low," based on the same tests?
Whatever.
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Wait a minute. In spite of my doctor's advice, I think I may be going back the vegetarian diet. Lemon bars notwithstanding.
Totally assanine. Either the test is close to useless, in which case we ought to be vigorously searching for a better one, and Creekstone should desist, or it's reasonable and Creekstone should be allowed to proceed. If the true prevalence is incredibly low, what has the cattle industry got to fear?
(tried to write this half an hour ago but SB's been down)
what has the cattle industry got to fear?
Losing so much profit by having to change their testing procedures to compete with Creekstone that they end up going out of business and we ALL starve.
The problem with commodities today is that there's (almost) no profit in them except by reducing costs and going mass-production on a scale unprecedented. Even then, the costs of labor increase while the cost of beef is forced cheaper by customer demand and government regulation.
So for the companies that are on the edge of profitability, adding that test might eliminate what little profit they have. Result: chapter 7 or 11, and while the courts are cleaning up the mess, no beef is produced, more money is lost, and the cost of beef for the consumer goes up.
Thus, the USDA acting to protect customers by protecting the corporations. They act as if the loss of the corporation through economic competition is more detrimental to the industry as a whole and the American consumer than the extremely rare case of a diseased animal making it into the food supply.
Like any insurance (or assurance) system, it's playing the odds and statistics with people's lives. We normally don't notice it until it personally affects us.
Better that a handful of people get sick and die than the entire nation starve because the corporations that feed them go out of business with no replacement.
Or at least, that's their view. Treat society as a whole and it makes perfect sense. Treat society as a collection of individuals with equal rights to life and its utterly repulsive.
Now, the problem is that the Declaration of Independence demonstrates that the founders believed in the latter, and THAT's why the attitude of the USDA and the corporations, while "American" in terms of free enterprise, is Unamerican by the standards our founders had established.
Note I'm not saying it's illegal or unconstitutional, merely unethical by the standard the DoI established as a minimum.
Joe: If you are a free market believer, then the large corporations have the option of passing the cost of testing on to the consumer, or not testing and presumably selling cheaper beef. The consumer can decide.
I'm just arguing their point, and it is a legitimate fear. The Judge obviously ruled in favor of free enterprise, defending constitutional standards.
The problem is that there already is some government regulation on the price of beef because of how much the government itself purchases for its military, infrastructure, and handouts. Thus, they can't entirely pass the cost onto the consumer without going through some damned agency that's meant to stop them from abusing their potential cartel status.
It's a much more complex situation BECAUSE free enterprise had already been removed from part of the equation.
This is like the large dairy company that sued a small Vermont (?) company for daring to state on its trucks that its cows weren't treated with rBGH. Mind, they made no claims that the milk was different, or that rBGH was dangerous, or anything of the sort; they just said, since it was true, that their cows weren't treated with it. And they did so because they felt consumers wanted that option.
The suit was designed to intimidate a small company in the face of a multinational corporation's lawyers and money. It failed. Now it seems like half the milk at the grocery store says it's from cows not treated with rBGH. We can argue the safety of rBGH 'til the cows come home, but what pisses big industry off is that consumers might get to make a choice (informed or otherwise).
This is the same logic by which Big Ag corporations are suing not to have to label GM foods sold in Europe, as local laws require. Whether GM foods are safe or not, the European consumers don't want them (and in many locales have even banned them). Big Ag says it's a restriction on free trade. I say it's just a matter of labelling your ingredients.
Lets finish that thought!
So for the companies that are on the edge of profitability, adding that test might eliminate what little profit they have. Result: chapter 7 or 11, and while the courts are cleaning up the mess, no beef is produced, more money is lost, and the cost of beef for the consumer goes up.
...Result2: cost of beef goes up favoring small scale beef production and family-farms, the beef lobby loses power, average americans eat less beef, greasy barbeque joints go out of business and are replaced by juice-bars and coffeeshops, people start losing weight/cholesterol plaques, rural economies diversify and reduce dependence on scarce water resources, aquifers begin to replenish, the stink of ammonia around Garden City, KS gradually fades away...
:)
I say it's just a matter of labeling your ingredients.
I could say the same thing for the big "yellow-beer" makers not wanting the micros to push for ingredient lists. :)
In this particular case, the way the big brewers are handling it is by buying the micros instead. A/B has owned RedHook for years, and just formed a joint company to acquire Fordham and Dominion here in the mid-atlantic.
Joe,
I can't see how your argument makes any sense at all.
First, if the whole beef market disappeared, we'd all still eat.
Second, unless the cost of testing all cows is so enormous that passing the raised price on to consumers would cause almost nobody to eat beef, legally *requiring* the test would decrease the total amount of beef eaten, but would not destroy the industry. You can see this easily if you draw a supply and demand curve; raising production costs shifts the supply curve to the left. How far the supply curve shifts to the left depends on how large is the change of the cost of producing the beef.
Now, I don't have cost figures, but the cost of producing beef is breeding, feeding, and caring for cattle. I am having a really hard time imagining how this test could raise the cost by a significant fraction.
As it is, we have one company (Creekstone) who wants to do this testing. That makes an awfully strong argument that the additional cost isn't all that large, and that at least one company in the industry doesn't think it's a business destroying move. Indeed, they appear to think they can charge more for their beef to make up for the additional cost, or eat the added cost and try to make up for it on volume. Otherwise, they wouldn't want to do it.
The only plausible reason not to want this testing done is because there's a risk that it will turn up some noticeable number of cows with BSE. That will cause a collapse in the beef market, for very good reasons. (If you think this is plausible, you should want to buy all your beef from this company that plans to test all their cows.)
The problem here is that the industry that's supposed to be protecting our health is also charged with protecting the industry. You and I have one vote each; the big players in the industry have lobbyists, soft money, and connections. Guess who wins.
I agree that the USDA's position was ridiculous from a civil liberties standpoint. But I don't think this discussion is complete without making sure that everyone understands the magnitude of risk posed to humans from BSE. It's microscopic. The danger of BSE to humans is that it can cause vCJD. There have been a grand total of 3 cases of vCJD reported in the U.S. Ever. And vCJD is not contagious in any conventional sense. (I'm assuming that there won't be a major upsurge in cannibalism in the near future; or at least, if there is, that the cannibals won't eat sick people; or at least, if they do, that it will continue to be unfashionable to eat nervous tissue.)
You can only catch vCJD by eating the inadequately cooked brains or spinal cords of animals infected by BSE. First, almost no one wants to eat nervous tissue. Too stringy. Second, there are pretty good regulations that prevent companies from processing nervous tissue as food. Third, most cows with BSE are sick cows, and there are also good regulations that prevent companies from processing sick cows as food.
The entire BSE scare is basically a hoax. The USDA's policy of preventing large-scale testing was stupid, but it wasn't endangering anyone's health.
Really liked what you had to say traumatized.
While reading what revere posted I was thinking along the same line. The way business is conducted needs to change and we need to bring it all home. Alas, the money mongers will not allow this.
What really sent me reeling was the department threatened Creekstone with prosecution. What the *@#&!?
OK, Revere, this discussion seems to have gone the way the "Lancet" discussion went: people arguing from fixed political positions in absence of numerical data. So my head's just shifted into risk assessment mode.
Do you have pointers to data about the reliability of the test in question, itself? False negative probabilities, false positive probabilities, that sort of thing?
J.S. wrote: "I agree that the USDA's position was ridiculous from a civil liberties standpoint. But I don't think this discussion is complete without making sure that everyone understands the magnitude of risk posed to humans from BSE. It's microscopic."
I agree that the probability and magnitude of the risk should be part of the discussion.
But BSE risk probability and magnitude should not be definitive in this discussion -- because values and cultural attitudes about food safety are also crucial factors in deciding on policy in democratic countries, thank goodness.
The probability of catching vCJD via the U.S. herd appears to be microscopic. The magnitude, however, if you are the unlucky one who catches it, is catastrophic -- a 100% Case Fatality Rate.
In the U.S., where the incidence of BSE in the herd appears to be so low, the cattle-testing issue is more about cultural values than about the magnitude and probability of the risk.
In this case, the main values of the pro-testing lobby seem to be: "Even one case of vCJD from a BSE+ hamburger is not worth the risk," and "We don't really trust the government and the beef industry enough to let them decide how much beef-testing to do." Whether you agree with these values or not, I think you have to conclude that there is nothing irrational about the beliefs.
As a nation, we appropriately respect many other cultural values in food testing and labelling: thanks to public pressure, USDA "allows" testing and labelling for halal, kosher, and many other categories which are more about values than about health hazards.
Some people -- notably the Japanese, who were burned by their government's miscommunication about early mad cow cases -- highly value knowing whether their meat has been tested for BSE. I see this as similar to how other people value knowing that their meat has been slaughtered according to acceptable cultural practices, or has been fed acceptable feed, or raised under acceptably humane conditions: there is nothing the slightest bit irrational about it.
Creekstone, like the good for-profit business that it is, wants to meet their Japanese customers' desire for BSE-tested beef, even though no one seems to claim that the tests are especially relevant in younger cattle. I see it as no different from many European customers demanding to know if their beef has been fed genetically-modified feed -- regardless of evidence that such feed does or does not cause negative health effects.
In early 2004, Peter Sandman and I wrote about the outrageousness of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's refusal to permit voluntary BSE-testing, in:
Misleading Toward the Truth:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture Mishandles Mad Cow Risk Communication,
at: http://www.psandman.com/col/madcow.htm
If the U.S. appeals the Robertson decision, we will make sure that Creekstone has a copy of our analysis.
Joe: If you are a free market believer, then the large corporations have the option of passing the cost of testing on to the consumer, or not testing and presumably selling cheaper beef.
Exactly.
Which is what gives the lie to the Bush administration's claim to practicing a free-market philosophy. These guys aren't free marketeers in any real sense. Rather, they're insider corporatists who sell political influence and market control.
--
Well said, Jody. You make a very powerful argument against the USDA's policy of forbidding testing. I don't think it's a conclusive argument that the testing itself is rational, though. At some level, there's an issue of finite public health resources, and there's no reasonable case to be made that BSE is in the top 100 (or probably top 1000) public health concerns. I think that, in this case, the cultural values for universal testing are the product of ignorance, and the proper response from the USDA should be an education campaign about the risks posed by BSE.
"If the test the USDA uses is unreliable because there are too many false negatives and false positives, why should we rely on the USDA's claim that the risk of BSE is "very, very low," based on the same tests?"
180,000 mad cows in Europe = ~150 vCJD cases
3 mad cows in USA = ?
False negatives = false sense of safety
False positives = false worries, economic costs
Lots of testing = lots of false + and false -
3 mad cows in USA = ?
There is a flawed implicit premise here, which is that there are and were only three BSE cases in the US.
For all we know, there may well have been more which were never detected because they were never tested. It is not possible to compare the scant surveillance mounted here to the blinding arc light of intense testing which was eventually trained on the British herds.
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js The USDA should launch a PR campaign... aimed at the Japanese?
Frankly, under normal circumstances, a campaign designed to assure me of the safety of a food product I had not previously doubted the safety of would achieve the opposite of its desired effect, so I can see why the FDA doesn't do it. After all, most Americans seem to have gotten over their mad cow fears.
As for me, I eat beef extremely rarely, and when I do, I make sure it's exclusively vegetarian fed/field grazed. That serves in the place of BSE testing for me, but I wouldn't object to eating beef that was also tested.
I understand the risk of developing vCJD is (apparently) extremely low. It's also a decidedly unpleasant possibility, the "last thing I need", and completely avoidable. (Perhaps Dr. Lanard would designate that the outrage factor.)
"It is not possible to compare the scant surveillance mounted here to the blinding arc light of intense testing which was eventually trained on the British herds."
BSE in the UK: http://www.oie.int/eng/info/en_esbru.htm
year cases
<1988446
19882514
19897228
199014407
199125359
199237280
199335090
199424438 *1st UK vCJD diagnosis
199514562
19968149 *1st UK vCJD death
19974393
19983235
19992301
20001443
20011202
20021144
2003611
2004343
2005225
2006114
total184,484
The UK had 184,484 cases of BSE through 2006, with 161,324 BSE cases (or 87%) occurring before the first vCJD death.
The UK increased testing after the EU required it in 2001. I don't know about other increases in testing, but other information is welcome.
There have been 3639 BSE cases 2001-2006, or about 2% of the UK total, since the EU increase in testing.
The Creekstone-USDA-Japan argument is mostly not about science.
"The UK had 184,484 cases of BSE through 2006, with 161,324 BSE cases (or 87%) occurring before the first vCJD death"
You forgot about the incubation period for vCJD/CJD, something in the order of decades. Could the first vCJD diagnosis in 1994 have caught vCJD from eating beef before 1988?
I don't see how you can conclude it's safe to eat beef from these statistics. All I see is once BSE became big news testing was ramped up and now the UK can be more confident of their animals being BSE-free than during the 90's; that's good news for kids born after 2000.
"You forgot about the incubation period for vCJD/CJD, something in the order of decades. Could the first vCJD diagnosis in 1994 have caught vCJD from eating beef before 1988?"
I didn't forget about it, and probably yes.
"I don't see how you can conclude it's safe to eat beef from these statistics. All I see is once BSE became big news testing was ramped up and now the UK can be more confident of their animals being BSE-free than during the 90's;"
What? The UK had 114 positive animals last year (184,484 all-time) versus 2 or 3 ever in the US.
I don't see how they should be confident that their animals are BSE free and we should be worried. In that sense, it is safe to eat beef in the US. The US never fed animal protein to the extent that it was used in Europe, and cattle are slaughtered at a younger age in the US.
"that's good news for kids born after 2000."
Only 3639 UK cattle with BSE after 2000.
.
albatross: I never said the argument made sense, which is likely why the USDA lost the court case in the first place.
I'm just saying what I thought was the argument they were making.
But for the others saying "just raise the price and all will be fine" - I answered that already: government regulation of the prices of beef and other commodities like that is ALREADY in effect in several states, ostensibly to protect the small farmer. "Free Enterprise" is already tampered with in this industry.
Hell boys, the USDA lost and it was based in thought like the Gerberding appointment for their argument to prevent 100% testing. I just wonder what the landscape is going to be if the Dems take control of the White House in early 09. First thing they wont be able to do is fire prosecutors....uhm eh, urp...chumguggle. Gerberdinator might run for the Senate and what to do with a Senate that might not be so friendly to a Dem, or a Republican for that matter? The Code of Federal Regulations has dropped by almost a half of a shelf at the library since Bush 1. I'll know whether to worry about BSE if the Dems take control and ORDER 100% testing. We wont pay for it at the checkout line if that happens though. It will be done by the government. If the Republicans take control, then BSE simply doesnt exist. Nope, all gone, never happened. I actually like have a few Dems on the board of directors. If they find BSE though be advised that all of the Mexicans WILL have to go home because those places will shutter their doors. Ever wonder why they havent really found it to date? Might it be because they dont want to on both sides of the aisle.