The USDA's much ballyhooed new measures to address the emergence of mad cow disease in the US are wholly inadequate. Until there is a complete and total ban on all feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock, coupled with the testing of millions of animals, mad cow disease will continue to amplifying and spread in US animal feed and among livestock. Eventually we will see cases of human mad cow disease emerging. It was a decade after the recognition of the first mad cow in Britain that the human deaths, continuing today, began appearing.
We know now that in the US the so called "firewall," the FDA's 1997 feed regulation misnamed a "feed ban," has been woefully ineffective, a farce. Sheldon Rampton and I exposed this in our 1997 book, Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?
We waited to see what the FDA would do before we concluded our book in the fall of 1997. The FDA wrote feed regulations that allowed the livestock and animal feed industry to continue their dangerous practices that are spreading mad cow disease in North America.
The USDA knew way back in 1991, more than a decade ago, that a feed ban was necessary to protect human and animal health, but sided with the livestock industry. In a 1991 report I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act USDA said, "the advantage of this option is that it minimizes the risk of BSE. The disadvantage is that the cost to the livestock and rendering industries would be substantial." (Mad Cow USA, p. 149-150)
The 1997 FDA feed regulation is not a feed ban, but a labeling requirement that meat and bone meal from cattle and other ruminants be labeled 'do not feed to ruminants.' (MCUSA, p. 215-218) Government investigators have found that this rule has been widely ignored and poorly enforced. Without offering proof, USDA officials now say there is 99% compliance with this rule.
However, even if that were true, it would mean little since farmers, ranchers and cattle producers can buy properly labeled feed and still feed it to cattle. There is no on-farm inspection of how even properly labeled feed is actually used, and such inspection is impossible.
As long as billions of pounds of rendered slaughterhouse waste are being fed to livestock, labeling regulations and the sort of partial requirements that USDA announced December 30, 2003, will not stop mad cow disease from spreading.
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