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Home > Archive > Politics and Medicine > August 2005 > Mad cow rules violated more than 1,000 times
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Mad cow rules violated more than 1,000 times
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| Ilena Rose 2005-08-17, 10:56 pm |
| Mad cow rules violated more than 1,000 times
Laurie Budgar
8/17/2005 4:05:44 PM
Earlier this month, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture
reiterated the government's faith in the safety of the nation's beef
supply: "Even if there were no testing [for mad cow disease], the
food-safety protocols would still be there," he said. But the food
safety protocols have turned out not to be infallible.
In records released last week, the USDA acknowledged that
slaughterhouses and processing plants violated those rules more than
1,000 times between January 2004 and May 2005.
The rules indicate that brains, spinal cords and other tissues at high
risk for transmitting bovine spongiform encephalopathy—called specific
risk materials—be removed from all cattle over the age of 30 months
before they are processed for meat or animal feed.
"The food safety protocols aren't good enough," said Consumers Union
senior scientist Michael Hansen, Ph.D. "They’ve found animals below
the age of 30 months that have tested positive for BSE." In addition,
Hansen said, researchers have found the disease in other tissues, such
as muscles or inflamed livers and kidneys, when they have studied
rodents and sheep, and even people infected with Creutzfeld-Jakob, the
human variant of the disease. "They haven't looked at cattle yet," he
said, describing an approach he labeled "Don't look, don't find."
"[There is] almost like a Keystone Cops quality, so it doesn't
surprise us that there's violations going on," Hansen said.
The USDA said the number of violations accounts for less than 1
percent of all citations at those plants. "At no point in time did
SRMs get to consumers," a USDA spokeswoman reportedly told consumer
groups, such as Public Citizen, which filed a Freedom of Information
Act request to compel the government to release the data.
Retailers must be getting nervous about the impact that repeated
scares will have on consumers, though. On Aug. 2—just days after a
third possible case of mad cow was identified (and was later
determined to be negative), Albertsons, the second-largest supermarket
chain in the country, announced its own line of all-natural ground
beef products, under the name Wild Harvest. "Today, more than ever,
customers are looking for more all-natural alternatives across all
departments in our stores," said Duncan MacNaughton, Albertsons'
executive vice president of merchandising. The cattle from which the
beef is produced are raised on a vegetarian diet and never receive
added growth hormones or antibiotics, the company said.
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| Ilena Rose Mirowitz Rosenthal Lord violates a mad cow rule every time
Jan Drew posts. Well over 1000 times.
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