World

Dealing With Mad Cow's Cows

January 24, 2001 / 4:19 PM EST / AP

Noel Garner, a bushy-haired farmer raising cattle in the verdant hills of western Ireland, was stunned when mad cow disease struck his small herd a couple months ago.

An even bigger shock came a few days later, when the carcass he had buried at the edge of a pasture showed up back on his doorstep.

Neighbors had driven a mechanized digger to the grave, unearthed the cow and carted it back to Garner's place in an old oil barrel.

They were afraid that diseased particles would seep into their water supply, says Gus Egan, who runs the livestock mart in Loughrea, County Galway. "The people were right. I'd do the same thing."

The case highlights the problem facing European countries as they initiate mass slaughters to stop the dreaded disease and try to revive collapsed markets: What to do with the bodies.

The "purchase for destruction" program launched by the 15-nation European Union this month foresees buying and incinerating up to 2 million head of cattle by the end of June, at an estimated cost to governments of $1 billion.

But implementation has been stymied in places by logistics as well as ethical concerns about sending so much prime beef up in smoke.

"It's an awful shame and a disgrace," Egan says, echoing a sentiment heard across Europe. "With all the people starving all over the world, to destroy perfectly good meat ..."

New evidence that the disease had spread from Britain to continental herds prompted EU leaders last month to adopt mandatory testing for cattle over 30 months. Any animal that isn't confirmed free of mad cow disease - bovine spongiform encephalopathy - can't go to market.

Germany, which started testing three weeks early, has found only 16 cases out of more than 112,000 tests conducted. Belgium found two in 7,550 tests.

Ireland has had more BSE cases - almost 600 since 1987 - than any country outside Britain. But out of 17,500 tests so far this month, not one has come back positive, according to Irish Agriculture Minister Joe Walsh.

Yet the wide-scale testing has led to isolated discoveries of BSE in places that had considered themselves pristine, including an Italian slaughterhouse that supplies McDonald's.

Thus, a measure meant to reassure Europeans has actually heightened fears of eating infected meat and contracting the fatal, brain-wasting, new variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.

Beef sales have tumbled by 27 percent across the EU - and as much as 50 percent in some countries. Many non-EU countries have suspended imports altogether.

And because sales are down, vast numbers of healthy cattle must be slaughtered just to prevent oversupply.

Ireland, a country with twice as many cows as people, usually exports 90 percent of the 550,000 tons of beef it produces annually to countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states - all of which have enacted temporary bans.

"Farmers have to regularly bring their old cows that are ready for slaughter to th slaughterhouse, but right now no one is buying them," EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler explained in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit.

"We can't simply shoot them to the moon," he added.

Yet the sheer numbers are making slaughter, much less disposal, difficult.

Lacking enough abattoirs and incinerators, authorities in Portugal's Azores Islands on Monday postponed the slaughter of some 5,000 cattle. They plan to send some of the doomed cattle to the Portuguese mainland.

Ireland has only a handful of small, private incinerators that handle hospital and pharmaceutical waste.

Since 1997, Irish slaughterhouses had been shipping animal parts considered potentially infectious - the brain, spinal cord and parts of the intestines - to the only plant in the country licensed to deal with it: Monery By-Products in County Cavan.

The plant turns the material into powdery meal and liquid tallow, which then were shipped to Germany for incineration. But EU rules introduced last month insist the entire intestine be treated as so-called "specified risk material," tripling the weight of material Monery has to process.

The plant, which is licensed to handle 1,000 tons a week, had to stop accepting shipments last week because of backlogs. Officials made emergency arrangements to blast-freeze and store the guts until Monery can catch up.

Meanwhile, the thousands of carcasses slaughtered under "purchase for destruction" also are waiting to be processed.

In the first week, Ireland slaughtered 4,000 cattle under the scheme, and expects to cull 300,000 of its national herd of 7.5 million.

Currently they are being frozen until they can be rendered into meal. That will then have to be warehoused until an incinerator is built - something that could take years given traditional opposition from environmental groups and neighbors.

"The Irish solution has been dumping your problem on someone else," said Walsh, the Irish agriculture minister. "But we can not indefinitely dodge this problem."

Walsh predicts the 50,000 tons of meal in storage will swell to 200,000 tons in six months. And the cost to Irish taxpayers - not counting building an incinerator - will likely approach $170 million, he said.

Many feel the money is being wasted.

Some suspect the government doesn't want the cows tested for fear of finding more BSE cases. Others call it morally wrong to destroy beef that in all likelihood is safe.

Sweden and Finland, which have a low BSE risk, have fully opted out of the program.

On Irish radio Wednesday, Walsh dismissed as unworkable suggestions that the meat be sent to poor countries, canned and stored for natural disasters, or even used for dog food.

"We're not crazy," he insisted, adding that giving it away to Third World countries would only disrupt their local markets - assuming any would take it.