Mad Cow Strategy Needs Beefing Up

The Agriculture Department program to detect mad cow disease has failings that may lead to understating the disease, according to a department inspector general's report released by a Democratic congressman.

Department officials insisted Tuesday that the draft report was a "snapshot" of the testing program in March, before it was officially started, and that some of the key concerns have already been addressed.

"We are testing precisely the population of animals that should be tested," Ron DeHaven, administrator of the department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told reporters in a conference call to respond to the report. He said the priority is protecting public health.

When the surveillance program is complete in 12 to 18 months with more than 260,000 tests, he said, "we hope to have some very good data" on whether mad cow disease is in the country's national herd.

But DeHaven and other department officials conceded the IG report raised some issues that needed to be addressed. For example, it found some cattle with nervous system problems were not being tested. DeHaven said that is no longer true in the new surveillance plan.

"We recognized a lot of shortcomings in the previous plan," said DeHaven.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee who released a copy of the IG report Tuesday, contended the audit found "major flaws" in the screening that put the program's credibility into question.

Waxman wrote to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman that the report would be a focus of a Wednesday hearing by his panel into the government's response to the threat of mad cow disease.

There has been only one case of mad cow disease — bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE — in the United States. A sick Holstein was discovered on a farm in Mabton, Wash., in December. More than 50 countries then cut off imports of U.S. beef and at least 700 more cattle in Washington state, Oregon and Idaho were killed as a precaution.

The disease affects the animal's brain and nervous system. People who eat products containing the BSE protein can contract a rare but fatal disease similar to BSE, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

While there is no test for mad cow disease when an animal is alive, the new surveillance system is aimed at singling out animals at highest risk and determining the prevalence of mad cow — if in fact it exists — in the U.S. herd.

DeHaven said since the new surveillance began June 1, just over 11,000 carcasses have been screened, leading to two "inconclusive" findings. Follow-up tests showed no presence of the disease.

The USDA inspector general's draft report said the testing program is poorly designed, relies on a false assumption that only high-risk animals are infected, and relies inappropriately on a voluntary submission of samples for testing.

These and other shortcomings, if not corrected, could impair the ability of the surveillance program "to perform risk assessments and program evaluations and reduce the credibility of any assertion regarding the prevalence of BSE in the United States," the report said.