American cattle are eating chicken litter, cattle blood and restaurant leftovers that could help transmit mad cow disease, gaps in the US defense against the disease that the Bush administration promised almost 18 months ago to close.
"Once the cameras were turned off, and the media coverage dissipated, then it's been business as usual: no real reform, just keep feeding slaughterhouse waste," said John Stauber, an activist and co-author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?
"The entire US policy is designed to protect the livestock industry's access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed," he said.
The government is now investigating another possible case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, in the US.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) promised to tighten feed rules shortly after the first case of mad cow disease was confirmed in the US, in a Washington state cow in December 2003.
"Today we are bolstering our BSE firewalls to protect the public," Mark McClellan, then-FDA commissioner, said on Jan. 26 last year.
The FDA said it would ban blood, poultry litter and restaurant plate waste from cattle feed and require feed mills to use separate equipment to make cattle feed. Chicken litter is ground cover for the birds that absorbs manure, spilled feed and feathers.
However, last July, the FDA scrapped the restrictions. McClellan's replacement, Lester Crawford, said an international team of experts assembled by the Agriculture Department was recommending even stronger rules, and the FDA would produce new restrictions in line with those recommendations.
Today, the FDA still has not done what it promised to do. The agency declined interviews, saying in a statement only that no timeline exists for new restrictions.
"It's just a lot of talk," said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat, a senior House Democrat on food and farm issues.
"It's a lot of talk, a lot of press releases, and no action," she said.
Ground-up cattle remains left over from slaughtering operations were used as protein in cattle feed until 1997, when an outbreak of mad cow cases in Britain prompted the US to order the feed industry to quit doing it.
Unlike Britain, however, the US ban has exceptions. For example, it's legal to put ground-up cattle remains in chicken feed. Feed that spills from cages mixes with chicken waste on the ground, then is swept up for use in cattle feed.
Scientists believe the BSE protein will survive the feed-making process and may even survive the trip through a chicken's gut.
That amounts to the legal feeding of some cattle protein back to cattle, said Linda Detwiler, a former Agriculture Department veterinarian who worked on mad cow disease for several years.
"I would stipulate it's probably not a real common thing, and the amounts are pretty small,"she said.
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