THE FINAL WORD | By Alan Guebert | May 23, 2003
1.) Mad cow madness
What many claimed could never happen in North America happened Tuesday when Canadian Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief confirmed mad cow disease had been discovered in an eight-year-old cow from a farm in northwestern Alberta.
The animal had been slaughtered on Jan. 31 after it was suspected to have contracted pneumonia. Routine post-mortem testing did not rule out BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly called mad cow. More testing, conducted in England, showed mad cow present. A grim-faced Vanclief said the 150-cow Alberta herd is quarantined, will be tested and later destroyed.
The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture immediately ordered a temporary import ban of Canadian ruminants, ruminant parts and feed. In 2002, the U.S. accounted for 78 percent of all Canadian beef exports, about four percent of U.S. beef consumption.
Last year, the U.S. imported 1.7 million head of Canadian cattle--511,000 from Alberta alone--and 373,000 tons of beef products valued at $2.5 billion. Over 70 percent of the beef product imports were "fresh-chilled" boneless cuts used largely in U.S.-processed ground beef.
On Wednesday, Japan and Australia banned the imports of Canadian beef, also.
The mad cow news immediately slammed all 2003 cattle futures contracts down their $1.50 per cwt. daily limit on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Tuesday. Likewise, all feeder cattle futures at the CME, with the exception of the spot May 2003 contract, took a $1.50 drubbing, also. Opening futures on Wednesday, however, reversed course.
Canadian mad cow made Wall Street sick to its stomach, too, Tuesday. McDonald's, the world's largest beef user, saw its shares slump by $1, or 6 percent. A year ago when mad cow was detected in Japan, some McDonald's outlets in the country saw in-store sales slide 18 percent. Share prices for Tyson Foods, the global beef packer, also were trimmed nearly 6 percent.
Mad cow incites panic because scientists believe humans develop a form of it called Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD). While links are tenuous, research suggests CJD can be contracted by eating meat from mad cow-infected animals. It's theorized that the disease is passed on by prions, or misshapen proteins, from the animals. In the 1996 European mad cow scare, beef consumption fell by more than 50 percent across the Continent after BSE was discovered in the United Kingdom. Some countries like Italy and France saw consumer beef demand plunge by more than 70 percent after mad cow was discovered there.
Mad cow is a fact of life--and death--in Europe. Since first surfacing in 1985, Great Britain has destroyed more than 3.7 million head of cattle suspected of either carrying the disease or being in contact with cattle that carried the disease. Between 1986 and 2002, according to Reuters, 181,376 cases of mad cow were confirmed in England.
Also, reports Reuters, the variant CJD has sickened or killed 129 people in Europe, mostly in England.
The U.S. claims never to have had a single case of mad cow. According to Ag Secretary Veneman, USDA tested 19,990 cattle for BSE "using a targeted surveillance approach designed to test the highest risk animals" in 2002. Canada, however, did have a case of mad cow in 1993, traced to an animal imported from Europe.
It is suspected the current mad-cow animal may have been imported from Japan. It was rendered into non-human food--most likely pet food--after its January slaughter. "It did not go into the food chain," Canadian ag chief Vanclief repeatedly stressed.
While American ranchers anxiously await the impact the Canadian case could have on U.S. meat markets, Canadian producers have most at risk. More than 80 percent of Canada's beef is exported and a global ban on the country's beef exports could devastate producers who have been rocked by drought, poor prices and year's of declining government support for agriculture.
Many producer-based farm organizations, like the Organization for Competitive Markets, say the mad cow news reinforces the need for full implementation of mandatory Country of Origin Labeling in 2004. "Currently there is no way for consumers to differentiate between domestically grown and processed product from foreign product," said Steve Cady, OCM executive director.
"But the country of origin labeling (COOL) law will remedy this situation so that our food economy is more insulated from global food scares. Consumers need to identify product produced in countries which have an outbreak of disease or contamination so that they can still buy beef, pork or produce that is produced in unaffected countries," he added.
2.) The Jungle: More bad meat and bad news for meat
In a dazzling and dazzlingly graphic series of articles in the May 18 and May 19 editions of the Philadelphia Inquirer, USDA, the U.S. meat industry and the rampant cronyism between the two got another black eye over "the United States' flawed meat-inspection system."
According to the stories, authored by Inquirer staff writers Oliver Prichard and Aparana Surendran, most of the meat on America's dinner tables coms from a less-than-wholesome alliance that "relies heavily on self-policing by the industry, discourages aggressive enforcement by government inspectors and often fails to protect consumers until it is too late."
Leaning heavily on evidence surrounding last year's deadly outbreaks of E. coli and listeria contaminations in Colorado and Pennsylvania, the series reads like Upton Sinclair's shocking 1906 novel The Jungle which exposed the filth and corruption in Chicago's turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry.
Some excepts include:
"Federal meat inspector Vincent Erthal saw how Wampler Foods prepared its poultry, so he didn't eat it ... It was commonplace, Erthal said, to see flies and cockroaches in processing areas, day-old meat particles in the grinding machines, and workers who picked up deli meats from the grimy floor before sending them on toward packaging."
"In the evisceration room, thousands of freshly slaughtered, defeathered and decapitated chickens hung by their drumsticks, zipping along a production line at 91 birds per minute ... (as USDA) inspectors work the production line at a harried pace ... Their workday is a repetitive blur of guts and carcasses; their uniform a smeared canvas of blood and grease. In just two seconds, the inspectors must make a crucial determination: Is this bird fit for human consumption, or possibly contaminated? When a diseased, feces-stained carcass rolls down the line, and inspector throws it in a trash bin, rinses his hands, and quickly turns back to his station."
"Last year, bacterial contamination forced America's meat and poultry companies to recall a record amount of food, including 27 million pounds from a Wampler Foods poultry plant in Montgomery County (PA). There a strain of listeria was linked to eight deaths, three miscarriages, and more than 50 illnesses across the Northeast."
"With meatpackers in fierce competition to supply mass retailers, pathogen control is often sacrificed for fast and cheap production ... 'The reality is that the big supermarket chain are hammering the processors. Wal-Mart want 99-cent hamburgers, and people wonder why we have E coli.' "
You get the big picture: Big business pressuring big government to look the other way big time (as Vice President Dick Cheney might say) to keep the kill lines moving and the rivers of blood--and money--flowing.
The Inquirer stories placed the blame for America's food contamination--which each year causes 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths--on weak federal laws to punish unclean plants and USDA's adoption of HACCP, the industry-managed Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points inspection system put in place in the late 1990s. (The Final Word has written about similar woes in Issues 6, 8, 17 and 22.)
The industry-to-government revolving door, which has brought many meat industry insiders inside USDA, has weakened public health, also, the newspaper reports.
According to the Inquirer, "Regulators with industry backgrounds are unlikely to fight for much-needed enhancements to the USDA's enforcement powers--which meat companies have successfully kept off the congressional agenda for years ..."
How? "Several of Veneman's top deputies have strong ties to the meat industry: chief of staff Dale Moore, senior advisor Elizabeth Johnson, and Chuck Lambert, undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, all came from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a ranchers lobby that contributed $800,000 to Republicans and $146,000 to Democrats in the last two election cycles."
The only surprise here is how cheaply politicians sold America's public health and undermined U.S. meat producers since HACCP's introduction. The U.S. meat industry annually generates more than $125 billion in business and Congress grabbed less than $1 million of in the 2000 and 2002 elections?
Either the shakedown artists in Congress are losing their money-grubbing form or--egads--they are suffering from E. coli or listeria-induced illnesses.
Highlighting one fact should shame Congress into action: 5,000 American deaths per year due to food poisoning. What would the public and Congressional reaction be if 5,000 Americans died each year to domestic terrorism?
The entire Inquirer series can be read at the following links:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/5884834.htm http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/5884855.htm http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/5884854.htm http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/5892357.htm http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/5892413.htm http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/5892354.htmTHE FINAL WORD:
