HOUSE COMMITTEE CHALLENGES USDA'S DOWNER CLAIM

The BSE-infected brains are hitting the fan now as the news hits our nation's capital that witnesses agree the Mad Cow was a walker. "The new information raises questions about USDA's credibility," said Tom Davis and Henry Waxman, who followed up with "If this cow was not a downer cow, then their sample is too narrow." In what's become a vaudeville-type formula, Steve Cohen makes a blanket denial, then pretends to be clueless about some relevant issue (in this case whether the plant had a particular USDA contract for BSE testing) in the hopes they'll forget about it by next time... which, it seems, the press usually does. Hope they're gonna pay attention this time.

UPDATE 2/18: Day-after coverage has more info, including the apparent first naming of the anonymous "third witness": "The House committee also received an affidavit from livestock hauler Randy Hull Jr., who said the cow had walked onto the trailer when he picked it up at a dairy in Mabton, Yakima County." Washington Post mentions that Hull provided a contract saying that he did not haul downer cows. This seems to contradict Louthan's earlier statement that the other cows in the truck were downers, but we'll see how that shakes out. The Seattle Times also calls into question the USDA's commitment to even doing the paltry "expanded" testing it's already promised: "The goal is to test 40,000 animals this year, double last year's efforts. In January, though, only 1,608 animals were tested nationwide, short of the more than 3,000 a month required to meet the goal."

ALSO: several new details cast Cohen's fiegned cluelessness into extreme doubt (my italics here): "For the past year, Ellestad said, the slaughterhouse had a policy of refusing downer cattle, though it would slaughter animals unable to walk because they'd been injured in transit. He said USDA officials knew that. But last fall, before the mad-cow case was discovered, Ellestad said, the agency asked him to collect samples from slaughtered cattle for mad-cow testing anyway, because other slaughterhouses in the region refused to do so. Ellestad also said that shortly after the cow tested positive, the USDA ordered the slaughterhouse to stop collecting brain samples for mad-cow testing.

AND: UPI's Steve Mitchell follows up with more damning detail: "Ellestad's affidavit also detailed a conversation he had on Jan. 19 with an unnamed Washington State official involved in USDA's BSE surveillance program, who said the cow in question had gone through a milking shed for three or four days after giving birth on Nov. 29, 2003. Ellestad said that means the cow was walking, which disputes USDA's contention the animal was injured during the birthing process. 'There would be no other way for her to go through the milking shed,' Ellestad said." And here's the specifics on the testing deal: "Ellestad said in June of 2003 USDA offered his company $10 for every brain sample from a downer animal it could deliver. Ellestad declined because his policy on downers had gone into effect and he no longer processed those animals. The USDA ultimately changed its offer to omit any reference in its purchase order form requiring the brains originate from downer animals, the affidavit said. Ellestad agreed to participate in the brain sampling program in October of 2003 and provided the committee with a copy of the USDA purchase order, which stated, "For each animal from which a BSE surveillance sample is collected, Vern's will be reimbursed $10." I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's pretty clear the USDA knew exactly what was going on at Vern's Moses Lake, and these facts suggest they may have been purposely setting up the plant to take the fall for the "lone downer cow from Canada."

STILL MORE: c/o VegSource, We find on Dave Louthan's Web page a little more detail about how the truck could be full of downers if they didn't take downers; unfortunately, it doesn't quite make things crystal clear... "The USDA vet asks the driver why are these cows down? Well Doc they fell down on the way over here. That's fine says Doc. Go ahead. No downers will be killed today. Just some cows who can't get up. The butcher says should we test these downers for BSE? Doc says what downers?" Huh? Is he saying the workers were routinely violating Moses Lake's policy? Or the vet was violating USDA policy? Sometimes colloquial language isn't the best choice. But this much is clear: "You people have got to stop buying beef. You have got to stop feeding that stuff to your kids. If you don't give them any money I guarantee you they will start testing in short order. Vote with your checkbook." Got that right. Also, here's the full Affidavit mentioned above (Large PDF), which looks to have lots of good specifics.

USDA LIES AGAIN: 500 'TESTED' COWS WEREN'T

Steve Mitchell keeps plugging away at the USDA's web of deceit surrounding BSE testing. His latest find is that they failed to test, or ineptly tested, nearly 500 suspect cows over the past two years -- including some in categories considered most likely to be infected. As he points out, this means "it may never be known with certainty whether these animals were infected with the deadly disease." And as for the lies, "Department officials said these animals were not included in the agency's final tally of mad cow tests, but the records, obtained by UPI under the Freedom of Information Act, indicate at least some of them were counted." More specifically, USDA spokeswoman Julie Quick told UPI, "None of those (untested animals or ones with the wrong portion of the brain collected) were counted in official sampling." However, Mitchell notes, it would have been necessary to include some of the untested animals in order to arrive at the USDA's final tally of 19,990 animals tested in fiscal year 2002, as stated in a Jan. 15, 2003, news release.

It's become clear that the whole strategy is simply to paper over the unsettling truth until after Election Day, as every move by the USDA is another foot-dragging, smoke-and-mirrors exercise, sometimes carried to absurd lengths. "Although UPI initially received the testing records last January, the USDA refused to release a key that would help decipher the meaning of several obscure codes and acronyms. After several more months of requests to obtain the key from both the Freedom of Information Office and the agency's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service, the USDA finally released the key in late May, but insisted it was not legally required to do so." All of this would be hilarious if people's lives weren't at stake - people, perhaps, like the unnamed person with a mysterious disease that looks like Mad Cow, but experts are assuring us isn't. "Experts who are studying the strain, discovered at Harborview Medical Center this summer, are awaiting blood tests being conducted at Cleveland's National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center, the Seattle Times said. Those tests should be completed in September. 'The disease is clearly not the human form of mad-cow, nor does it appear to be Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a closely related condition,' said Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti, director of the center. 'We really are puzzled at this time,' he said. 'This is unusual.' Let's hope it stays that way - but with the USDA in charge, hope may be our last resort.

UPDATE 8/23: Still more USDA prevarication: A USDA document from 1990 obtained by UPI acknowledges British cows as young as 22 months were infected with mad cow. USDA officials, in the wake of the December case of mad cow disease, have insisted it would be unlikely to find the deadly disease in cows under 30 months of age, but the 1990 document, entitled "Emergency Programs Alert" and issued May 1990, describes the outbreak of mad cow disease in the United Kingdom and states: "Age of affected cattle at onset ranged from 1 year 10 months to 15 years." The document urges USDA veterinarians to collect a brain sample from any U.S. cattle showing signs of the disease and does not specify any limitations on age.

LATEST MAD COW STRATEGIES

You really have to hand it to the USDA for their brilliant management of the Mad Cow crisis. I'm not kidding. I don't mean the actual threat to public health, of course, but the threat to the meat industry. They're all over that. The latest move was to release a flurry of findings and hype related to several different aspects of the situation so that overworked journalists would have a hard time sorting it out, or finding out which nugget was front-page news.

I'd nominate this one: "The United States is neglecting to test the majority of cattle most at risk of having mad cow disease." Reuters cites USDA investigators saying that the agency "was not testing adult cattle that died on the farm and had failed to test hundreds of cattle condemned due to possible central nervous system disorder -- a symptom of mad cow disease and many other diseases." More specifically, "the USDA failed to test 518 of the 680 cattle condemned at slaughter for central nervous system symptoms between fiscal 2002 and 2004." Hmmmm. Wonder why they didn't think to test those other 518?

While that was coming through, the USDA's Inspector General, Phyllis K. Fong, gave the final word on the famous so-called-Downer Cow issue, and good for her that no one was paying attention, because this smells exactly like an overcrowded feedlot: "Agriculture Department officials did not intentionally falsify records of a Washington state cow found to be infected with mad cow disease," she said, but added that "two weeks after a USDA veterinarian inspected the animal last December and declared it an ailing 'downer,' he took the unusual step of updating and annotating the records after being queried by Agriculture Department officials." Huh. Yeah, that is a little odd. But no explanation as to why this happened. "She also said he failed to place a required ear tag on the animal." Wow. What a coincidence, right? That this one animal happened to miss out on ear tagging? But it gets sillier: "The man who made the ["no downer"] allegation, Fong said, appeared to be mistaken about which animal turned out to be infected." Oh, really? Funny how the next sentence mentions that "five people at either the slaughterhouse or the dairy farm from which it came saw the cow walking the day it was slaughtered." So not only was Dave Louthan "mistaken," there was some kind of mass hallucination going on that day. And the crowning note: "Fong did not come to any independent conclusion about whether the infected animal was a downer." Of course not - because it's not as if that was a central issue to this entire investigation. Jesus. We all know that if they'd been able to back it up, they would certainly have come to the "conclusion" that it was a downer. The fact that they're trying to weasel out of the whole argument almost proves Louthan and Ellestad were right.

Meanwhile, Steve Mitchell continues to plug away, scaring up interesting documents showing that the USDA in 2002 advised against the very test it's now using, specifically because of the danger of "false positives." But Mitchell's sources argue for a PR strategy even more brilliant than I'd suspected:

"By releasing preliminary positives -- or inconclusives, as the USDA has deemed them -- that are later ruled negative, the agency could desensitize markets, consumers and foreign trading partners to real positive cases when and if they occur, the sources said. 'Bio-Rad was approved as a way of getting people used to a possible case if there ever was one,' a veterinarian with expertise in mad cow disease told UPI. 'They (USDA officials) know it has a high false positive rate ... The more inconclusives they have, the easier it is to "mix something up" and have all negative tests,' said the veterinarian, who requested anonymity. The veterinarian's comments were echoed by other experts in this field, who also declined to be named.

USDA spokeswoman Julie Quick did not respond to UPI's question of whether this was the agency's intended strategy. However, John Clifford, USDA's chief veterinary officer, acknowledged at a recent news conference that release of the inconclusive results could have that effect. 'We want to minimize the impacts upon the markets,' Clifford said. 'We feel like that after we get this information out there a couple of times that hopefully it will continue to minimize that impact.'

Quick insisted the agency's statement was not intended to recommend against the Bio-Rad test. Instead, she said, it was meant to recommend that countries not simply rely on rapid screening tests as a way to confirm a case of mad cow disease. No other testing experts UPI contacted interpreted the statement that way and Quick, who acknowledged she was not familiar with the technical details of the tests, declined to make Clifford or other USDA officials available to discuss the issue or offer clarification.

The USDA's decision not to release the samples from the two inconclusives for verification by outside labs has also come under question. The agency used a test called immunohistochemistry, or IHC, to determine the animals were not infected with mad cow, but experts said this is not always a foolproof test and it can miss cases. Markus Moser, Prionics' chief executive officer and a molecular biologist, noted that Germany was considered BSE-free when using the IHC test. When officials there began using the Prionics rapid test in 2000, he said, they found several cases and so far have detected more than 300 infected animals.

Stuart Wilson, Microsens' scientific director and a molecular pathologist, noted in a document he recently prepared on false positives that there have been instances when Bio-Rad was used more than a few months before the animal developed symptoms and they were found correctly to be positive, but IHC incorrectly ruled them negative.

In other words, in addition to all the other crazy chicanery, the test that overturned the false positives might well have been wrong. I'd think something like that would at least make page 2 or 3, no?

MAD COW POTPOURRI

There's a bunch of little developments and perspectives in the ongoing Mad-Cow brouhaha that need covered, so I'm gonna dump 'em all here:

Even the parent company of the USDA now says they're "disappointed" in it: The National Cattlemen's Beef Association board of directors is telling its members it is "very disappointed" with the agriculture department's handling of mad cow disease.

According to this Duluth paper, the USDA (which is supposedly about to vastly expand its BSE testing next week) still has been "unable for nine months now to document those [20,000] tests [in 2003] in response to a Freedom of Information Act request."

Fun with transcripts, part I: A Denver Post piece called "When advocates become regulators" profiles Charles Lambert, who spent 15 years at the NCBA before joining the USDA as undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs. At a hearing less than one year ago, Lambert said mad cow disease wasn't a threat.
"Is there a possibility that it could get through?" Rep. Joe Baca, a California Democrat, asked.
Lambert answered, "No, sir."
"None at all?" Baca asked.
"No," Lambert replied.
"You would bet your life on it - your job on it, right?"
Lambert answered, "Yes, sir."
And of course, Lambert, who now says, "I overstated my case," still has a job - the job he bet against Mad Cow showing up in the USA! "Whether it's intentional or not, USDA gives the impression of being a wholly owned subsidiary of America's cattlemen," sez Carol Tucker Foreman in the article. "Their interests
rather than the public interests predominate in USDA policy."

Fun with transcripts, part II: At yesterday's Tele-News Conference with Ann M. Veneman and J.B.Penn, Veneman again said more cows will be found in the US to have BSE: "[W]e anticipate that we may find a few additional cows. And we are prepared for that. Certainly we've discussed this with our trading partners in terms of a very robust system that we are implementing in terms of surveillance in this country." Penn chimed in with " ... And we of course have made them aware that if we have additional BSE in our livestock herds then we'll very possibly find it." Oh, very possibly, huh? That's reassuring. Then comes this question from a reporter:

Q: There's a claim that I believe is coming from not just RCALF but the Consumer Federation that the USDA's misrepresenting the Harvard Study saying that it does not account for the introduction, the possible introduction of diseased cattle from Canada or other countries and therefore you cannot make any presumptions about the state of the safety of the supply in this country.

And Veneman says - wait for it - "I don't have any information," right. "Well, I don't have the benefit of having heard the RCALF press conference first of all, so I can't respond to specific allegations they may be making. But let me just say a word about the Harvard Study. ...And through that study it didn't say that we didn't have BSE or we wouldn't have BSE." No, the study didn't, Madame Secretary, you did, which is exactly what the questioner explicitly asked you. As you know, on Feb. 26, 2002 you said the study's conclusion was that "early government protection systems have been largely responsible for keeping BSE out of the United States." Liar.

Science corner: Here's an interesting angle. "With funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a group of UW-Madison researchers will investigate what happens if infectious prion proteins - considered the cause of chronic wasting disease and mad cow disease - enter wastewater treatment plants. At most treatment plants, microorganisms decompose biodegradable material in the sewage and, in theory, should also disintegrate infectious proteins, says McMahon. But as she points out, prion proteins generally are very resistant to degradation. "Prion proteins can be viewed as an environmental contaminant," says McMahon, adding that it currently is not known how long these proteins can remain intact and infectious in the environment.

Well, fortunately, we don't drink wastewater. I mean, sure, sometimes by accident... but other than that, and in a few places here and there, I mean, sometimes wastewater can become tap water, and in that form, rather a lot, really...

This is where we might wish the USDA were allowing their workers to actually learn the new food-safety rules without taking a sick day from work. But don't worry, because the USDA may soon be investigating itself again over Mad Cow, this time, over the clear violation of its own policy to allow millions of pounds of Canadian processed beef into the US. Chuck Schumer "has requested the OIG look into who at the USDA made the decision and if the meat industry put pressure on the agency to ignore the Canadian restrictions." CSPI's Caroline Smith DeWaal sums it all up: "They've been ignoring the risks from (mad cow disease) in the human food supply since the 1990s, on the basis that we didn't have (mad cow) in this country, so now these assertions from the agency that there's no possibility that contaminated meat could reach U.S. consumers is really questionable."

MAD COW: USDA BUMBLES ON

It's almost impossible to keep track of all the elements of the USDA's screwed-up Mad Cow strategy, though the federal investigations do help. The latest is into "allegations an agency supervisor in Texas violated federal policy and ordered that a suspect cow not be tested for mad cow disease." In his ongoing quest to rake the Mad Cow muck, Steve Mitchell also finds that at that same Texas facility, the USDA did not test any cows for mad cow disease in the past seven months. "The USDA also failed to test a single cow in 2002 at another Texas slaughterhouse that processes high-risk, downer cows." And this is getting to be a common refrain: "A woman at [the other slaughterhouse,] San Angelo Packing, who refused to identify herself, declined to comment, saying the president of the company, whom she also would not identify, was out of town."

Lack of information seems to be the main concept here, applied as liberally as the meatpackers and their lobbyists can get away with. In addition to the above stonewalling, the USDA "has failed to supply the number of cows exhibiting signs of a brain disorder it has tested for mad cow disease to Japanese authorities, who requested the information more than four months ago." Mitchell continues, quoting a Japanes official, that "the USDA has also failed to address other questions about how the agency is ensuring mad cow disease does not infect U.S. herds." Despite our attempts to bamboozle the Japanese into accepting our risky meat, this official saw the problem pretty clearly: "For some reason, this government can't do anything the big meat industry (opposes)," he said.

And as Ann Veneman's resignation is demanded over the department's breaking of its own rules in secretly importing Canadian beef, what's her rebuttal? "I didn't know." Come on, how's she supposed to keep track of every little life- and economy-threatening issue that's the biggest story her agency has faced in decades? Really, now. When "who knows?" is your organization's basic operating principle, you gotta expect a couple oddball developments here and there.

And speaking of developments, that's the trouble. BSE could still be developing in our herds as well as in our population. In our herds because the FDA is still doesn't have Mad Cow feed rules announced, much less in place and enforced, and can't even say when this will happen. So any feed that's "at risk" is still getting fed to cows right now, with potential consequences several years down the road. And according to British scientists, BSE is still developing in the human population, with up to 4,000 people over there unwittingly carrying it. (But none here, of course, since we have a Firewall against Mad Cow.) The concern is that these folks, even if they don't get Mad Cow symptoms, could still pose a risk to others as blood donors "or if they had an operation which involved instruments contacting infected tissue." It's being called a Mad Cow Time Bomb. But when it comes to the USDA, the key word is: Dud.

UPDATE 5/24: Veneman lied about not knowing, says Cattlemen's group, adding "there were numerous indications Veneman would have been aware" of the millions of pounds meat illegally crossing the border. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer puts it bluntly: "Don't trust USDA about mad cow." And the Wilmington Star-News both states outright that Veneman is a liar and accuses her of cronyism and profiteering.
ALSO: Mad Cow-type prions are discovered in sheep muscle, but don't worry, if sheep have Mad Cow, "it probably would be in very small amounts." And we all know it takes a huge amount of that stuff to infect anybody.

USDA'S WEB OF LIES GROWS BIGGER, CLEARER

UPI's Steve Mitchell is once again rocking the house with new revelations - he's found documents showing that neither a test for illegal antibiotics nor a temperature reading - both required to be performed on all downer animals - were performed on the Mad Cow, which it's now quite clear was not a downer. Mitchell even spells it out for the slow-of-dot-connecting: "If the Washington cow was not a downer, it raises the question of how many other, seemingly healthy animals infected with mad cow went undetected and were approved for human consumption." Yes, it does.

Mitchell also identifies - or at least reports Louthan identifying - the USDA vet who inspected the cow in question: Rodney Thompson, who may be a) scapegoated by the USDA for neglect of duty or b) one of the organizers of this hoax, and thus due for a promotion. There's a strong case to be made, though, for "neglect of duty," and ex-USDA vets such as Lester Friedlander and Tom D'Amura go on record with it, using the phrase. In typical USDA fashion, Steve Cohen first evades questions about the discrepancies, then goes ahead with the outright lies: "It's not a requirement to get a temperature," Cohen said. But this is directly contradicted by a training course FSIS gives to its new meat inspectors to assist them in conducting inspection of live animals. "The course document, obtained by UPI, advises inspectors: 'You must take the temperature of all downers.'" Gosh, that seems pretty clear. The training documents also blow apart the No-Temp-Cause-the-Cow-Was-Lying-Down defense. To recap: USDA lied about cow being a downer, they lied about USDA procedure, they'll lie again tomorrow, most likely. What a country.
UPDATE 2/25: Now they're trying to fudge this crucial issue: DeHaven is floating the line that "both accounts [USDA's and Vern's] could in fact be true." Don't let him get away with that BS, Steve.

THE 143-MILLION-POUND BOMBSHELL

Hey folks, remember how all last week and the week before the USDA kept saying there was no evidence the downers were ever made into meat? Well, as of Sunday afternoon, there suddenly was ... yes... evidence the downers were ever made into meat! And on that little distinction rests the largest beef recall in U.S. history. Because while the chance of illness, according to the USDA, is "low," there's almost no doubt now that American consumers over the past two years (at least) have been eating beef from animals too sick to stand up on their own! Hey hey! Animals that are therefore most likely to suffer from Mad Cow disease! But don't worry, to the USDA that's only "Class II." It's a low risk - to them, anyway.

On his blog Wayne Pacelle says "It's not up to The HSUS to do the USDA's job," yet that's exactly what's happened here, and it bears repeating: The largest beef recall in US history was initiated by an outside agency acting in secret while the USDA inspector (according to the USDA) was right there on the premises. If food safety and animal-cruelty prosecution were up to the USDA, this would all still be going on at Westland/Hallmark. And of course, duh, it is all still going on all over the country, but after this, a lot of meat producers have got to be pretty nervous about exactly what's going on down at the kill floor. I'd call that a good day's work.

USDA: "SEATING PREFERENCE WILL BE GIVEN TO THE INDUSTRY"

Now it looks as though our health guardians are afraid of finding any form of dangerous contamination: A recent memo on the new HACCP food safety rules informs inspectors that the USDA will not reimburse them for travel expenses or give them time off to attend an educational session that's been scheduled during weekday working hours. Here's the money quote: "The memo says inspectors are free to attend a separate session on Saturday that is intended for industry personnel, but cautions 'seating preference will be given to the industry.'"

This wry piece by Steve Mitchell slams the USDA's bogus excuses up against the wall with deadpan reporting: The USDA spokesman says the meeting was on a workday because "it would be more convenient for the inspectors rather than taking up their time in the evening," whereas "The industry meeting was scheduled for the weekend because 'a lot of companies find it easier to do these workshops on Saturday than they do during the work week.'" Steve Mitchell blithely notes the evasiveness: "Asked if a weekend meeting also might be more convenient for agency employees, Baun [completely changed the subject]."

Later Mitchell spells out what should be obvious: USDA inspectors need the training more than industry employees "because they oversee the companies to ensure they are conducting the HACCP tests in an appropriate way and often help the plant employees understand what the regulations require of them."

It all wraps up in a classic wry juxtaposition. "The CDC recently reported a 36 percent reduction in E. coli infections as well as drops in illnesses associated with other pathogens, an announcement that was hailed by the USDA and the meat industry as evidence the HACCP program was effective." Then: "The same week of the CDC announcement, however, the meat company Excel recalled 22 tons of beef due to possible E. coli contamination." Well, yeah.

But here's the REAL kicker - this whole we-don't-want-you-to-learn-how-to-find-pathogens-so-we'll-make-it-egregiously-hard approach to scheduling? Casually tossed off in the middle of the story:

USDA spokesman Matt Baun "said a similar approach had been used for training sessions on mad cow disease testing."

USDA VET BRIBED TO SHUT UP?

Although I sympathize completely with what he's up against, I worry about Dave Louthan, how his story gets bigger and, well, wilder as time goes on. But there's nothing I wouldn't put past the folks at the USDA given their previous history. So I gotta pay attention when Louthan says that Rodney Thompson, the press-sequestered USDA vet who supposedly marked the cow a downer,"was given a promotion and bumped up three pay grades in an effort to keep him silent," and attributes the info to a named source, meat inspector Donald West. Either Louthan's starting to go off the deep end, or the USDA is in some serious, serious trouble. It's one or the other.

Steve Mitchell says, "UPI has been unable to verify any of Louthan's allegations, in part because the USDA has refused to give out any information on Thompson. In fact, agency officials will not even verify if Thompson is still a USDA employee, saying they cannot comment on an ongoing investigation. Asked about the promotion and pay-raise allegations, USDA spokeswoman Alisa Harrison said, 'I haven't heard of that at all ...I'm sure that's part of what the (Inspector General) is taking a look at.'" Hmmm. Isn't that what they call a non-denial denial?

Meanwhile, the first lawsuit - a class-action lawsuit - has been filed in King County, WA over the mad cow meat that got to consumers' plates in the wake of the yank-now-confess-later recall. This is started by one family, but who knows how many other families ate some of that 19 tons of potentially deadly meat?

USDA'S FUZZY MATH

The Washington Post reports that "After doubling its testing for mad cow disease in response to the first case in the United States, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman says the government may expand its survey beyond the 40,000 animals now planned." Great. Obliquely addressing the Mad-Cow-Not-a-Downer issue, Veneman said the new plan "will include some apparently healthy animals," but ominously, "Veneman did not specify how many more animals might be tested."

Hmmm. Wonder how many more? Maybe something like negative 20,000? Because that's what they're on track for with January's numbers. Yes, immediately after the first Mad Cow was found in the US, "testing has plummeted," this Seattle Times piece tells us. Outside of the tests done specifically on herdmates as part of the 2003 investigation, "only 1,608 animals were tested in January, down from 3,064 in December." Eleven more months at that rate will bring us up short of even the 20,000 the USDA claims to have tested in 2003. Does that make sense?

Sure it does, if you're the USDA and don't want to find any more Mad Cows. "USDA requested us to stop taking samples," Tom Ellestad said in the same story, adding that he didn't know why they told him to stop. And I love this: "[USDA] spokesman Jim Rogers said he wasn't familiar with the situation at Vern's." Vern's? Nope, doesn't ring a bell. We have so very many plants we deal with, how can we keep track of them all?

Messing with the data to get the results they want (or lack thereof) seems to be the USDA's M.O., as a top scientist there just blew the whistle (to the New York Times) on the practice of fast-tracking "safety" approval before the science could back it up. The story, headlined Scientist pressured to OK meat, continues: "In particular, the scientist said, approval to resume importing Canadian beef was given in August before a study could be done confirming that it was safe." Subpar for the course.

UPDATE 2/26: However you add up all of the above, Japan ain't buyin' it, which is the bottom line. And it doesn't look so good that not only is the USDA itself resisting increased testing, the agency is willfully blocking small beef packing companies and ranchers from testing their own cattle for Mad Cow.

USDA FRAUD GETTING TOO OBVIOUS TO IGNORE

There's little new in this Philadelphia Inquirer series on the ineffectiveness of the USDA in handling the meat industry; most of it rehashes the Denver Post series from last August. But what new stuff there is, pegged to the Wampler recall of fatally poisonous deli meat, is pretty interesting...

Vince Erthal, the food-safety inspector at the center of that whirlwind, says his supervisors gave "Wampler managers advance notice of USDA's 'random' listeria tests, which allowed the company to conduct 'special cleanups' that ensured negative listeria findings." Gosh! If I didn't know better, I'd sure call that "fraud" - wouldn't you? And before discounting him as a lone nutcase, bear in mind that "he is among a number of field inspectors across the country who have accused USDA managers of refusing to aggressively police plants with sanitary problems."

In the rewrite of the Denver Post USDA-too-close-to-the-meat-industry (which, let's remember, was basically a rewrite on PCRM's position paper on the USDA from three years ago), it's noted that when Michael R. Taylor became the USDA's head of food safety, "he found his phone was equipped with speed-dial buttons for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the American Meat Institute." Taylor closes that sidebar with the observation that the agency's meat-industry large population of meat-industry alumni "creates a fundamental conflict of interest because it forces the secretary of agriculture to balance her food-safety responsibilities with her economic and promotional functions." Oddly, though, "her" (Ann Veneman's) ties to industry powerhouses like Cargill and Monsanto goes completely unmentioned, as though some of the editors got cold feet at the last moment and removed the relevant paragraph.

It's not at all surprising, though, that the nine "Tips to Avoid Food-Borne Illnesses" do not include the simplest, most commonsense and effective tip of all: REDUCE OR ELIMINATE YOUR CONSUMPTION OF FOOD IN WHICH THESE BACTERIA ORIGINATE. Yep, innocent kids dying horrendous deaths from E.Coli poisoning we can take, but doing without meat? It's literally unthinkable.

UPDATE 5/21: Inquirer Editorial following up on series. Turns out they're against bad meat.

LATEST USDA FOLLIES

It's a pity the national media has the attention span of a 2-year-old, because there are some noteworthy - and entertaining - things going on in the aftermath of the downer recall.

Just a couple highlights for now: In the words of the Cattle Network site: USDA To Hallmark: We Want Our Plaque Back. Yes, the USDA has officially rescinded Hallmark/Westland's "Supplier of the Year" award from 2005 - and to show how serious this is, they want the meatpackers to return the plaque itself. No, seriously.

But to show there's no hard feelings between the agency and the industry it, *cough* "regulates," the USDA stonewalls before congress on lifesaving information that might upset Big Meat. As the WSJ succinctly put it, USDA Won't Disclose Who Sold Recalled Beef. "Agriculture Department officials, under fire on Capitol Hill over the largest meat recall in U.S. history, told legislators that they can't disclose a list of 10,000 establishments -- from food distributors and processors to grocery stores and restaurants -- that sold the recalled meat. But a rule change, in the works for the past two years, would allow the disclosure..." wait for it... "if it hadn't been held up by bureaucratic delays." Damn those bureaucratic delays! They're probably the same ones that stopped the USDA from being able to carry out the kind of undercover investigation the HSUS was able to that exposed this flagrant lapse in food safety!

USDA PROMISE: 200,000 COWS TESTED THIS YEAR

I didn't blog any of the stories last week saying the USDA supposedly was going to increase Mad Cow testing, because I wanted to wait and hear the USDA commit to it publicly and explicitly. Well, now it's official - I guess... listen to how it's made public: "U.S. animal health inspectors will test between 200,000 and 260,000 cattle for mad cow disease this year, up from 20,000 last year, a legislative aide told Reuters on Monday. Yes, that's right - it's not an announcement from the front office, but "a legislative aide, who was briefed by U.S. Agriculture Department officials." Well, who was this aide? "The aide, who wished not to be identified, said the one-year testing program would allow inspectors to be 99 percent confident that if there was one case of mad cow disease among 10 million cattle, it could be identified." WTF? Wished not to be identified? See, this is what worried me about this so-called promise. Who's going to stand behind it? We don't even have a damn spokesman's name yet! Something tells me they're not going to actually test 200,000 cattle this year, but I'm putting that as a headline to remind us that that's the claim.

PM UPDATE: The USDA now has a release up about this, and it supplies enough context to show that already the con is on. The statement above from Reuters that "U.S. animal health inspectors will test between 200,000 and 260,000 cattle for mad cow disease this year" is incorrect, since this plan doesn't go into effect until June: "USDA will begin immediately to prepare for the increased testing, with the anticipation that the program will be ready to be fully implemented June 1, 2004. In the meantime, BSE testing will continue at the current rate." PLUS: They're already backing off the concept that they "will test" 200,000 to 280,000 - note that every mention of that is couched as a conditional - "if we test this many, we can be this certain." In the transcript of the USDA press briefing, Bill Thomson of Oster Dow Jones brings this up - "you're not giving us an estimate on how many animals you will test. Is there a possibility that you'll test less than 201,000 animals?" and DeHaven comes out and says: "You guys are doing your best to get me to identify a number, and I'll emphasize again that the goal of this is to test as many of that target population as we can." Then: "It's possible that we would collect somewhere less than 200,000." So this blog entry hasn't even been up all day, and already, the "promise" that's been reported as fact in all major newspapers is revealed to be non-binding. It's the difference between saying "I'm going to do such-and-such" and "I'll do my best!"

AND: More evidence this is a smokescreen for business as usual: Scott Kilman of the WSJ asks, "Under the old program employees of meat packing companies or meat plants often picked that animal. Will that now be the job of a federal employee?" and DeHaven hedges, basically saying that since they're doing the best they can, it doesn't matter who picks the cows to test. He says the answer will be in "the plan on our website," but, lo and behold, it ain't. The plan spells out who physically collects the samples, but not who picks. But come on, folks, give 'im a break - he's doing the best he can!

UPDATE 3/16: No matter how much DeHaven and Veneman tap-dance about this, "we're doing our best" isn't good enough for Japan - which is, of course, the bottom line.

AND: It's apparently also not good enough for US meatpackers.

FALLOUT

Here's a good roundup of the latest developments in the downer-meat scandal. This one focuses on the revelation that HSUS went directly to prosecutors with the video and were asked not to go public yet and waited a month before releasing the clips on their site when no prosecution was forthcoming.

And the HSUS investigator I lauded - and still do - goes into detail about what was going on at Hallmark and how frequently.

Some choice bits:

* The USDA inspections came regularly at 12:30 and 6:30 so that workers had plenty of time for misdeeds such as those captured on video. This squares with what Howard Lyman and others have reported about the USDA's joke of an "inspection" process.

* The In-N-Out burger chain pledged to never use hallmark beef from this point forward.

* Geez, Wallace Shawn is getting to be a regular around here: "Anthony Magidow, general manager of the meat processing portion of Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., said Friday that he could not believe cows had been mistreated at the facility until the Washington Post reporter who broke the story showed him the video last Monday." Yeah, it was just too incredible to contemplate that these rogue operators might be flouting the rules, given that "one was a supervisor with 30 years of experience at the company and another had worked there for 12 years." Maybe you should get down to the kill floor a little more often and see what your most trusted employees are up to, Mr. Magidow, if you were, indeed, not aware such things were going on.

But here's the best part:

* "Magidow said there is no chance that any of the seven animals that were tormented in the videotape wound up in meat that went into the national school lunch program." OK, that's the view from guy who's unable to believe what's going on because he's out of the loop - how does that square with the actual eyewitness testimony? "The undercover investigator said many cows approved for slaughter later went down, and he frequently saw those animals enter the kill box. Workers never notified the USDA officer on site after animals went down, he said." Hmmmm. Too bad you're so unaware of what your longtime employees are up to, Mr. Magidow, 'cause it sure sounds like downed animals were made into meat - and if there was no notification, nobody knows which downers wound up where.

And all snark aside, this is what it comes down to. This clueless bozo thinks he can play games with peoples's lives (not to mention animals') by sitting there and declaring the animals didn't get made into meat. So let's consider this logically for a second... these longtime employees have a downed animal, and rather than use some of the equipment they have on hand to forcibly move cattle, they spend minutes of precious time (remember the profit margin depends on cattle coming into the slaughterhouse as rapidly and regularly as possible) taunting and torturing the animal to make it walk... and then once it's walking they just walk it out of the facility and into more paperwork, rather than send it to the kill floor and be done with it. How credulous are we supposed to be? Why would anyone let him get away with such patent nonsense when lives are at stake?

The USDA is still probing. It's a chance for them to come out swinging and show they're not just industry patsies by a) closing Hallmark completely and b) undertaking a thorough investigation of this practice throughout the industry. Or they could always go with c) declaring that this was all just a simple misunderstanding, isolated at this one location and on these particular dates when it just so happened that a camera was running, and everybody should go ahead and eat all the meat they possibly can. Wonder which the USDA will choose? Place your bets now.

RICOCHETS

By now the HSUS video of downers being abused is a well-established American icon, but I can't let go of that "bombshell" analogy, so now we have all the stories where the facts and their respective spins go bouncing around from one media format to another, with the requisite newspaper editorials condemning this supposed isolated incident and demanding "action" to assure we can all swallow animal corpses without fear, and with "reaction" from "experts" like Temple Grandin.

Grandin, who makes her career off the meat industry, tends to low-ball its ill effects (outside of, you know, making the cattle nervous and anxious when their kill chutes are poorly designed), so it's worth noting that she baldly states that the stuff seen in the video - which, cruelty aside, is all about flouting USDA regulations and slaughtering high-risk downers - is probably going on right now at "10 or 15 percent of the plants" in the United States. In other words, even if we lowball Grandin's own lowballing and take the 10% estimate, take the record-setting amount of meat just recalled because there were downers in it (and once again, downers are the most likely to be carrying BSE) and multiply it by 650. I don't even want to figure out all the zeroes in that.

We'll let this one Baltimore Sun article stand in for all the others, as it does have a couple more good gems: F'rinstance, try to reconcile these - the USDA promises to "ramp up" its inspection process, while at the same time claiming that "We know our inspectors were correctly inspecting the plant" in question. Huh? If they were already correct, how can you make them more correcter?

And Amanda Eamich, the spokeswoman behind that quote, also blithely states that (quoting the article) "the department's investigation found that the mistreatment documented on the video was an exception to its practices." Uh huh... an exception to its practices? Or to its supposed policies??? After all, if this stuff was going on and the USDA official present couldn't find it, how can the USDA speak with any credibility about what was or was not regularly happening at this plant... or any other, for that matter? What exactly is their basis of data by which they can determine this is an "exception"? The plant's records of its own violations? What? Inquiring stomachs want to know.

And as one last tidbit... A Mad Criminal is on the loose! While one of the two men wholly responsible for this 143-million-pound recall has been taken into custody, the other remains at large! That means Luis Sanchez could be out there somewhere forcing downers to walk to slaughter even as we speak! Doesn't the law enforcement here seem a little lackadaisical? I mean, we're talking about the two most evil men in the whole slaughter industry, the two who refuse to follow the rules and who, all by themselves, came up and implemented this plan to subvert USDA regulations - and one of these two is still out there, continuing, no doubt, to instigate more isolated incidents!!! The horror! Seriously, though, I hope that no language barrier prevents these two from singing.

MORE MYSTERY MEAT

You can almost set your watch by it: After much hullabaloo, back when the national news media was focused on this, as to how it was going to get right to the bottom of the Alabama Mad Cow and its origins, the USDA has come up with next to nothing, and hardly anyone is reporting this discrepancy. Capital Press Agriculture Weekly, though, notes that as of last week, the cow's origins "remain a mystery."

The article notes that "USDA promised daily Internet updates on the investigation, posted at www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse.shtml, then didn’t give any new information for the next three days." And after those three days, there's been squat - go check for yourself.

In a continuation of the tradition of USDA follies, the article goes on to note that the agency's initial announcement got the breed of the cow wrong, and that upon digging up the body, had "estimated" the cow's age at 10 years. But there's some contention about that estimate, since it conveniently dates the animal's birth before the 1998 feed ban. South Korea, for one, isn't blithely accepting this "estimate" and says the U.S. has failed to prove its claim that a cow found infected with BSE there last month is 10 years old. The country will continue to ban US beef until the USDA produces more compelling evidence of this claim. I'm sure they'll step up and delivers that evidence immediately - assuming, that is, that the dog didn't eat it.

USDA + FRIDAY + "MAD COW" = SUSPICIOUS

In another Friday release that mysteriously got swept under the news rug, the USDA has admitted that the "BSE Firewall" does not exist. "There is still a risk, though slight, of mad cow disease in the United States, and it is greatest in the three Northwestern states bordering Canada." Remember when the risk was so small it amounted to "no risk?" How'd we get to particular states with "greatest risk?" Well... "Investigators tracked the animals born in the same herd within a year of the [BSE-]infected cows or born to them, and of those, 29 were shipped to the United States. Investigators were unable to find 11 of those animals; 18 were slaughtered for their meat or killed for other reasons." Interesting that this is coming out now. Are we being softened up for another "discovery?"

UPDATE: Don't know if this answers the previous question, but it's certainly an interesting coincidence: 5/6: Feds probing claims of mad cow violations. Plenty of provovative tidbits, as usual, in this Steve Mitchell story. Some excerpts:

Investigators with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Inspector General's office are looking into allegations that cow brains and other risky materials that could carry mad cow disease might be entering the human food supply in violation of agency policy, United Press International has learned.

Stanley Painter, chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals... said he had been informed other USDA meat inspectors were aware of cases where employees of meatpacking plants failed to ensure specified risk materials or SRMs -- such as brains and spinal cords -- from cows over 30 months old did not enter the nation's food supply.

Painter said OIG investigators told him in March they did not have the non-compliance reports and also were having difficulty obtaining them.

OIG officials have informed Hinchey's [Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y.] office they interviewed Painter and also are investigating how the USDA handled his complaints, the aide said, and added Hinchey plans to follow up on this matter.

Painter said the agency officials asked him questions that suggested they did not understand USDA policies and implied he should have handled the reports of alleged violations by doing things that would have been a breach of official agency procedures.

Painter said the violations continue to happen and noted he just recently learned of another one. "The potential is there for it to happen all across the country," he said. "It's not just in one location, it's not isolated, because the policy is the same nationwide."

USDA IN PANIC MODE ON VEGANISM

The USDA solidified their role as apologists and promoters of the dying meat industry with a wild claim that "There's absolutely no question that it's unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans," backed up by the nonsense that "Animal source foods have some nutrients not found anywhere else." Well, sorry, but a) there sure as hell is a question as to your wacko claim, and b) no, animal source foods have ZERO "nutrients not found anywhere else." Yet these charges are reprinted without challenge or even cursory examination by so-called journalists.

What's Lindsay Allen's basis for these definitive statements? It would be laughable if the situation weren't so tragic for the subjects and ominous for the notion of truth in our culture: Rather than study the first-world vegans she's supposedly talking about, in controlled, quantified experiments against first-world meat-eaters, Allen bases the hyperbole on a meat-industry-funded "study" in Kenya whose conclusion was obvious before it was already done: Malnourished children living on nothing but corn and beans saw their health improve when their diet was diversified with the addition of meat and milk. What a shocker, eh? Note that there was no comparison with malnourished children whose diets were diversified with the addition of, say, greens, or even multiple types of beans. In other words, nothing even approaching an actual vegan diet that first-world parents feed their children; nothing that could possibly back up such a far-reaching claim.

The BBC, which before its smackdown over the Blair-Iraq situation was a pretty credible news outlet, is one of the worst offenders here, not only leaving the central claims unexamined but adding a forum parroting the USDA's framing, "Are vegan diets harmful for children?" rather than, say, "Can you believe anything uttered by these paragons of deception, collusion and incompetence?" The Scotsman is a little better, leaning on the scotsman Paul McCartney, who concisely observes that "These [studies] are engineered by livestock people who have seen sales fall off." But like other outlets, they headline the article with Allen's BS statement, and allow her to lie about the funding, something that's easily checked just by looking at the abstract. (Check for the phrase "National Cattlemen's Beef Association") It's a shameful day for journalism and for truth, which means it's a great day for the USDA and their corporate puppet masters.

UPDATE 2/28: It's interesting that the USDA believes that theoretical harm to infants from a lack of meat-eating, based on one study of third-world kids, is worth making international headlines over, while actual documented harm being done to hundreds of thousands of U.S. children from meat-eating merits no mention whatsoever (and of course, this is only one source of major harm out of many, as we document here every day): "Lower IQ levels linked to mercury exposure in the womb costs the United States $8.7 billion a year in lost earnings potential, according to a study released Monday by researchers at a New York hospital. The Mount Sinai Center for Children's Health and the Environment combined a number of previous studies to determine hundreds of thousands of babies are born every year with lower IQ (search) associated with mercury exposure." The article goes on to note that the EPA estimates that "about 8 percent of American women of childbearing age have enough mercury in their blood to put a fetus at risk." Even low-balling that population estimate at 100 million women, that's 8 million women in this country putting their unborn children at risk for permanent damage by their consumption of fish. You'd think that might merit some mention, but... huh. Nope.

UPDATE 3/1: Commentators both inside the vegetarian movement and elsewhere are beginning to question the bizarre logic behind Allen's screed. Notably, in The Scotsman (again! - is it really the Paul McCartney connection?), Dr. Mark Porter uses his "Medical Notes" column to blast the whole escapade: "At first glance, Allen’s findings do seem worrying, but scratch the surface and her conclusions appear to be built on shaky foundations. Her research was carried out on 544 African schoolchildren whose vegan diets consisted of little more than starchy maize and bean-based foods - a much poorer quality diet than one would expect to find among even the strictest vegans in the UK. Her findings fly in the face of existing research that suggests vegetarian children brought up on a carefully balanced diet often grow faster than those who eat meat."

VENEMAN: MORE U.S. MAD COW LIKELY

While one arm of the government reaffirms the trope that nobody could get Mad Cow in the U.S., more disturbing signs emerge from other branches:

Ann Veneman is casually softening us up for the next Mad Cow "discovery," saying the USDA "won't be surprised" if it turns up additional infected animals. "There is certainly a likelihood we will find more (diseased) cows," Veneman said Friday. And on the same day, the FDA announced it has "not yet finalized long-awaited rules to prohibit cattle blood and poultry litter from U.S. cattle feed as a precaution against mad cow disease. Remember, these are the rules that were supposed to be "published swiftly" in January so they could be implemented immediately.

Meanwhile, that Texas No-Test Downer case gets more and more suspicious: "The vet condemned the animal as unfit for human consumption and recommended to a regional director with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in Austin that samples from the cow's brain be tested, Burley Smith, vice president of Lone Star Beef, said.  But the regional director told the vet not to test the cow, Smith said. Instead, it was taken a rendering plant where the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates rendering plants, approved it for use in swine feed." Steve Mitchell, as always, has much more: In addition to the departmental infighting reported in the above story, there was a May 6 e-mail order from the USDA "instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties." The USDA is facing possible legal action from the national inspectors union, which considers this a violation of inspectors' free speech rights and a breach of their labor agreement with the agency. Additionally, "Stanley Painter, chairman of the National Joint Council, said the USDA has sent out notices in the past stating inspectors cannot talk to reporters. 'It's an intimidation thing,' Painter told UPI." As always, spokesman Steve Cohen is on hand to be "not familiar with" whatever national-crisis document is being discussed on a given week.

Even the New York Times has started to remark on the man-behind-the-curtain stuff: "The federal Department of Agriculture is making it hard for anyone to feel confident that the nation is adequately protected against mad cow disease. At a time when the department should be bending over backward to reassure consumers, it keeps taking actions that suggest more concern with protecting the financial interests of the beef industry than with protecting public health." Well, yeah. That's why they keep reminding us that the 200,000-cow test plan is a "surveillance, not a food safety" plan.

OUR STRIP-MALL BSE TEST LAB NOT SECURE?

So I'm reading along... "The U.S. government's main laboratory for testing mad cow disease, located in an Iowa strip mall, is not secure enough to store dangerous pathogens like the brain-wasting disease, USDA..." Hang on. Excuse me? The sole spot we've been counting on to ensure the safety of the entire country as well as several crucial industries... is a storefront in a strip mall? "The building housing the strip mall is close to other commercial businesses and has limited security at the entry and exit points," said a report by the USDA'S Office of Inspector General, which conducts independent audits and investigations of USDA programs. Well, yeah. Also, the Dunkin Donuts next door might lead some people to think we don't take actual BSE testing all that freakin' seriously. This article adds that "Investigators repeated their concern that scientists and students were allowed "unlimited access" to the laboratory without the USDA requiring background checks." But really, man. It's the strip-mall thing. Maybe that's why the USDA suddenly announced seven new testing facilities at big-name universities. Also possibly related - Mad Cow Blamed For Ames Plant Closing, as strip-mall BSE testing professionals move to college towns so they can get an education while doing their job.

UPDATE 3/31: Mad cow samples removed from Ames laboratory, reports the local Ames paper. Very odd. Why were samples there if they shouldn't be, and why do they need to be "removed" all of a sudden? And where exactly are these particular samples going to? Previously, "Officials of the animal and plant inspection service had stated that 'all pathogens of consequence had been removed,' but investigators learned later from a laboratory official that a mad cow tissue sample remained. Hmmmm. The more cynical among us might wonder if there were samples that could be "troublesome" which may wind up getting "misplaced" en route. Also, ya gotta love this description of our strip-mall BSE lab: "The lab moved to the site in 1973 and was intended to be temporary." Well, see, now it's gone, so it was temporary. I mean, it was only there 31 freakin' years...