Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people's health

Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people's health

GRAIN, May 2011

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School children in the US were served 200,000 kilos of meat contaminated with a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria before the nation's second largest meat packer issued a recall in 2009. A year earlier, six babies died and 300,000 others got horribly sick with kidney problems in China when one of the country's top dairy producers knowingly allowed an industrial chemical into its milk supply. Across the world, people are getting sick and dying from food like never before. Governments and corporations are responding with all kinds of rules and regulations, but few have anything to do with public health. The trade agreements, laws and private standards used to impose their version of "food safety" only entrench corporate food systems that make us sick and devastate those that truly feed and care for people, those based on biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and local markets. People are resisting, whether its movements against GMOs in Benin and "mad cow" beef in Korea or campaigns to defend street hawkers in India and raw milk in Colombia. The question of who defines "food safety" is increasingly central to the struggle over the future of food and agriculture.

The growing global menace

Food should be a source of health, not harm. But food can maim, cripple, and kill. The leading cause of food poisoning in the United Kingdom today is Campylobacter, a tiny bacterium, rife throughout the country's chicken supply, that causes in humans diarrhoea, fever, abdominal pain and cramping, and in some cases chronic, even life-threatening, conditions. People get it from touching raw poultry or eating undercooked birds. Some 85% of the chicken population in the UK may be infected. In the United States, the top culprits these days are Norovirus, mostly transmitted from dirty hands, and Salmonella, contracted from eating food with faeces on it. Norovirus will give you acute vomiting and diarrhoea, while Salmonella causes vomiting, fever and cramps

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Graph: Data compiled by GRAIN from government and UN sources, 2008-2010 (except Australia=2005)

Among the more notorious food safety incidents in recent years was the melamine scandal in China in 2008. Six babies died and 300,000 others got horribly sick with kidney problems when the industrial chemical melamine got into the commercial milk distribution circuit. There was also a dioxin scandal in Germany in January 2011, where the German authorities shut down more than 4,000 farms after it was discovered that a German company had sold 200,000 tonnes of dioxin-tainted animal feed, which had subsequently entered the food chain. Dioxins are cancer-causing poisons formed in the burning of waste and other industrial processes. 1

How bad is the problem globally? Believe it or not, there are no global statistics or tracking mechanisms on food safety incidents worldwide; reliable data on their frequency and impact are grossly inadequate. Nevertheless, the available data do show that food poisoning is quite common in most countries (see Graph 1). 2 According to the Singaporean authorities, who run a pretty tight food hygiene system, roughly 1.5 billion people worldwide are affected by food-borne disease outbreaks each year, resulting in 3 million deaths. 3

The price of this food safety mess is huge. The UK puts the annual costs to the British economy at US$1.92 billion, which its Food Standards Agency bluntly calls "too much". Australia's annual bill is US$1.23 billion. The World Health Organisation says that the annual cost to Vietnam is US$210 million. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has long given the figure of US$35 million per year, but a new study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University in 2010 puts the figure astronomically higher, at US$152 billion. 4

Food safety in the Fast Food Nation

Does US-style production represent the future of global food? Possibly. Certainly, elite Western opinion shapers and policymakers – the editors of The Economist, the directors of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, certain key elements in the Obama administration – think it should. So it is worthwhile to consider how the US food safety regime has responded to the dilemmas of scale in recent years.

In an industrialised, highly consolidated food system geared to maximising profit by selling vast volumes of cheap food, pressure exists at every phase of the production chain to cut costs by cutting corners, including safe food practices. Moreover, the very scale of modern food production means that seemingly isolated lapses can become quite grave, subjecting millions of people to danger based on the actions of a single production facility.

The case of Peanut Corp. of America demonstrates the perils of scale. Until recently, the company ran two plants: one in Texas, one in Georgia. These two facilities processed 2.5% of the peanuts produced in the United States, and sold "peanut paste" to the entire US processed food industry. By late 2007, the company had evidently given up trying to maintain hygienic conditions at its facilities. In late 2008, people started coming down with salmonella from a dizzying array of products containing Peanut Corp.'s paste, prompting the FDA to initiate a "voluntary recall". By the time all was said and done, the recall affected no fewer than 1,800 supermarket brands. The tainted products killed nine people and officially sickened around 700 – half of them children – in 46 US states. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reckons that for every reported case of salmonella, another 38 cases go unreported – so the real number of people made ill from the output of just two facilities may be up to 26,000. In the wake of the fiasco, US journalists showed that the FDA had "outsourced" inspection of the Georgia plant to state authorities, and then ignored the state inspectors' findings of atrocious hygiene practices. Moreover, it turned out that the company's own testing had found salmonella in huge batches of peanut paste, which it proceeded to send out anyway. i

In another incident in 2009, a company called Beef Packers, owned by transnational agribusiness giant Cargill, had to declare two "voluntary recalls" involving over 500 tonnes of ground beef infected with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. ii The USDA announced that consuming the suspect meat could cause "treatment failure" iii – that is, death – because of its ability to withstand drugs. At least 39 people in 11 states reported getting sick, and more than 200,000 thousand kilos of the tainted meat was served to school children through the National School Lunch program. iv

The official response to such incidents has been minimal. In January 2011, a hotly debated piece of legislation called the Food Safety Modernisation Act was signed into being. The intention of the original Bill was to update and inject some resources into the US food safety system. It basically called for more inspections, gave the government authority to mandate food recalls, and provided some traceability to an otherwise fairly unregulated industrial sector. Who would oppose such a move? The fat cats from the food industry, you might think – the Cargills and the Tysons, who don't want to be controlled. But you would be wrong. The new rules would hardly affect them.

According to an analysis by the US NGO Food & Water Watch, nothing in the Act would have prevented the Peanut Company of America from sending out its tainted paste. Worse, the rules would not even touch the meat sector, the biggest source of food-borne illness in the United States. v The main opponents of the bill throughout the debate were small family farm activists who, because of the way the bill was framed, saw themselves falling under these controls when they are not the problem. So instead of instigating real food safety reform in a country where one out of four people gets sick and 5,000 people die from eating contaminated food each year, the law might do next to nothing.

In the absence of stricter public action around food safety, corporations have moved to fill the void -- sometimes to tragicomic effect. A case in point: in the mid-2000s, a company called Beef Products Inc. had an ingenious idea: it would buy slaughterhouse scraps – which are extremely likely to be infected by bacterial pathogens – from large-scale beef processors at cut-rate prices. It would purée those parts into a paste, which it would then mix with ammonia to kill bacterial pathogens. It would sell the product back the the beef industry as a cheap filler for ground beef, with the added feature that the ammonia in the paste would sterilise the ground beef it was mixed with. The beef industry had found a "solution" to the problem of bacterial pathogens in ground beef! The product, known in the industry as "pink slime" for its distinctive look, could be found in 70% of hamburgers consumed in the United States by the end of the decade. The USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service, which oversees meat safety, applauded -- it recognised "pink slime" as safe without requiring testing, on the grounds that it had been sterilised by ammonia. But in 2009, a New York Times exposé found that pink slime in fact tended to be ridden with pathogens -- and was actively adding to the pathogen load of the ground beef it was mixed with. Beef Products Inc. responded by merely upping the ammonia dose for its mix. To this day, the product remains widely used in the vast US ground beef market, including at fast-food chains nationwide. vi

If the official US response to highly visible manifestations of food poisoning, like Salmonella-tainted meat and peanut butter, has been underwhelming and industry-friendly, then the response to low-level exposure to pathogens that cause cumulative damage has been virtually non-existent. The first kind causes spectacular, impossible-to-ignore symptoms like vomiting and diarrhoea; the second entails subtle, easy-to-ignore ones that can cause significant long-term damage. Corporate-led food safety regimes like the one in the United States have to at least gesture at the first kind; the second kind, not so much.

It turns out that the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), which oversees the safety of the US meat supply, routinely endorses meat that it knows to be tainted with residues of "veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals", the USDA Inspector General revealed in a 2010 report. vii The damning report was met with silence by the US media – probably because small amounts of substances like heavy metals don't cause dramatic immediate symptoms, but rather hard-to-trace, slow-to-develop conditions like cancer. As the report puts it, the "effects of residue are generally chronic as opposed to acute, which means that they will occur over time, as an individual consumes small traces of the residue". In its report, the USDA Inspector General's office expressed confidence that the FSIS would redouble efforts to keep heavy metals and antibiotic traces out of the meat supply going forward. Yet it had expressed the same thing, after exposing the same problem, in its report two years earlier. viii

Another example is the US Food and Drug Administration's refusal to act on mounting evidence that Bisphenol A, an industrial compound found in many food containers, is an endocrine disrupter. If the food safety regime for spectacular pathogens could be described as porous, that for the second, more subtle, kind barely exists at all.

Written with contributions from Tom Philpott, senior writer on food and agriculture for Grist magazine.

i "Peanut Corp. Shipped Product After Finding Salmonella", Bloomberg News, 27 January 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aeXwqlMnIWU0;
 and "Peanut Plant Had History of Health Lapses", New York Times, 26 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27peanuts.html?_r=1&ref=health


ii "Antibiotic-resistant salmonella, school lunches, and Cargill's dodgy California beef plant", Grist, 10 December 2010, http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-10-meat-wagon-cargill-salmonella/


iii "California Firm Recalls Ground Beef Products Due to Possible Salmonella Contamination", USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, 9 December 2009,

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Recall_065_2009_Release/index.asp


iv "Why a recall of tainted beef didn't include school lunches", USA Today, 2 December 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-01-beef-recall-lunches_N.htm


v Responsibility for food safety in the US is divided between two agencies. The US Department of Agriculture is responsible for meat, poultry and egg products, which accounts for 20% of the US food supply. The Food and Drug Administration, within the US Department of Health, takes care of the rest. The Food Safety Modernisation Act addresses only the work of the FDA. The top sources of food poisoning in the United States are, however, poultry, beef and leafy vegetables (in that order, 2007). See: "Can Congress make a food-safety omelette without breaking the wrong eggs? ", Grist, 25 October 2010.

vi "Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned", New York Times, 30 December 2009,

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
; See also, "Lessons on the food system from the ammonia-hamburger fiasco", Grist, 5 January 2010, http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-05-cheap-food-ammonia-burgers


vii "FSIS National Residue Program for Cattle", Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Agriculture, http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/24601-08-KC.pdf



viii "USDA Inspector General: meat supply routinely tainted with harmful residues", Grist, 15 April 2010: http://www.grist.org/


This is "food safety"?

Government and industry action on food safety gives little indication that they recognise any fundamental problem with industrial food production. Rarely do their regulations or standards hinder corporate practices in any significant way. On the contrary, they tend to reinforce the power of large industry while undermining, or even criminalising, small-scale production and local food cultures. Colombia, for instance, is in the process of implementing legislation to prevent the sale of raw milk in urban areas. Well over two million farmers and vendors depend for their livelihoods on these sales of raw milk, and around 20 million Colombians, most of them poor, depend on raw milk as an affordable and essential source of nutrition, easily made safe by boiling it at home. Hard pressed to justify its moves on public health grounds, the government says that the legislation is part of its commitment to the WTO, and that it will help to "modernise" the dairy sector, making it better able to compete with imports when a looming free trade agreement with the EU kicks in. 5

These days, in Colombia and elsewhere, "food safety" policy has little to do with public health or consumers. It has become a battleground among contesting interests, the site of power struggles for control over food and agriculture, with decisions being increasingly taken far from producers and consumers, in the obscure world of trade negotiations and multilateral agencies, where politics and commerce, not science and public health, are what drive things.

Consider the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the fatal brain-wasting condition popularly known as mad cow disease. People get the human strain of it by eating the meat of cows that have been fed diseased animals as a cheap source of protein – a practice common in industrial feedlots since the 1970s. The US and Canada lost Japan, Korea and several other major export markets for beef when BSE was found in their herds in 2003, and have had a tough time regaining those markets because risks remain from their industries' feeding practices. 6 Indeed, in March 2011, a new case of BSE was identified in a Canadian cow. 7 But through constant pressure, particularly at the trade negotiating table, both countries have secured some concessions to allow certain parts of the cow, or the meat of younger animals, to cross borders freely. Both countries also went to the Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) in Paris, which has a similar role to Codex Alimentarius Commission in Rome but for the animal kingdom, to get their beef declared generally safe for consumption. Where does that leave Japan? Unmoved. It says that its standards are higher than those of the OIE or the US, and have to be given priority.

Beijing, for its part, has so far refused to budge. But that doesn't mean that Chinese consumers are getting ractopamine-free pork. The same government fighting off ractopamine-laced US pork, is aggressively pushing, in the name of "food safety", a consolidation and modernisation of the country's pig production based on the US factory farm model. China's two largest, vertically-integrated pork producers, Yurun and Shineway, both of whom have been heavily funded by the US bank Goldman Sachs, were implicated in recent food safety incidents involving ractopamine and clenbuterol (another banned drug added to pig feed for the same purposes). 8 In March 2011, Chinese consumers were shocked when a CCTV television report uncovered how ractopamine and clenbuterol are widely used in the farms supplying Shineway in Henan Province. 9 The report found that Shineway was actually offering farmers higher prices for pigs fed ractopamine. 10

Superbugs and megafarms

"Superbug" is a term used to describe bacteria that have acquired the ability to resist commonly used antibiotics. One of the most notorious is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which emerged in the 1960s in the UK and has since spread around the world, with deadly consequences. In the US alone, 17,000 people died from MRSA infection in 2005. i

MRSA is typically associated with hospitals, where the superbug has a tendency to get into open wounds and cause difficult-to-heal infections. But in recent years these superbugs have found another place to thrive: industrial pig farms. ii

In 2004, Dutch researchers identified a new strain of MRSA, later labelled ST398 or "pig MRSA", which they found in people in close contact with Dutch pig farms. Within two years ST398 become a leading source of human MRSA infection in the country, accounting for more than one in five human MRSA cases. Studies showed that these cases were closely related with pigs, and further research revealed that ST398 was running rampant in pigs on Dutch farms. A 2007 survey found ST398 in 39% of pigs and 81% of local piggeries. iii

New surveys of farms outside of the Netherlands have turned up similar numbers. iv The first ever EU-wide survey for MRSA on pig farms in 2009, using a method that "largely underestimates MRSA prevalence", found ST398 in more than two-thirds of EU member states. Spain and Germany had the highest incidence, with over 40% of pig holdings testing positive for MRSA. v Not surprisingly, given the European pig industry's heavy exports overseas, ST398 is turning up in pigs beyond Europe's borders, too. A study of pigs in the Canadian province of Ontario, for instance, found ST398 in a quarter of local pigs, as well as in one-fifth of the pig farmers tested. vi Only one study has been conducted in the US so far: it was a pilot study of two large hog operations in the midwest that found ST398 in 49% of the pigs and 45% of the workers. vii

MRSA has the potential to evolve in very dangerous ways in its new home on pig farms. The density of animals in factory farms allows the bacteria to evolve rapidly and in diverse ways. Also, the use of antibiotics on factory farms is ubiquitous. Pigs are routinely fed antibiotics in their feed and water, often as a preventive measure against disease outbreaks and even simply to increase growth rates.

In the US, 80% of all antibiotics consumed annually are consumed by livestock. viii In China, the figure is nearly 50%. ix Even in the EU, where the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics for animals is banned and where the types of antibiotics allowed for livestock are controlled, the use of antibiotics for animals still exceeds their use for humans. In Germany, for example, three times as many antibiotics are given to animals as to humans. x Such widespread use of antibiotics in factory farms speeds up the development of antibiotic resistance among bacteria. Unlike other strains of MRSA, ST398 can already withstand tetracyclines, a group of antibiotics that is given heavily and regularly to pigs in factory farms. The medical profession is getting increasingly worried about what this will mean for the future of human health care, as antibiotics may become useless. The WHO now calls it "the greatest threat to human health". xi

The good news, however, is that ST398 still hasn't shown much virulence in humans, nor is it easily transmitted between people. Not yet, at least.

In 2010, a 14-year-old girl in France, recovering in hospital from pneumonia, was infected with a superbug. She soon began having serious respiratory problems, her lungs started bleeding, and within six days she died. The superbug that killed her was a clone of MRSA ST398 that is known to circulate in humans. The most alarming issue for the French doctors studying the case was that this was the first incident on record in which this strain of MRSA had acquired the capacity to produce a lethal toxin in humans, something that certain other strains of superbugs are able to do. They reasoned that if the clone of MRSA ST398 could do it, then surely "pig MRSA" has the same capacity. xii

It is not much of a stretch to imagine a situation where "pig MRSA" passes from a pig to a farm worker carrying another MRSA strain with virulence to humans, mixes with that strain, and acquires its capacity for virulence. The new virulent strain of ST398 could then easily pass back into the pigs, where it would rapidly amplify and spread. ST398 is transmitted to humans not only through contact with live pigs: the bacteria is also present on meat sold in supermarkets and can be carried over large distances by the insects that pass in and out of farms. xiii

The EU is slowly starting to take action to defend against such a possibility. It has implemented several measures to restrict the use of antibiotics in livestock production and, at national and at EU level, some surveillance of farms is being carried out. In 2009, a panel of the European Food Safety Authority recommended that the EU move towards "systematic surveillance and monitoring of MRSA in intensively reared animals". South Korea, for its part, banned the use of seven antibiotics in animal feed in 2008, and implemented a national programme to reduce the use of antibiotics on livestock farms. But such restrictions on the use of antibiotics for livestock hardly exist in the US, although proposed legislation restricting the non-therapeutic use of certain antibiotics in feed is currently before Congress. As for surveillance, the US National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System doesn't even test for MRSA. xiv Outside the industrialised countries, where the meat industry is expanding most rapidly, there is an almost complete absence of controls on the use of antibiotics in agriculture and of surveillance for pathogens such as MRSA.

Enhancing surveillance and cutting back on the use of antibiotics in factory farms are important measures. But they aren't enough to deal effectively with the threat posed by MRSA and the myriad other pathogens that thrive in factory farms. A staggering 61% of all human pathogens, and 75% of new human pathogens, are transmitted by animals, with many of the most dangerous – such as bird flu, BSE, swine flu and the Nypah virus – having emerged from intensive livestock farms. xv It is the way that animals are farmed that is fundamentally at issue. xvi

i E. Klein, D.L. Smith, R. Laxminarayan, "Hospitalizations and Deaths Caused by Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, United States, 1999–2005", Emerg. Infect. Dis. Vol. 13, No. 12, 2007, pp. 1840–46.

ii Ed Yong, "MRSA in pigs and pig farmers", 23 January 2009,

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/01/mrsa_in_pigs_and_pig_farmers.php


iii X.W. Huijsdens et al., "Community-acquired MRSA and pig-farming", Ann. Clin. Microbiol. Antimicrob., Vol. 5, No. 26, 2006; A.J. de Neeling et al., "High prevalence of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus in pigs", Vet. Microbiol., Vol. 122, No. 3–4, 21 June 2007, pp. 366–72; I. van Loo et al., "Emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus of animal origin in humans", Emerg. Infect. Dis., Vol. 13, No. 12, 2007, pp. 1834–9.

iv Danish Integrated Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring and Research Programme, http://www.danmap.org/pdfFiles/Danmap_2009.pdf


v "Pig MRSA widespread in Europe", Ecologist, 25 November 2009; Broens et al., "Diagnostic validity of pooling environmental samples to determine the status of sow-herds for the presence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)", Poster presented at the ASM–ESCMID Conference on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococci, in Animals: Veterinary and Public Health Implications, London, 2009.

vi "Guelph Researchers Find MRSA in Pigs", University of Guelph, 8 November 2007, http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2007/11/post_75.html.


vii T.C. Smith, M.J. Male, A.L. Harper, J.S. Kroeger, G.P. Tinkler et al., (2009) "Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Strain ST398 Is Present in Midwestern US Swine and Swine Workers", PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2009.

viii See "New FDA Numbers Reveal Food Animals Consume Lion's Share of Antibiotics", Center for a Liveable Future, Johns Hopkins University, 23 December 2010,. http://www.livablefutureblog.com/2010/12/new-fda-numbers-reveal-food-animals-consume-lion%E2%80%99s-share-of-antibiotics
 See also Margaret Mellon, Charles Benbrook, Karen Lutz Benbrook, "Hogging it!: Estimates of antimicrobial abuse in Livestock", Union of Concerned Scientists, 2001, http://www.ucsusa.org/



ix "Half of China's antibiotics fed to animals: expert", Xinhua, 26 November 2010.


x Kristen Kerksiek, "Farming out Antibiotics: The fast track to the post-antibiotic era", Infection Research, Germany, 22 March 2010,


http://www.infectionresearch.de/perspectives/detail/pressrelease/farming_out_antibiotics_the_fast_track_to_the_post_antibiotic_era/



xi AAP, "Greatest threat to human health", Sydney Morning Herald, 16 February 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/greatest-threat-to-human-health-20110216-1awai.html


xii Frédéric Laurent, "Les souches de staphylococcus aureus ST398 sont-elles virulents", Bull. Acad. Vét. France, Vol. 163, No. 3, May 2010.

xiii See Aqeel Ahmad et al., "Insects in confined swine operations carry a large antibiotic resistant and potentially virulent enterococcal community", BMC Microbiology, 2011, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2180/11/23/abstract


xiv Maryn McKenna, "Alarm over 'pig MRSA' – but not in the US", Wired, 30 October 2010, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/alarm-over-pig-mrsa-%E2%80%94-but-not-in-the-us/


xv John McDermott and Delia Grace, "Agriculture-Associated diseases: Adapting Agriculture to improve Human Health", ILRI, February 2011.

xvi GRAIN, "Germ warfare: Livestock disease, public health and the military-industrial complex", Seedling, January 2008, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=533


Food safety and global trade: Europe and the US impose their standards


snip...SEE FULL TEXT REPORT HERE ;


http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=222


Read the synopsis of this report here.

http://www.grain.org/m/?id=327


http://www.grain.org/front_files/GRAIN_Food_Safety_Synopsis_2011.pdf


Approximately 50.3 million pounds of the beef recalled by HallmarkWestland went to federal nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, and of those 50.3 million pounds, about 19.6 million pounds had already been consumed at the time the recall was issued. Release No. 0054.08, USDA, Transcript of Technical Briefing - HallmarkWestland Meat Packing Company (Feb. 21, 2008).

9. HSUS members that consume meat products, including beef products, are concerned about eating adulterated meat products and the health risks associated with such adulterated meat. Specifically, they are concerned that downed cattle are at an increased risk for harboring and transmitting BSE prions and other pathogens. The consumption of meat products derived from BSE-infected cattle is believed to cause a human neurological disease known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease ("vCJD"). The disease is progressive, invariably fatal, and there is no known effective treatment or cure. Downed cattle may also be at higher risk for harboring other foodborne transmissible pathogens, including E. coli 0157:H7, Salmonella, and anthrax. By allowing downed cattle to enter the food supply, USDA's regulatory loophole injures members of The HSUS by placing them at an increased risk of contracting these food-borne illnesses each time they eat beef.

10. Members of The HSUS are also concerned about the meat products provided to their children through the National School Lunch Program. More than 31 million school children receive lunches through the program each school day. To assist states in providing healthful, low-cost or free meals, USDA provides states with various commodities including ground beef.

As evidenced by the HallmarkWestland investigation and recall, the potential for downed animals to make their way into the National School Lunch Program is neither speculative nor hypothetical.

http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/FDA/hsus-v-schafer-usda-complaint.pdf


Sunday, May 01, 2011

STUDY OF ATYPICAL BSE 2010 Annual Report May 2011

http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2011/05/study-of-atypical-bse-2010-annual.html


Monday, April 18, 2011

Multidrug-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in US Meat and Poultry

http://staphmrsa.blogspot.com/2011/04/multidrug-resistant-staphylococcus.html



TSS

Establishing a Fully Integrated National Food Safety System with Strengthened Inspection, Laboratory and Response Capacity

Draft 09/24/09

Establishing a Fully Integrated National Food Safety System with Strengthened Inspection, Laboratory and Response Capacity

Strategic Vision

Food safety is a core public health issue even though the U.S. food supply is among the safest in the world. With today’s far reaching and complex food supply chain, there is an increasing need to find more effective solutions to better protect American consumers by preventing intentional and unintentional food contamination. Food can become contaminated through many different vehicles at many different steps – at the source on the farm or in harvest water, in processing or distribution facilities, during transit, at retail and food service establishments, and in the home. In recent years, FDA, in cooperation with other food regulatory and public health agencies, has done a great deal to prevent both intentional and unintentional contamination of food at each of these steps. FDA has worked with other federal, state, local, tribal, territorial and foreign counterpart food safety regulatory and public health agencies, as well as with law enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies, and with industry, consumer groups, and academia to strengthen the nation’s food safety and food defense system.

This cooperation has resulted in greater awareness of potential vulnerabilities, the creation of more effective prevention programs, new surveillance systems, and the ability to respond more quickly to outbreaks of foodborne illness. However, changes in consumer dietary patterns, changes in industry practices, changes in the U.S. population, and an increasingly globalized food supply chain and new pathogens and other contaminants pose challenges that are requiring us to continually update our current food protection strategies.

Recognizing these challenges, President Obama has made a personal commitment to improving food safety. On July 7, 2009, the multiagency Food Safety Working Group (Working Group), which he established, issued its key findings on how to upgrade the food safety system for the 21st century. The Working Group recommends a new public-health-focused approach to food safety based on three core principles: prioritizing prevention, strengthening surveillance and enforcement, and improving response and recovery. Preventing harm to consumers is the top priority. Too often in the past, the food safety system has focused on reacting to problems rather than preventing harm in the first place. The Working Group recommends that food regulators shift towards prioritizing prevention and move aggressively to implement sensible measures to prevent problems before they occur.

At the Federal level, a number of Agencies are working together to coordinate their efforts and develop short- and long-term agendas to make food safer. As the federal regulatory agency responsible for most of the food supply, FDA1 is committed to ensuring that the U.S. food2 supply continues to be among the safest in the world. FDA has the responsibility of establishing enforceable standards to ensure the safety of the food the Agency regulates. These standards will reflect the prevention-oriented public health principles embraced by the Working Group. FDA will set new food

1FDA is the federal agency that is responsible for the food supply except for meat, poultry, and processed egg products, which are overseen by our partners at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 2 For purposes of this document, the term “food” includes human food, animal feed, components (i.e. ingredients) of both food and feed, and dietary supplements for humans, except as otherwise noted. Page 1

Draft 09/24/09

safety standards and review existing standards in light of what we have learned over the past decade with regard to prevention strategies. In addition, FDA will work with food industry to establish quantitative metrics for the controlling factors affecting food safety by incorporating appropriate measures of success. These metrics, or measures, will improve our ability to verify that certain measures or practices are being carried out and are effective.

This verification requires a systematic, integrated approach to effective risk control and enforcement strategies. Together with our federal and state, local, tribal and territorial partners, FDA will work to plan and implement an inspection and enforcement program to ensure high rates of compliance with the Agency’s food safety standards. By working with federal, state, territorial, tribal and local regulatory and public health partners, FDA will establish a fully integrated national food safety system, built on collaboration among all of these partners. The system will encompass inspections, laboratory testing, and response and will place priority on preventing foodborne illness, in both food for humans and animals, through the adoption and uniform application of model programs, such as the Manufactured Food and the Retail Food Regulatory Program Standards and other appropriate program standards. This collaboration will result in 1) better ability to assess potential risk at domestic food facilities and greater and more consistent inspectional coverage of these facilities across the entire food supply chain, 2) greater food surveillance through integration of food facility inspection and testing information, and 3) improved rapid response capacity and efficiency.

Under this system, FDA and federal, state, territorial, tribal and local regulatory agencies will conduct food facility inspections under the same set of standards. FDA will work with its regulatory partners to develop uniform national standards, including inspection, investigation, and testing protocols; training and certification requirements; establish program audit criteria; and create performance metrics to ensure program objectives are met. System integrity and credibility will be maintained through regular program oversight and accountability at all levels. Federal and state inspections will be conducted in accordance with a public health risk driven national work plan that FDA will develop with its regulatory partners. An integrated system will result in more coordinated response efforts to better respond to multi-state outbreaks when they occur.

To be fully successful, the national food safety system must be built with continuous input from FDA’s regulatory and public health partners. It must be sustained through multi-year funding that will be provided to state and local regulatory and public health partners to build the necessary state and local infrastructures, contain adequate legislative authorities to facilitate information sharing and communication among all partners, and include infrastructure for a national electronic information-sharing mechanism. These actions will result in a national food safety system that reduces foodborne illness, identifies sources of risk throughout the system, and reduces time to detect and respond to outbreaks. A public health driven, collaborative, and leveraged approach to food safety activities and responsibilities will be reflected in improved public sector resource utilization at a national level, which provides additional capacity for ensuring a safe and secure food supply.

Background

snip...see full text ;


http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForFederalStateandLocalOfficials/UCM183650.pdf



http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/SafetyHealth/AnimalFeedSafetySystemAFSS/ucm196795.htm



http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/NewsEvents/CVMUpdates/ucm196822.htm




re-Establishing a Fully Integrated National Food Safety System with Strengthened Inspection, Laboratory and Response Capacity


WHERE did it say they were going to test all cattle for BSE or any strain of TSE ?

WHAT about the August 4, 1997 MAD COW FEED BAN, that never was ?


THE tonnage of suspect tainted mad cow feed in the U.S.A. over the past decade, well, since August 4, 1997 partial and voluntary mad cow feed ban is phenomenal, it is absurd, it is astronomical, and for this reason, and past reasons, North America should test all cattle for TSE. I say all North America for the following reason ;


The most recent assessments (and reassessments) were published in June 2005 (Table I; 18), and included the categorisation of Canada, the USA, and Mexico as GBR III. Although only Canada and the USA have reported cases, the historically open system of trade in North America suggests that it is likely that BSE is present also in Mexico.

http://www.oie.int/boutique/extrait/06heim937950.pdf



Friday, September 4, 2009

FOIA REQUEST ON FEED RECALL PRODUCT 429,128 lbs. feed for ruminant animals may have been contaminated with prohibited material Recall # V-258-2009

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2009/09/foia-request-on-feed-recall-product.html



Saturday, August 29, 2009

FOIA REQUEST FEED RECALL 2009 Product may have contained prohibited materials Bulk Whole Barley, Recall # V-256-2009

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2009/08/foia-request-feed-recall-2009-product.html



C O N F I R M E D


----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr."
To:
Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2009 9:25 PM
Subject: [BSE-L] re-FOIA REQUEST ON FEED RECALL PRODUCT contaminated with prohibited material Recall # V-258-2009 and Recall # V-256-2009

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2009/11/re-foia-request-on-feed-recall-product.html



Thursday, November 12, 2009

BSE FEED RECALL Misbranding of product by partial label removal to hide original source of materials 2009

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2009/11/bse-feed-recall-misbranding-of-product.html



CVM Annual Report Fiscal Year 2008: October 1, 2007-September 30, 2008

PUTTING LIPSTICK ON A PIG AND TAKING HER TO A DANCE...TSS

BSE Feed Rule Enforcement: A Decade of Success OFF TO A FAST START

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2008/06/texas-firm-recalls-cattle-heads-that.html



Sunday, January 17, 2010

BSE USA feed inspection violations 01/01/2009 to 01/17/2010 FDA BSE/Ruminant Feed Inspections Firms Inventory Report

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2010/01/bse-usa-feed-inspection-violations.html



A band aid approach, to something that needs a tourniquet, like irradiation, and or ammonia, or whatever, same thing, your masking the problem, and in the end, will make it worse, the industry will become more complacent. see below, you can run just the numbers I picked up over the years. i'm talking 100s and 100s of tonnage of mad cow feed. I even remember the token purina mad cow feed mill in Gonzales Texas back in 2001. where the FDA spouted out that ;


''FDA has determined that each animal could have consumed, at most and in total, five-and-one-half grams - approximately a quarter ounce -- of prohibited material. These animals weigh approximately 600 pounds.''

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2001/new00752.html



you can take that with how ever many grains of salt you wish, but i read that as saying, it was only 5 1/2 grams, and the old cow ways 600 pounds, so know way that even if the feed was tainted, there was not enough to cause disease. the fda, usda et al, knew at that exact moment when they wrote that statement, they knew then that the 5 1/2 grams was enough to kill a small herd of cows. it was old science. but again, they chose to deceive. THIS WAS 2001, and it's now 2009, and they still are choosing to deceive, and the new administration appears willing to continue the USA mad cow charade. NOW, since the charade at the purina mill in 2001, i am going to list a few figures of suspect, banned mad cow feed that went out into commerce, even in 2008, 2007, 2006, back a few years, and you can compare, what enormous amounts of banned suspect mad cow feed and other products continue to go out. when you consider, and they knew all along, that .005 grams is lethal, my God, how much of this poison was consumed?


10,000,000+ LBS. of PROHIBITED BANNED MAD COW FEED I.E. MBM IN COMMERCE USA 2007

Date: March 21, 2007 at 2:27 pm PST REASON Blood meal used to make cattle feed was recalled because it was cross-contaminated with prohibited bovine meat and bone meal that had been manufactured on common equipment and labeling did not bear cautionary BSE statement.

VOLUME OF PRODUCT IN COMMERCE 42,090 lbs. DISTRIBUTION WI

REASON Products manufactured from bulk feed containing blood meal that was cross contaminated with prohibited meat and bone meal and the labeling did not bear cautionary BSE statement.

VOLUME OF PRODUCT IN COMMERCE 9,997,976 lbs. DISTRIBUTION ID and NV

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR MARCH 21, 2007

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/enforce/2007/ENF00996.html



Subject: MAD COW FEED RECALL USA SEPT 6, 2006 1961.72 TONS IN COMMERCE AL, TN, AND WV Date: September 6, 2006 at 7:58 am PST

snip...SEE ALL THAT I FOUND HERE ;


http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2009/03/millions-and-millions-of-pounds-of-mad.html





WE know now, and we knew decades ago, that 5.5 grams of suspect feed in TEXAS was enough to kill 100 cows.





P04.27

Experimental BSE Infection of Non-human Primates: Efficacy of the Oral Route

Holznagel, E1; Yutzy, B1; Deslys, J-P2; Lasmézas, C2; Pocchiari, M3; Ingrosso, L3; Bierke, P4; Schulz-Schaeffer, W5; Motzkus, D6; Hunsmann, G6; Löwer, J1 1Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Germany; 2Commissariat à l´Energie Atomique, France; 3Instituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy; 4Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease control, Sweden; 5Georg August University, Germany; 6German Primate Center, Germany

Background:

In 2001, a study was initiated in primates to assess the risk for humans to contract BSE through contaminated food. For this purpose, BSE brain was titrated in cynomolgus monkeys.

Aims:

The primary objective is the determination of the minimal infectious dose (MID50) for oral exposure to BSE in a simian model, and, by in doing this, to assess the risk for humans. Secondly, we aimed at examining the course of the disease to identify possible biomarkers.

Methods:

Groups with six monkeys each were orally dosed with lowering amounts of BSE brain: 16g, 5g, 0.5g, 0.05g, and 0.005g. In a second titration study, animals were intracerebrally (i.c.) dosed (50, 5, 0.5, 0.05, and 0.005 mg).

Results:

In an ongoing study, a considerable number of high-dosed macaques already developed simian vCJD upon oral or intracerebral exposure or are at the onset of the clinical phase. However, there are differences in the clinical course between orally and intracerebrally infected animals that may influence the detection of biomarkers.

Conclusions:

Simian vCJD can be easily triggered in cynomolgus monkeys on the oral route using less than 5 g BSE brain homogenate. The difference in the incubation period between 5 g oral and 5 mg i.c. is only 1 year (5 years versus 4 years). However, there are rapid progressors among orally dosed monkeys that develop simian v CJD as fast as intracerebrally inoculated animals.

The work referenced was performed in partial fulfillment of the study "BSE in primates" supported by the EU (QLK1-2002-01096).


http://www.prion2007.com/pdf/Prion%20Book%20of%20Abstracts.pdf




look at the table and you'll see that as little as 1 mg (or 0.001 gm) caused 7% (1 of 14) of the cows to come down with BSE;


Risk of oral infection with bovine spongiform encephalopathy agent in primates

Corinne Ida Lasmézas, Emmanuel Comoy, Stephen Hawkins, Christian Herzog, Franck Mouthon, Timm Konold, Frédéric Auvré, Evelyne Correia, Nathalie Lescoutra-Etchegaray, Nicole Salès, Gerald Wells, Paul Brown, Jean-Philippe Deslys Summary The uncertain extent of human exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)--which can lead to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD)--is compounded by incomplete knowledge about the efficiency of oral infection and the magnitude of any bovine-to-human biological barrier to transmission. We therefore investigated oral transmission of BSE to non-human primates. We gave two macaques a 5 g oral dose of brain homogenate from a BSE-infected cow. One macaque developed vCJD-like neurological disease 60 months after exposure, whereas the other remained free of disease at 76 months. On the basis of these findings and data from other studies, we made a preliminary estimate of the food exposure risk for man, which provides additional assurance that existing public health measures can prevent transmission of BSE to man.

snip...

BSE bovine brain inoculum

100 g 10 g 5 g 1 g 100 mg 10 mg 1 mg 0·1 mg 0·01 mg

Primate (oral route)* 1/2 (50%)

Cattle (oral route)* 10/10 (100%) 7/9 (78%) 7/10 (70%) 3/15 (20%) 1/15 (7%) 1/15 (7%)

RIII mice (ic ip route)* 17/18 (94%) 15/17 (88%) 1/14 (7%)

PrPres biochemical detection

The comparison is made on the basis of calibration of the bovine inoculum used in our study with primates against a bovine brain inoculum with a similar PrPres concentration that was inoculated into mice and cattle.8 *Data are number of animals positive/number of animals surviving at the time of clinical onset of disease in the first positive animal (%). The accuracy of bioassays is generally judged to be about plus or minus 1 log. ic ip=intracerebral and intraperitoneal.

Table 1: Comparison of transmission rates in primates and cattle infected orally with similar BSE brain inocula

Published online January 27, 2005

http://www.thelancet.com/journal/journal.isa




Calves were challenged by mouth with homogenised brain from confirmed cases of BSE. Some received 300g (3 doses of 100g), some 100g, 10g or 1g. They were then left to develop BSE, but were not subjected to the normal stresses that they might have encountered in a dairy herd. Animals in all four groups developed BSE. There has been a considerable spread of incubation period in some of the groups, but it appears as if those in the 1 and 10g challenge groups most closely fit the picture of incubation periods seen in the epidemic. Experiments in progress indicate that oral infection can occur in some animals with doses as low as 0.01g and 0.001g. .........

http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/bse/science-research/pathog.html#dose




It is clear that the designing scientists must also have shared Mr Bradley’s surprise at the results because all the dose

levels right down to 1 gram triggered infection.

http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk/files/ws/s145d.pdf



2

6. It also appears to me that Mr Bradley’s answer (that it would take less than say 100 grams) was probably given with the benefit of hindsight; particularly if one considers that later in the same answer Mr Bradley expresses his surprise that it could take as little of 1 gram of brain to cause BSE by the oral route within the same species. This information did not become available until the "attack rate" experiment had been completed in 1995/96. This was a titration experiment designed to ascertain the infective dose. A range of dosages was used to ensure that the actual result was within both a lower and an upper limit within the study and the designing scientists would not have expected all the dose levels to trigger infection. The dose ranges chosen by the most informed scientists at that time ranged from 1 gram to three times one hundred grams. It is clear that the designing scientists must have also shared Mr Bradley’s surprise at the results because all the

dose levels right down to 1 gram triggered infection.


http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk/files/ws/s147f.pdf




Re: BSE .1 GRAM LETHAL NEW STUDY SAYS via W.H.O. Dr Maura Ricketts

[BBC radio 4 FARM news]


http://www.maddeer.org/audio/BBC4farmingtoday2_1_03.ram



http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/03/slides/3923s1_OPH.htm



2) Infectious dose:

To cattle: 1 gram of infected brain material (by oral ingestion)


http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/sci/bio/bseesbe.shtml




Tuesday, January 19, 2010

CVM's OR Develops New PCR-Based Method for Testing Animal Feed


http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2010/01/cvms-or-develops-new-pcr-based-method.html



NOW that we have established that this infamous part of the USA BSE MAD COW TRIPLE FIRE WALL was a farce, let's look further into the historical myth of no mad cows in the USA (well, they estimate at 1 in a million slip by into the food system), but i dispute that by many more. The BSE surveillance program was/is terribly flawed as well.


bottom line, and i say this with full confidence, with the present and past surveillance of BSE/TSE in the USA, and the continued feed violations, in the TONS, no one will ever know the true extent of any strain of mad cow disease in the USA. you don't have to just take my word on it, read the facts. blunder, after blunder, after blunder. they have all been posted here, i would be glad to go over any and or all of them one by one for any that doubts me. i can sum it all up real quick, Canada is looking to find, and the USA has never, EVER, done that. it's been just the opposite for the USA. don't believe me, or the facts, here is what Dr. Paul Brown of the cdc/nih et al ;


PAUL BROWN COMMENT TO ME ON THIS ISSUE

Tuesday, September 12, 2006 11:10 AM

"Actually, Terry, I have been critical of the USDA handling of the mad cow issue for some years, and with Linda Detwiler and others sent lengthy detailed critiques and recommendations to both the USDA and the Canadian Food Agency."

PAUL BROWN CDC ET AL COMMENT TO THE MEDIA ON THIS ISSUE ;

"Everything they did on the Texas cow makes everything USDA did before 2005 suspect," Brown said. ...snip...end


http://www.upi.com/



http://usdameatexport.blogspot.com/2009/09/japans-new-leaders-seen-tougher-on-us.html



http://prionunitusaupdate2008.blogspot.com/2009/04/national-prion-disease-pathology.html



Statement on Texas cow with central nervous system symptoms

Main Category: Public Health Article

Date: 05 May 2004 - 0:00 PDT

The Food and Drug Administration learned that a cow with central nervous system symptoms had been killed and shipped to a processor for rendering into animal protein for use in animal feed.

FDA, which is responsible for the safety of animal feed, immediately began an investigation. On Friday and throughout the weekend, FDA investigators inspected the slaughterhouse, the rendering facility, the farm where the animal came from, and the processor that initially received the cow from the slaughterhouse.

FDA's investigation showed that the animal in question had already been rendered into "meat and bone meal" (a type of protein animal feed). Over the weekend FDA was able to track down all the implicated material. That material is being held by the firm, which is cooperating fully with FDA.

Cattle with central nervous system symptoms are of particular interest because cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, also known as "mad cow disease," can exhibit such symptoms. In this case, there is no way now to test for BSE. But even if the cow had BSE, FDA's animal feed rule would prohibit the feeding of its rendered protein to other ruminant animals (e.g., cows, goats, sheep, bison).

FDA is sending a letter to the firm summarizing its findings and informing the firm that FDA will not object to use of this material in swine feed only. If it is not used in swine feed, this material will be destroyed. Pigs have been shown not to be susceptible to BSE. If the firm agrees to use the material for swine feed only, FDA will track the material all the way through the supply chain from the processor to the farm to ensure that the feed is properly monitored and used only as feed for pigs.

To protect the U.S. against BSE, FDA works to keep certain mammalian protein out of animal feed for cattle and other ruminant animals. FDA established its animal feed rule in 1997 after the BSE epidemic in the U.K. showed that the disease spreads by feeding infected ruminant protein to cattle.

Under the current regulation, the material from this Texas cow is not allowed in feed for cattle or other ruminant animals. FDA's action specifying that the material go only into swine feed means also that it will not be fed to poultry.

FDA is committed to protecting the U.S. from BSE and collaborates closely with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on all BSE issues. The animal feed rule provides crucial protection against the spread of BSE, but it is only one of several such firewalls. FDA will soon be improving the animal feed rule, to make this strong system even stronger.

Source: FDA http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2004/NEW01061.html



http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/NewsEvents/FDAVeterinarianNewsletter/ucm092863.htm



Monday, October 19, 2009

Atypical BSE, BSE, and other human and animal TSE in North America Update October 19, 2009

http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2009/10/atypical-bse-bse-and-other-human-and.html




That Texas mad cow (not that first one documented that was cover-up for good, the stumbling and stagering one that went straight to the render, and did not pass go, not that one), but the second one that sat on the shelf for 8 months before finally an act of Congress it took to confirm and many scientist and other fine citizens to get Congress, to finally make them test that damn cow, and yes, it was finally CONFIRMED. that cow sat on the shelf for 8 months, simply so BSE MRR policy, the legal trading of all strains of mad cow disease could be shoved down the throat of every Country. We are not doing what the U.K. did when they poisoned the globe with mad cow disease, a disease in humans that is 100% FATAL, once clinical. North America is home to more documented TSE in livestock and animals running the wild than any other country I know, and we have been rendering them up for a long, long time, and feeding them to humans and livestock for human and animal food. c-BSE, h-BSE, l-BSE have all been documented in North America in cattle, they may even be in sheep and goats, dogs or cats. scrapie (all the many typical strains), and the atypical Nor-98 scrapie strain have been documented in the USA. TWO strains of CWD in deer and elk i.e. now the Wisconsin strain. Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy as well has been documented. and we have atypical TSE in humans in the USA. ... a bit of history on this topic of concern ;




""These 9,200 cases were different because brain tissue samples were preserved with formalin, which makes them suitable for only one type of test--immunohistochemistry, or IHC."


THIS WAS DONE FOR A REASON!


THE IHC test has been proven to be the LEAST LIKELY to detect BSE/TSE in the bovine, and these were probably from the most high risk cattle pool, the ones the USDA et al, SHOULD have been testing. ...TSS

USDA 2003 BSE ROUNDTABLE

http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/2009/04/bse-mad-cow-testing-usa-2009-figures.html



Subject: Re: BSE 'INCONCLUSIVE' COW fromTEXAS ???

Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:12:15 -0600

From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr."

To: Carla Everett

References: <[log in to unmask]><[log in to unmask] us>

Greetings Carla, still hear a rumor;

Texas single beef cow not born in Canada no beef entered the food chain?

and i see the TEXAS department of animal health is ramping up for something, but they forgot a url for update?

I HAVE NO ACTUAL CONFIRMATION YET...

can you confirm??? terry


============================================================


-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: BSE 'INCONCLUSIVE' COW from TEXAS ???

Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:38:21 -0600

From: Carla Everett

To: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr."References: <[log in to unmask]>

The USDA has made a statement, and we are referring all callers to the USDA web site. We have no information about the animal being in Texas.

Carla

At 09:44 AM 11/19/2004, you wrote:

Greetings Carla,

i am getting unsubstantiated claims of this BSE 'inconclusive' cow is from

TEXAS. can you comment on this either way please?

thank you,

Terry S. Singeltary Sr.


======================================


-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: BSE 'INCONCLUSIVE' COW from TEXAS ???

Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:33:20 -0600

From: Carla Everett

To: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr."References: <[log in to unmask]><[log in to unmask] us><[log in to unmask]> <[log in to unmask]us> <[log in to unmask]>

our computer department was working on a place holder we could post USDA's announcement of any results. There are no results to be announced tonight by NVSL, so we are back in a waiting mode and will post the USDA announcement when we hear something.

At 06:05 PM 11/22/2004,

you wrote:

why was the announcement on your TAHC site removed?

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy:

November 22: Press Release title here

star image More BSE information

terry

Carla Everett wrote:

no confirmation on the U.S.'inconclusive test...

no confirmation on location of animal.

END...TSS


-------- Original Message --------


Subject: Re: US CHOICE OF MAD COW TEST QUESTIONED Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 00:53:39 +0100 From: Moser Markus Reply-To: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy To: BSE-L@uni-karlsruhe.de

######## Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy #########

Regarding your question about Canada's BSE-test choice for their official BSE surveillance, I can confirm that they chose the Prionics-Check Western rapid test. Regards Markus

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: US CHOICE OF MAD COW TEST QUESTIONED Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 01:11:04 +0100 From: Roland Heynkes Reply-To: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy To: mhtml:%7B33B38F65-8D2E-434D-8F9B-8BDCD77D3066%7Dmid://00000553/!x-usc:mailto:BSE-L@uni-karlsruhe.de

######## Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy #########

Dear Terry,

odd that the USDA et al approves two US-OWNED tests that are _known_ to give false positives, when they know other rapid TSE test are much more reliable.

the BioRad-test seems to be the most sensitive rapid BSE test and it is clear that you "get" false positive results when you try to confirm its results with a less sensitive method like immune histochemistry. Poorly trained technicians of course may produce some false positives with the BioRad-test, but immune histochemistry produces many false negatives especially in the hands of not very experienced people. Generally the false negative and not the much fewer false positive results are the problem of all actually available BSE tests.

It is therefore not so easy to say, if the BioRad-test produced a false positive or if the confirming test produced a false negative result and which of them is more reliable. I for sure would not eat the meat of a cow which was seemingly false positive tested with the BioRad-test.

IT's like they purposely do not want to find any TSE in the USA bovine, so they pick the worst test available.

The BioRad-test is definitively not the worst test available (have a look on the EU results) and when a government does not want to get positive results, it uses immune histochemistry instead.

The USDA own experts think BioRad is not suitable for supposedly BSE/TSE free and low incidence areas, so why did they choose this test and or the IDEXX, which i dont think has even been submitted to the EU for evaluation and has no commercial experiance to my knowledge.

Are you sure that USDA has experts for BSE testing?

You could almost get the feeling they are deliberately skipping over Prionics for the least supperior TSE rapid test. I believe the Canadians finally did choose prionics. maybe paul or marcus might comment?

The Prionics western blot test is also a good rapid test which of course does not produce false positive results. In addition this test allows to see new variants of BSE, which would not be seen with the BioRad. But at least in Europe its positive results become confirmed by the OIE Western blot exactly as the BioRad results. Because of this control step the BioRad test cannot produce significantly more problems.

seems if North America is going to be a consolidated BEEF trading market amongst themselves and expect to export there tainted products everywhere, they could at least come up with the same TSE rapid Test. how can one use a less reliable test and the other use a more reliable test, and it all be the same? i know there is a word Dehaven used, but it slips my mind now, (consolidated markets) that's not it, but you get the just of my thoughts, i think;-)...TSS

Not the minor differences between the rapid tests are the problem, but the much to low testing numbers and the prefered IHC-testing in the USA. In Germany we test every month as many as the USA is going to test per year (mostly with BioRad) - and we have only 13 million cattle.

kind regards

Roland

########### http://mailhost.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/warc/bse-l.html ############


-------- Original Message --------


Subject: Re: US CHOICE OF MAD COW TEST QUESTIONED Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 02:51:09 +0100 From: Moser Markus Reply-To: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy To: BSE-L@uni-karlsruhe.de

######## Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy #########

Dear Roland

Immunohistochemistry, correctly executed, is the gold standard, together with the OIE Western blotting method. It allows detection of infection even in cases where prion aggregates can only be detected in few individual cells. It is certainly not less sensitive than either Bio-Rad or Prionics. In fact, the abundant data on all three methods indicate equal diagnostic sensitivity (if sampling is done appropriate: note that immunohistochemistry has to be conducted on different tissue samples, since the tissue has to be formalin fixed). In case a BSE case obtained with a rapid test cannot be confirmed in a first approach with one of the gold standard methods, the second method will be used. I agree, that the sensitivity of immunohistochemistry can be negatively influenced e.g. by only looking at a limited number of slides or by not carefully examining the slides for prion aggregates. However, if a rapid test is not confirmed by immunohistochemistry due to a sloppy analysis, it will still show up in the OIE Western blot. Nevertheless, it is of course possible, that a true positive result cannot be confirmed e.g. if only the tissue sample used for the initial testing contained prion aggregates, which is theoretically possible, since the aggregates are not evenly distributed in the tissue. This is why it is not formally possible to disproof with 100% certainty an initial positive diagnosis (and you are right: it's certainly wise to rather not eat any suspicious animals). Nevertheless, false positives cannot in general be attributed to faulty confirmatory tests, but to the fact that the ELISA method simply produces a certain rate of false positives, which is why we offer rapid BSE tests on both platforms, the ELISA and the Western technology. And we make it clear to our customers, that when choosing the Prionics-Check LIA (the ELISA based test) coping with occasional false positive results will be inevitable. The LIA is therefore mostly used in European countries, with well established levels of BSE, while the Prionics-Check Western is also used in BSE-free countries (where a maximum positive predictive value is important to support the conclusion of low frequency or absence of BSE, which would otherwise be difficult for the reason you indicated and I mentioned above, i.e. due to the reason that it is hard to formally disprove an initial diagnosis with absolute certainty).

Regards, Markus


-------- Original Message --------

-------- Original Message --------



Subject: USA BIO-RADs INCONCLUSIVEs
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 15:37:28 -0600
From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr." To: [log in to unmask]

Hello Susan and Bio-Rad,

Happy Holidays!

I wish to ask a question about Bio-Rad and USDA BSE/TSE testing and there inconclusive. IS the Bio-Rad test for BSE/TSE that complicated, or is there most likely some human error we are seeing here?

HOW can Japan have 2 positive cows with No clinical signs WB+, IHC-, HP- , BUT in the USA, these cows are considered 'negative'?

IS there more politics working here than science in the USA?

What am I missing?

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: USDA: More mad cow testing will demonstrate beef's safety
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 09:26:19 -0600
From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr." snip...end

Experts doubt USDA's mad cow results

snip...END

WELL, someone did call me from Bio-Rad about this, however it was not Susan Berg. but i had to just about take a blood oath not to reveal there name. IN fact they did not want me to even mention this, but i feel it is much much to important. I have omitted any I.D. of this person, but thought I must document this ;

Bio-Rad, TSS phone conversation 12/28/04

Finally spoke with ;

Bio-Rad Laboratories 2000 Alfred Nobel Drive Hercules, CA 94547 Ph: 510-741-6720 Fax: 510-741-5630 Email: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

at approx. 14:00 hours 12/28/04, I had a very pleasant phone conversation with XXXX XXXXX about the USDA and the inconclusive BSE testing problems they seem to keep having. X was very very cautious as to speak directly about USDA and it's policy of not using WB. X was very concerned as a Bio-Rad official of retaliation of some sort. X would only speak of what other countries do, and that i should take that as an answer. I told X I understood that it was a very loaded question and X agreed several times over and even said a political one.

my question;

Does Bio-Rad believe USDA's final determination of False positive, without WB, and considering the new atypical TSEs not showing positive with -IHC and -HP ???

ask if i was a reporter. i said no, i was with CJD Watch and that i had lost my mother to hvCJD. X did not want any of this recorded or repeated.

again, very nervous, will not answer directly about USDA for fear of retaliation, but again said X tell me what other countries are doing and finding, and that i should take it from there. "very difficult to answer"

"very political"

"very loaded question"

outside USA and Canada, they use many different confirmatory tech. in house WB, SAF, along with IHC, HP, several times etc. you should see at several talks meetings (TSE) of late Paris Dec 2, that IHC- DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NEGATIVE. again, look what the rest of the world is doing. said something about Dr. Houston stating; any screening assay, always a chance for human error. but with so many errors (i am assuming X meant inconclusive), why are there no investigations, just false positives? said something about ''just look at the sheep that tested IHC- but were positive''. ...

TSS


-------- Original Message --------


Subject: Your questions
Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 15:58:11 -0800
From: To: [log in to unmask]

Hi Terry:

...snip

Let me know your phone number so I can talk to you about the Bio-Rad BSE test. Thank you

Regards

Bio-Rad Laboratories 2000 Alfred Nobel Drive Hercules, CA 94547 Ph: 510-741-6720 Fax: 510-741-5630 Email:


=================================


snip...end...TSS


[Docket No. 03-025IFA] FSIS Prohibition of the Use of Specified Risk Materials for Human Food and Requirement for the Disposition of Non-Ambulatory Disabled Cattle

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/Comments/03-025IFA/03-025IFA-2.pdf




-------- Original Message --------

Subject: RE: Greetings again Professor Aguzzi ... TSS
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 09:19:49 +0100
From: "Adriano Aguzzi" To: "'Terry S. Singeltary Sr.'"

Dear Mr. Singeltary

I sympathize with your wish to have the most sensitive assay implemented. However, the situation is not as simple as one might think. In the case of homogeneously distributed agent, biochemical detection of PrPSc is indeed likely to be more sensitive than immunohistochemistry. In the case of variegated, punctate distribution of the agent, morphological methods may indeed be an asset.

There are also issues of feasibility. In my laboratory, we routinely run phosphotungstic acid precipitation followed by Western blotting. However, this is an extraordinarily cumbersome procedure. The sensitivity is increased vastly, but the amount of work needed is also amazing. There is no way I could see our own procedure implemented for mass screening of millions of cows - unless one would draft a veritable army of laboratory technicians. For all these reasons, while I see all your points, I feel unable to offer a strong public opinion in favor or against any specific methods. The final decision needs to take into account a variety of complex factors, and that is why I believe that it is best left to a panel of experts rather than to a public discussion.

Best regards Adriano Aguzzi

____________________________

Prof. Adriano Aguzzi (MD PhD hc FRCP FRCPath) Institute of Neuropathology, University Hospital of Zürich Schmelzbergstrasse 12, CH-8091 Zürich, Switzerland Tel. ++41-1-255 2107 Tel. (direct line): 2869 Fax: ++41-1-255 4402, cellular: +41-79-320 1516

http://www.unizh.ch/pathol/neuropathologie/



-----Original Message-----

From: Terry S. Singeltary Sr. [mailto:flounder@wt.net]
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 20:18 To: adriano@pathol.unizh.ch
Subject: Greetings again Professor Aguzzi ... TSS


Greetings again Professor Aguzzi,

A kind greetings from Texas. I hope you do not mind, but I must ask you several questions that will put you in the hot seat. Someone with credibility must come forward, such as yourself and speak out about the fact of the non scientific approach that USDA et al has take after the first diagnosis of BSE in the USA. This being, the refusal to use Western Blot on any suspicious or inconclusive BSE/TSE test. IHC is like a brain biopsy on trying to diagnose a CJD case. IF you take the sample from a part of the brain that is not that tainted, you will not get a reading. WB is much more sensitive, especially now with the Phospohtugstic acid precipitation step. IF Prusiners CDI was validated, who knows, that might even be more sensitive. Bottom line, we need you to come forward and state publicly ''the facts'' about USDA et al decision not to use WB on not only questionable samples, but on ALL samples. would you be willing to comment on this, to me or someone from the media (under the understanding it will be for the public)? I have several questions for you??? This is very very important in terms of human health (i.e. that nov. pos. pos. incl. neg cow).

P.S. there is one other top TSE scientist that has come forward and said what the USDA et al did with that cow was ''not logical''. (this will not be published for another 3 or 4 weeks). ONE other TOP TSE scientist saying the same thing would be much better for the public to hear and understand. anyway, does not hurt to ask, and i hope you come through here for us. I know this is a very loaded question, but times a wasting, and human health is at risk here...

thank you, with kindest regards,

I am sincerely,

Terry S. Singeltary Sr.

CJD WATCH

http://www.fortunecity.com/healthclub/cpr/349/part1cjd.htm



CJD Watch message board

http://disc.yourwebapps.com/Indices/236650.html



Q&A Dr. Jean-Philippe Deslys

snip...

Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 11:53:47 -0500
From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr."
Reply-To: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy
To: BSE-L@LISTS.UNI-KARLSRUHE.DE


##################### Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy #####################


Q&A Dr. Jean-Philippe Deslys

1. What is the standard regime for testing of suspect animals in the EU?

The regime is an initial screening by a high-output test, the Bio-Rad test. If a result raises suspicion, a confirmatory test is conducted with the Western blot test.

2. How long has this been the case?

It s a fairly recent development. Only recently has the Western blot test become sensitive enough, with the addition of phospohtungstic acid precipitation step. The Bio-Rad test (which Deslys helped develop) is extremely sensitive, and the standard Western blot is extremely reliable with high-signal test results. However, it had to be made more sensitive for low-signal (samples with low density of malformed prions) samples. It has been made more sensitive.

Reproducibility is the problem with the IHC test. It is not standardized; depending on the lab and its protocols, or even on the technician involved in the test, one can get conflicting results.

3. Is there a way to measure the three tests in sensitivity, accuracy and objectivity?

Historically, yes. The IHC was the gold standard at one point, but we have shifted to the Western blot. It requires less work, it is more sensitive and its results are reproducible. IHC relies on localization. If you have a weak signal case, you may get lucky and test a spot with a high concentration of prions. But the opposite it true too; you can miss an infection by testing a sample with low concentrations. Western blot is much better for low signal situations.

4. The USDA in 2003 used the Western blot to confirm the BSE case in Washington state, and it sent samples to the U.K. for independent testing. In the case this November, which it announced was negative, it instead used the IHC test and did not send samples to the U.K. Is this good science?

It s not logical. If you have two consecutive questionable screenings, you do another test. I can only advise, it s management s duty at USDA to make the decisions. But when you have a discrepancy between the rapid test and the IHC, it is only logical to confirm it with another test.

5. We are hearing now about a new strain of BSE, atypical BSE or aBSE. Or BaSE. We have heard that IHC, the so-called gold standard, cannot detect the variant. Is this true?

Yes. There have been a few cases, one in Italy, one in Belgium, one here in France. It seems to only affect very old animals. The distribution in the brain is very different than we see with BSE, it looks very different. The IHC test will come back negative.

This his a very recent phenomenon. I have no opinion on its virulence. We do not know where it comes from. It could be a version of sporadic infection. Western blot caught them, but we would not even know it existed if we weren t running systematic testing in the EU.

BSE was around for a long time before we caught it and by then, it was everywhere. It had become highly infectious. It probably amplified due to low-temperature rendering. The disease was recycled through the food chain, and was given time to amplify. By the time it was identified, even good cooking couldn t eliminate it.

I can t stress enough that systematic testing is necessary. Withdrawing all positives from the food chain is the best way to break the cycle.

What can happen with testing of only cattle that are clearly at risk is that several can remain undetected. Canada has tested about 30,000 head of cattle and has three positives. That would indicate that there are probably undiscovered cases. And what happens then is that the disease is allowed to amplify. You have to maintain testing.

When people choose to protect their economic interests over public health, it can have a boomerang effect. It happened all through Europe. They always deny; it s not OUR problem, it is our neighbor s problem. And then a single case is discovered and the public reacts. The economic results are devastating. It would be better to just assume BSE is present and use systematic testing as protection. That way, the public is reassured that it is not entering the food supply.

By systematic testing, I mean doing as we do in the EU, which is to test every animal over 30 months of age when it is slaughtered. In Europe, three times as many cases of BSE have been caught by systematic testing as by clinical testing (of clearly sick animals). In 2004, eight clinical cases were discovered, 29 were discovered at rendering plants, and 17 at slaughter. We should be using these tests as a weapon to protect the public and to give them assurance that the food supply is being protected.

6. USDA s list of specified risk materials excludes some products, like blood and bone meal, that are banned in the EU and UK. Is our feed supply safe?

With SRMs, where do you stop? Tests have found prions in meat, nerves travel through meat, and so on. The main infectivity is in the brain and the spinal cord. A blood and bone meal ban in animal feed is not really necessary, because except in cases of highly infective animals, it is unlikely that they are dangerous in themselves. If you combine systematic testing and targeted SRM removal, the brain and the spinal column in cattle over 30 months, you can have a compromise that is both safer and less costly than expanded feed bans.

Certainly, you can stop the spread of BSE with a total ban on offal. But it has to be a total ban. It can t be given to sheep or swine or poultry. It would be very expensive and virtually impossible to accomplish. You can have farmers using the wrong feed or transportation errors.

Systematic testing makes far more sense. I think of it as a thermometer. It not only allows us to catch the disease, it also allows us to monitor its progress. We can watch the levels of infectivity and if they start going up instead of down, we can take measures.

To an extent, our environment is contaminated. About 10 percent of wild animals test positive for TSEs. If you recycle these agents, they can evolve and get more dangerous. This is probably what happened with BSE. It wasn t very dangerous until it evolved to the disease we know today.

People complain that testing is very expensive. It is much more expensive to kill and test whole herds.

7. In your opinion, is infected feed the sole method of transmission of BSE, apart from the very rare maternal transmission?

Feed is the main problem. However, we are seeing some other possibilities, including through fat and greases. Calves are fed milk extracts, with the cream removed. To make it nutritious, they are using fat and grease from cattle.

(FOLLOW QUESTION: Would that allow BSE to develop into an infective level in cattle younger than 30 months, assuming they might be getting infected at a younger age?)

8. You were involved in a study that tested two primates who were fed infected brain tissue. One eventually died of TSE; the other survived. The press reported that the main finding was that it would take something on the order of 1.5 kilograms of infected matter to create an infection, but that seems to be an oversimplification. Could you explain it further?

The findings suggest that as little as five grams is enough to infect. The 1.5 kilo figure is the amount of infected tissue that would have to be ingested from an animal that would be below the threshold of infection, and would test negative. In other words, even though a younger animal may be developing the disease, it would take a considerable amount of tissue to transmit the disease.

An animal could be just below the testing level, and not be particularly dangerous. But that is why you have to keep testing. Once it reaches the threshold, it can become highly infective.

9. BSE is a pretty horrifying disease, but overall, it has killed less than 200 humans, and only a handful in recent years. Listeria, by comparison, kills thousands every year. Overall, how do you rate the threat from BSE?

The overall risk is not particularly high. Over two million infected animals went into the food chain in Europe, 400,000 of them before the SRMs, the brains and spinal column, were removed from the carcass. Less than 200 died, and less than 4,000 are at risk of developing the disease. What we know now is that one particle is not going to kill you. There has to be condensation of the prions to be truly dangerous.

This is not a sterile world. But the danger is that now that the crisis appears to be over, attention will turn elsewhere and that will allow the disease to amplify again. Just as we stopped paying attention to AIDS when medication seemed to control it, then were surprised when a new and more infectious and aggressive strain appeared, we could be surprised by a more serious strain of BSE. That is why I support systematic testing for the long term. The object is to keep levels of BSE low, and to recognize the danger if it suddenly pops back up. ...END

TSS


######### https://listserv.kaliv.uni-karlsruhe.de/warc/bse-l.html ##########



http://lists.iatp.org/listarchive/archive.cfm?id=126139




Texas even had a 'secret' test that showed that mad cow positive; experimental IHC test results, because the test was not a validated procedure, and because the two approved IHC tests came back negative, the results were not considered to be of regulatory significance and therefore were not reported beyond the laboratory. . A Western blot test conducted the week of June 5, 2005, returned positive for BSE.


http://www.usda.gov/documents/vs_bse_ihctestvar.pdf



48 hr BSE confirmation turnaround took 7+ months to confirm this case, so the BSE MRR policy could be put into place. ...TSS



-------- Original Message --------

Subject: re-USDA's surveillance plan for BSE aka mad cow disease

Date: Mon, 02 May 2005 16:59:07 -0500

From: "Terry S. Singeltary Sr."

To: mhtml:%7B33B38F65-8D2E-434D-8F9B-8BDCD77D3066%7Dmid://00000265/!x-usc:mailto:paffairs@oig.hhs.gov, mhtml:%7B33B38F65-8D2E-434D-8F9B-8BDCD77D3066%7Dmid://00000265/!x-usc:mailto:HHSTips@oig.hhs.gov, mhtml:%7B33B38F65-8D2E-434D-8F9B-8BDCD77D3066%7Dmid://00000265/!x-usc:mailto:contactOIG@hhsc.state.tx.us


Greetings Honorable Paul Feeney, Keith Arnold, and William Busbyet al at OIG, ...............

snip...

There will be several more emails of my research to follow. I respectfully request a full inquiry into the cover-up of TSEs in the United States of America over the past 30 years. I would be happy to testify...

Thank you, I am sincerely, Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Bacliff, Texas USA 77518 xxx xxx xxxx

snip... see full text ;


http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2008/10/idiopathic-brainstem-neuronal.html




From: TSS Subject: Re: Feds skipped key mad cow disease test in 2004 case USDA changes its protocols after animal initially had been cleared Date: June 17, 2005 at 10:35 am PST

In Reply to: Re: Feds skipped key mad cow disease test in 2004 case USDA changes its protocols after animal initially had been cleared posted by TSS on June 17, 2005 at 5:03 am:

##################### Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy #####################

I would like to add to the first paragraph of Adriano Aguzzis comments. We have seen cases in Europe, where a positive result obtained with our Western blot rapid test(Prionics-Check WESTERN)could not be confirmed with IHC, but with the OIE-Western blot procedure, and we have also seen cases where the result could be confirmed by IHC but not by OIE-Western blot. As Adrino Aguzzi pointed out both IHC and OIE-Western have their limitations, but when combined and when performed well they pick up BSE reliably. In case of doubt, i.e. if a rapid test comes out consistently positive but an initial attempt of confirmation with IHC (or OIE-Western) fails, we recommend to routinely do a second test with the respective alternative method. This is the procedure most national reference centers, which are responsible for final confirmation of BSE cases, are following.

Regards Markus Moser Prionics


-----Original Message-----

From: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [mailto:BSE-L@aegee.org] On Behalf Of Terry S. Singeltary Sr. Sent: Freitag, 17. Juni 2005 14:07 To: BSE-L@aegee.org Subject: Re: [CJDVoice] Feds skipped key mad cow disease test in 2004 case USDA changes its protocols after animal initially had been cleared

##################### Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy #####################


http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/2007/10/bse-base-mad-cow-testing-texas-usa-and.html



http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/



THEY SKIPPED THIS KEY TEST, AND HAD THAT MAD COW ON THE SHELF FOR 8 MONTHS FOR A REASON; and that was to get the BSE MRR policy in full force FIRST ;

Docket APHIS-2006-0026 Docket Title Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy; Animal Identification and Importation of Commodities Docket Type Rulemaking Document APHIS-2006-0026-0001 Document Title Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy; Minimal-Risk Regions, Identification of Ruminants and Processing and Importation of Commodities Public Submission APHIS-2006-0026-0012 Public Submission Title Comment from Terry S Singletary


http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064801e47e1



Docket APHIS-2006-0041 Docket Title Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy; Minimal-Risk Regions; Importation of Live Bovines and Products Derived from Bovines Commodities Docket Type Rulemaking Document APHIS-2006-0041-0001 Document Title Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy; Minimal-Risk Regions; Importation of Live Bovines and Products Derived From Bovines Public Submission APHIS-2006-0041-0028 Public Submission Title Comment from Terry S Singletary

Comment 2006-2007 USA AND OIE POISONING GLOBE WITH BSE MRR POLICY

THE USA is in a most unique situation, one of unknown circumstances with human and animal TSE. THE USA has the most documented TSE in different species to date, with substrains growing in those species (BSE/BASE in cattle and CWD in deer and elk, there is evidence here with different strains), and we know that sheep scrapie has over 20 strains of the typical scrapie with atypical scrapie documented and also BSE is very likely to have passed to sheep. all of which have been rendered and fed back to animals for human and animal consumption, a frightening scenario. WE do not know the outcome, and to play with human life around the globe with the very likely TSE tainted products from the USA, in my opinion is like playing Russian roulette, of long duration, with potential long and enduring consequences, of which once done, cannot be undone. These are the facts as I have come to know through daily and extensive research of TSE over 9 years, since 12/14/97. I do not pretend to have all the answers, but i do know to continue to believe in the ukbsenvcjd only theory of transmission to humans of only this one strain from only this one TSE from only this one part of the globe, will only lead to further failures, and needless exposure to humans from all strains of TSE, and possibly many more needless deaths from TSE via a multitude of proven routes and sources via many studies with primates and rodents and other species.

MY personal belief, since you ask, is that not only the Canadian border, but the USA border, and the Mexican border should be sealed up tighter than a drum for exporting there TSE tainted products, until a validated, 100% sensitive test is available, and all animals for human and animal consumption are tested. all we are doing is the exact same thing the UK did with there mad cow poisoning when they exported it all over the globe, all the while knowing what they were doing. this BSE MRR policy is nothing more than a legal tool to do just exactly what the UK did, thanks to the OIE and GW, it's legal now. and they executed Saddam for poisoning ???

go figure. ...


http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064801f8151



Docket APHIS-2006-0041 Docket Title Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy; Minimal-Risk Regions; Importation of Live Bovines and Products Derived from Bovines Commodities Docket Type Rulemaking Document APHIS-2006-0041-0001 Document Title Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy; Minimal-Risk Regions; Importation of Live Bovines and Products Derived From Bovines Public Submission APHIS-2006-0041-0028.1 Public Submission Title Attachment to Singletary comment

January 28, 2007

Greetings APHIS,

I would kindly like to submit the following to ;

BSE; MRR; IMPORTATION OF LIVE BOVINES AND PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM BOVINES [Docket No. APHIS-2006-0041] RIN 0579-AC01


http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/ContentViewer?objectId=09000064801f8152&disposition=attachment&contentType=msw8



IN A NUT SHELL ;

(Adopted by the International Committee of the OIE on 23 May 2006)

11. Information published by the OIE is derived from appropriate declarations made by the official Veterinary Services of Member Countries. The OIE is not responsible for inaccurate publication of country disease status based on inaccurate information or changes in epidemiological status or other significant events that were not promptly reported to the Central Bureau,


http://www.oie.int/eng/Session2007/RF2006.pdf




Sunday, September 6, 2009

MAD COW USA 1997 SECRET VIDEO

SEE ANOTHER VIDEO THAT SHOWED IN CANADA, BUT NOT USA, ABOUT ANOTHER USA TSE COVER-UP MORE BRAINS NOT TESTED PROPERLY, key brain parts missing. ...


http://madcowusda.blogspot.com/2009/09/mad-cow-usa-1997-video.html




SEE THIS DAMNING VIDEO AT BOTTOM OF ;

Monday, July 27, 2009

U.S.A. HIDING MAD COW DISEASE VICTIMS AS SPORADIC CJD ?


http://creutzfeldt-jakob-disease.blogspot.com/2009/07/usa-hiding-mad-cow-disease-victims-as.html




DAMNING TESTIMONY FROM STANLEY PRUSINER THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER ON PRIONS SPEAKING ABOUT ANN VENEMAN

''nobody has ever ask''

''they dont want our comment''

''they don't want to know, the don't care''

''i have tried repeatedly''

''level of absolute ignorance''

''Entire policy was driven...heard from mr. laycraft, so now, after time has passed, it's ok for Canada, cattle under 30 month, to the USA, THAT'S ALL THAT MATTERED!

PRUSINER ASKED : IF FROM YOUR TESTIMONY, A DEMONSTRATED THREAT TO PUBLIC HEATH ?

''yes, i think prions are bad to eat, and you can die from them''



http://maddeer.org/video/embedded/prusinerclip.html



Tuesday, December 15, 2009


NAIS, COOL, FROM FARM TO FORK, MAD COW DISEASE


snip...


Appendix II

Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 40 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

On December 26, 2003, USDA began checking the primary and secondary customers of the recalling company that it was aware of, although the entire product distribution chain was unknown. During the checks, USDA tried to determine if the product was further distributed, and it used verification checks to acquire distribution lists for secondary and tertiary customers of the recalling company.

Verification checks continued until February 25, 2004. Three USDA districts conducted these verification checks. The Boulder District coordinated the checks and assigned checks to the Minneapolis District Office for customers in Montana and to the Alameda District Office for customers in California. USDA required that 100 percent of the primary checks, 50 percent of the secondary checks, and 20 percent of the tertiary checks be conducted on-site. According to USDA, more than 50 percent of the secondary checks were actually conducted on-site. FDA officials helped conduct verification checks. According to USDA, the recall took a long time to complete because USDA contacted each customer at least twice. USDA first contacted each customer to conduct the check and again to verify product disposition.

On February 25, 2004, the Boulder District concluded that the recall was conducted in an effective manner. On March 1, 2004, USDA s Recall Management Division recommended that the agency terminate the recall, and USDA sent a letter to the recalling company to document that USDA considered the recall to be complete.

Recall Was Complicated by Inaccurate Distribution Lists and Mixing of Potentially Contaminated and Noncontaminated Beef USDA used distribution lists and shipping records to piece together where the recalled product was distributed. According to USDA, one of the recalling company s three primary customers was slow in providing its customer list. USDA could not begin verification activities for that primary customer without this list. Furthermore, some customers of the recalling company provided USDA with imprecise lists that did not specify which customers received the recalled product. As a consequence, USDA could not quickly determine the scope of product distribution and had to take time conducting extra research using shipping invoices to determine which specific customers received the product.

Even when USDA determined the amount and location of beef, the agency still had trouble tracking the beef in certain types of establishments, such as grocery store distributors. USDA could not easily track the individual stores where those distributors sent the beef because of product mixing Appendix II Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE Page 41 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs and the distributors record-keeping practices. Generally, distributors purchase beef from multiple sources, mix it in their inventory, and lose track of the source of the beef they send to the stores that they supply. To deal with this problem, USDA first identified the dates when recalled beef was shipped to the distributors and then asked for a list of the stores that were shipped any beef after those dates. Consequently, some stores were included in the recall that may never have received recalled beef. The recall was also complicated by repeated mixing of recalled beef with nonrecalled beef, thereby increasing the amount of meat involved in the recall. The recalling company slaughtered 23 cows on December 9, 2003, and shipped those and 20 other carcasses to a primary customer on December 10, 2003. The recalling company s carcasses were tagged to identify the slaughter date and the individual cow. The primary customer removed the identification tags and mixed the 23 recalled carcasses with the 20 nonrecalled carcasses. Because the carcasses could not be distinguished, the recall included all 43 carcasses at the primary customer.

After one round of processing at the primary customer, the meat from the carcasses was shipped to two other processing facilities. Both establishments further mixed the recalled meat from the 43 carcasses with meat from other sources. In all, the mixing of beef from 1 BSE-positive cow resulted in over 500 customers receiving potentially contaminated beef. Imprecise distribution lists and the mixing of recalled beef combined to complicate USDA s identification of where the product went. Specifically, on December 23, 2003, USDA s initial press release stated that the recalling company was located in Washington State. Three days later, on December 26, 2003, USDA announced that the recalled beef was distributed within Washington and Oregon. On December 27, 2003, USDA determined that one of the primary customers of the recalling firm distributed beef to facilities in California and Nevada, in addition to Washington and Oregon, for a total of four states. On December 28, 2003, USDA announced that some of the secondary customers of the recalling company may also have distributed the product to Alaska, Montana, Hawaii, Idaho, and Guam, for a total of eight states and one territory.

On January 6, 2004, over 2 weeks from recall initiation, USDA determined that the beef went to only six states Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana and that no beef went to Alaska, Hawaii, or Guam. To reach that conclusion, USDA used the distribution lists, shipping records, and sales invoices that it received from companies to piece together exactly where the recalled beef may have been sent. The lists Appendix II Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 42 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

showed that 713 customers may have received the recalled beef; 6 of those may have received beef from more than one source. USDA determined that 176 customers on the lists did not actually receive recalled beef, including the customers in Guam and Hawaii. USDA s review also indicated that recalled beef was probably not shipped to Alaska or Utah, and USDA checked 2 retailers in Alaska and 3 retailers in Utah to confirm that was the case. In total, USDA conducted verification checks on 537 of the 713 customers on the lists. USDA s initial checks identified an additional 45 customers that may have received the recalled beef that were not included on the distribution lists, for a total of 582 verification checks. Figure 4 summarizes USDA s verification efforts during the recall.

Appendix II

Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 43 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

Figure 4: USDA s Recall Verification Checks by Location and Customer Type for Meat Associated with the Animal Infected with BSE

Note: USDA checked 15 primary, 40 secondary, and 526 tertiary customers plus the recalling company, for a total of 582 verification checks.

USDA s press release stated that the recall involved 10,410 pounds of beef products, and the USDA recall coordinator for this recall told us that downstream processors mixed the recalled beef with nonrecalled beef, for a total of more than 38,000 pounds of beef that was distributed at the secondary customer level. According to USDA officials involved with the

D = Distributor R = Retailer SF = Storage facility P = Processor

Primary customers (15 total) Recalling slaughterhouse (WA) 1 R (OR) 1 P (WA) 1 P (OR) 1 P (OR) 11 R (WA) Secondary customers (40 total) Tertiary customers (526 total) 1 R (OR) 1 SF (OR) 3 D (OR) 3 D (WA) 2 dual D (OR) 59 R (OR) 79 R (WA) 5 R (ID) 3 R (UT) 4 R (MT) 161 R (WA) 8 R (ID) 15 R (OR) 2 R (AK) 31 R (OR) 8 R (WA) 10 R (NV) 5 R (ID) 10 R (CA) 2 R (CA) 17 R (OR) 5 R (WA) 1 D (NV) 11 R (CA) 85 R (NV) 3 D (OR) 11 R (OR) 2 D (CA) 26 R (CA) 2 R (WA)

( ) Acronyms in parentheses are postal abbreviations for each state. Source: GAO analysis of USDA verification check documents.

Appendix II

Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 44 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

recall, the precise amount of meat that was sold at the retail level is unknown because retailers at the tertiary level further mixed nonrecalled meat with potentially contaminated meat. USDA told us that more than 64,000 pounds of beef was ultimately returned or destroyed by customers, and that, because of the mixing, it was not able to determine how much of the original 10,410 pounds of recalled beef was contained in the 64,000 pounds that were recovered.

FDA s Role in USDA s Recall

Parts of the BSE-infected animal slaughtered on December 9, 2003, were not used for food, but they were sent to renderers to be separated into raw materials, such as proteins and blood. Rendered materials are used for many purposes, including cosmetics and vaccines. FDA has jurisdiction over renderers.

When USDA learned of the BSE-infected cow on December 23, 2003, the agency immediately notified FDA. On December 24, 2003, FDA sent an inspection team to a renderer that handled materials from the BSE cow. Inspectors confirmed that the parts of the slaughtered BSE positive cow were on the premises. FDA later identified a second company that potentially rendered material from the slaughtered BSE cow. Both renderers agreed to voluntarily hold all product processed from the diseased cow and dispose of the product as directed by FDA and local authorities.

On January 7, 2004, 15 containers of potentially contaminated, rendered material (meat and bone meal) were inadvertently loaded on a ship, and on January 8, 2004, the ship left Seattle, Washington, for Asia. The renderer initiated steps to recover the shipped material, so it could be disposed of as directed by FDA and local authorities. The ship carrying the material returned to the United States on February 24, 2004, and the material was disposed of in a landfill on March 2, 2004.

On January 12, 2004, FDA asked both renderers to expand their voluntary holds to rendered materials processed from December 23, 2003, through January 9, 2004, because they may have rendered some recalled meat or trim that was recovered from retail establishments. Both renderers agreed to the expanded product hold. In total, FDA requested that renderers voluntarily hold approximately 2,000 tons of rendered material. FDA confirmed that none of the potentially contaminated, rendered material entered commerce, because FDA accounted for all rendered material. FDA

Appendix II

Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 45 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

reported that no recall was necessary because no product was distributed commercially by the rendering companies.

USDA and FDA Worked Together on the Recall USDA and FDA worked together in two ways. First, both agencies notified each other if their investigations yielded any information about products within the jurisdiction of the other agency. For instance, when conducting the second round of verification checks, USDA tracked the disposition of the product to renderers and landfills and notified FDA when the product went to renderers. Second, FDA officials helped conduct verification checks. FDA conducted 32 of the 582 verification checks (approximately 5 percent) for the USDA recall. Officials from both agencies indicated they regularly interacted and shared information. Table 3 outlines the agencies actions.

Table 3: Detailed Timeline of USDA, FDA, and Company Actions Related to the Discovery of an Animal Infected with BSE

Date USDA recall actions FDA actions Company actions

12/9/03 " USDA samples cow for BSE. " BSE cow is slaughtered.

12/11/03 " Sample is sent to Ames, Iowa, for BSE testing. " Recalling company sends carcasses to primary customer for processing.

12/12/03 " Primary customer sends meat products to two other primary customers for further processing.

12/12 -

12/23/03 " Other primary customers distribute recalled product to secondary customers. " Secondary customers distribute recalled product to tertiary customers.

12/23/03 " BSE test results are presumptively positive. " Recall meeting. " Initiation of voluntary recall. " Press release. " FDA notified of BSE test results. " FDA dispatches investigation teams.

12/24/03 " FDA inspects Renderer 1. " FDA determines some rendered material from Renderer 1 is intended for Indonesia. " FDA discovers some material may have been sent to Renderer 2. " Renderer 1 agrees to hold remaining rendered material. " Recalling company contacts primary customers. " Primary customers contact their customers.

Appendix II

Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 46 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

12/25/03 " USDA receives confirmation from reference lab in England that cow in question is BSE positive.

12/26/03 " Verification checks begin " USDA announces recalled product in Washington State and Oregon. " FDA begins process of comparing records to ensure all products from Renderers 1 and 2 are accounted for. " Renderer 2 agrees to hold all material that may have been derived from BSE cow. None of the rendered material has been distributed.

12/27/03 " USDA announces recalled product was distributed in Washington State, Oregon, California, and Nevada. " FDA issues statement confirming that the rendering plants that processed all of the nonedible material from the BSE cow have placed a voluntary hold on all of the potentially infectious product, none of which had left the control of the companies and entered commercial distribution.

12/28/03 " USDA announces recalled product was distributed in Washington State, Oregon, California, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam.

12/29/03 " Food Safety and Inspection Service determines that the recalled meat products were distributed to 42 locations, with 80 percent of the products distributed to stores in Oregon and Washington State.

12/31/03 " FDA offers assistance to USDA to complete recall verification checks.

1/6/04 " USDA determines recalled product was only distributed in Washington State, Oregon, California, Nevada, Montana, and Idaho.

1/8/04 " FDA is notified by the renderer that some of the rendered material on hold from Renderer 1 was inadvertently shipped to Asia. Renderer 1 commits to isolate and return the rendered material. " Rendering company notifies FDA of shipment of product on hold.

(Continued From Previous Page)

Date USDA recall actions FDA actions Company actions

Appendix II

Federal Actions Associated with the Discovery of an Animal in the United States Infected with BSE

Page 47 GAO-05-51 Food Recall Programs

Source: GAO analysis of USDA and FDA information.

1/12/04 " FDA advises Renderers 1 and 2 that they may have rendered meat or trim subject to recall from retail stores. " FDA requests Renderers 1 and 2 to place all rendered material from December 23 to January 9 on hold. " FDA determines neither renderer had shipped rendered material manufactured after December 23, 2003.

2/9/04 " All rendered material was disposed of in landfill, except material shipped to Asia.

2/24/04 " Ship carrying rendered material returns to U.S. port.

2/25/04 " Verification checks complete. " USDA Boulder District Office concludes recall is effective.

3/1/04 " Recall is closed.

3/2/04 " FDA observes disposal in landfill of remaining rendered material...

snip...

REPORTS

1. Food Safety: USDA and FDA Need to Better Ensure Prompt and Complete Recalls of Potentially Unsafe Food. GAO-05-51, October 7.tss

http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-51


Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d0551high.pdf


Appendix C. Agents that require specific government approval for scientific investigations within the USA.a

Select agents, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services onlyb High consequence pathogens and agents, U.S. Department of Agriculture onlyc HIgh consequence livestock pathogens and toxins, overlap agents and toxinsd

(NO HUMAN TSE LISTED ???...tss) BSE agent

http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/disease_emergence/AppendixC.pdf


QFC sued over mad cow case

Grocer negligently exposed them to beef, family claims

Friday, March 5, 2004

By LEWIS KAMB SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

An Eastside family who says they ate beef linked to the nation's only known case of mad cow disease yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit against QFC, claiming the grocery store chain negligently exposed them and others to "highly hazardous" meat and did not properly notify them that they had bought it. ...

snip...

full text ;



http://naiscoolyes.blogspot.com/2009/12/nais-cool-from-farm-to-fork-mad-cow.html





WITH an incubation period of over 50 years in some cases, let's pray that no one becomes clinical. once clinical, TSE is 100% fatal. ...TSS





Tuesday, July 14, 2009

U.S. Emergency Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Response Plan Summary and BSE Red Book Date: February 14, 2000 at 8:56 am PST

WHERE did we go wrong $$$



http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/2009/07/us-emergency-bovine-spongiform.html



Sunday, December 28, 2008

MAD COW DISEASE USA DECEMBER 28, 2008 an 8 year review of a failed and flawed policy


http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2008/12/mad-cow-disease-usa-december-28-2008-8.html



Monday, May 11, 2009

Rare BSE mutation raises concerns over risks to public health


http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2009/05/rare-bse-mutation-raises-concerns-over.html



2009 UPDATE ON ALABAMA AND TEXAS MAD COWS 2005 and 2006


http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2006/08/bse-atypical-texas-and-alabama-update.html



Thursday, January 07, 2010

Scrapie and Nor-98 Scrapie November 2009 Monthly Report Fiscal Year 2010 and FISCAL YEAR 2008


http://scrapie-usa.blogspot.com/2010/01/scrapie-and-nor-98-scrapie-november.html



Thursday, January 14, 2010

SAMPLE COLLECTION FROM CATTLE UNDER THE BOVINE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY (BSE) ONGOING SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM FSIS NOTICE 05-10 1/12/10


http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2010/01/sample-collection-from-cattle-under.html



UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CREEKSTONE FARMS PREMIUM BEEF, L.L.C., Plaintiff, v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, et al., Defendants. ::::::::::: Civil Action No. 06-0544 (JR)

snip...

JAMES ROBERTSON United States District Judge

The government’s additional argument, that private testing 14 somehow would interfere with USDA’s surveillance program, is unexplained and therefore rejected. Of greater concern is the possibility that private testing 15 could produce a false positive result, which might trigger unnecessary public alarm. USDA has asserted this possibility as a reason to avoid private testing. Indeed, the Bio-Rad kits that Creekstone proposes using are used throughout the world, including as part of the USDA’s own surveillance testing. - 18 -


https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2006cv0544-22



Friday, August 29, 2008

CREEKSTONE VS USDA COURT OF APPEALS, BUSH SAYS, NO WAY, NO HOW


http://madcowtesting.blogspot.com/2008/08/creekstone-vs-usda-court-of-appeals.html



Subject: USDA VS CREEKSTONE BSE/BASE/TSE TESTING Civil Action No. 06-0544 Date: September 4, 2007 at 9:47 am PST

USDA

AUGUST 21, 2007

Mr. Terry S. Singeltary Sr. Post Office Box 42 Bacliff, Texas 77518-0042

Dear Mr. Singeltary:

This is in response to your e-mails to Secretary Johanns concerning private testing for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia involving Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, LLC. We regret the delay in responding.

As you may know, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) filed an appeal of the U.S. District Court's order on June 15,2007. While we recognize your views, we cannot comment on any matters at issue in the pending litigation. However, we can assure you that USDA remains committed to ensuring effective, scientifically sound testing for significant animal diseases and to protecting U.S. animal and public health from BSE.

We understand that the effects of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) are devastating, and we are sorry to learn of the loss of your mother. Some of us at USDA have also lost family members to CJD and other degenerative neurological diseases. Although it is rare, the classical form of CJD does occur sporadically in the United States and worldwide. However, no cases of vCJD-the form of BSE that can be transmitted from animals to humans-are known to have originated in the United States. Because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is responsible for addressing concerns about CJD and other human health issues, you may wish to contact that agency directly. The address is CDC, HHS, 200 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, D.C. 20201.

We also wish to clarify that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 1997 ban on ruminant-to-ruminant feeding is the primary measure in place to protect animal health with regard to BSE. Protection of public health from BSE is achieved by the removal from the human food supply of the animal tissues-often referred to as specified risk

Mr. Terry S. Singeltary, Sr. Page 2

materials-in which the BSE infective agent would be found if present, and by other controls imposed at the slaughter level. These additional controls include the Food Safety and Inspection Services' ban on nonambulatory cattle from the human food chain; a prohibition on air-injection stunning of slaughter cattle; the requirement of additional process controls in advanced meat recovery systems; and, a prohibition on the use of mechanically separated beef in human food. Additionally, protection from BSE and other diseases is achieved by conducting antemortem inspections of slaughter cattle and excluding any animals that display clinical signs of neurological disease or other abnormalities.

We appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns. To learn more about USDA's BSE surveillance and safeguarding activities, please visit our Web site at www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse/index.shtml.

Sincerely,

Jere L. Dick Associate Deputy Administrator National Animal Health Policy and Programs Veterinary Services


============================END=========================



>>>We also wish to clarify that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 1997 ban on ruminant-to-ruminant feeding is the primary measure in place to protect animal health with regard to BSE.<<< ?



DISTRIBUTION Ohio. QUANTITY 12.46 tons were distributed. REASON Product contained protein derived from mammalian tissue and according to regulation must bear the statement "Do not feed to cattle or other ruminants" on the label. This regulation is designed to prevent the establishment and amplification of BSE through feed. This statement does not appear on the label. http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/ENF00623.html



REASON The products contain protein material derived from bovine mammalian tissues; however, the bags are not labeled with the required BSE cautionary statement.

VOLUME OF PRODUCT IN COMMERCE 14,000 to 15,000 gallons.

DISTRIBUTION Nationwide.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00719.html



FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Ongoing.

DISTRIBUTION: IL QUANTITY: 169 tons of ruminant feeds and 27 tons of non-ruminant feeds

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR October 10, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00714.html



FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Complete

DISTRIBUTION: KY, GA, NC, FL WV QUANTITY: 568 tons

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR August 29, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00708.html



FIRM INITIATED RECALL: ONGOING

DISTRIBUTION: KY, VA, MD, WV, NC, SC, GA, AL, DE, FL, MS and TN

QUANTITY: 962 tons

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR August 1, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00704.html



Customers were asked to complete and return a recall response form that was included with each letter documenting the numbers of bags and varieties of products for which the customers affixed the BSE sticker-labels. The firm expanded their recall on May 10, 2001, and mailed recall letters with BSE labels and response forms to the affected customers.

FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Ongoing

DISTRIBUTION: KY, GA, NC, TN, VA QUANTITY: 933 tons

_______________________________


RECALL NUMBER, PRODUCT AND CODE: V-377-1, Renner’s brand 45% meat and bone meal, packed in 100 pound bags. REASON: The product contained protein material derived from bovine mammalian tissues; however, the bags are not labeled with the required BSE cautionary statement. MANUFACTURER/RECALLING FIRM: F. W. Renner & Sons, Inc., Canton, Ohio RECALLED BY: The recalling firm contacted the consignees by telephone on June 19, 2001. FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Complete DISTRIBUTION: OH QUANTITY: 2,500 lbs

_______________________________


FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Complete

DISTRIBUTION: PA QUANTITY: None. The product turn over is two weeks or less.

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR July 25, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00703.html



REASON: The cattle feed (for ruminant animals)may contain protein derived from mammalian tissues. MANUFACTURER/RECALLING FIRM: Champaign Landmark, Inc., Urbana, Ohio RECALLED BY: On 5/24/2001, the firm's Feed Manager personally visited the sole farmer/consignee, at which time, he hand-delivered the firm's recall letter.

FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Complete

DISTRIBUTION: Ohio QUANTITY: 2,000 LBS

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR July 11, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00701.html



REASON: The product is not labeled with the required caution statement “Do not feed to Cattle or other Ruminants.” MANUFACTURER/RECALLING FIRM: International Proteins Corporations (IPC), St. Paul MN RECALLED BY: Recalling Firm, Revised labeling by letter on April 17, 2001.

FIRM INITIATED RECALL: Ongoing.

DISTRIBUTION: MN, IL, MO, AR and TX

QUANTITY 3,094 tons

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR July 04, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00700.html


DISTRIBUTION: MN, IL, MO, AK, TX. QUANTITY: 3,094 tons.

REASON: The product is not labeled with the required caution statement "Do Not Feed to Cattle or Other Ruminants."

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR June 20, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00698.html



DISTRIBUTION: Al, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, IA, KY, ME, MD, MA, MO, MN, MS, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, RI, TN, VA, WV, and WI.

QUANTITY: 2,790 tons of ruminant feed products and 14,000 tons of non-ruminant feed products.

REASON: The animal feed products may contain protein derived from mammalian tissues.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00696.html



http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00694.html



PRODUCT: Custom Vaquero Supplement for Cattle identified by Purina Mills. Recall #V-027- 1. CODE: 7V87. MANUFACTURER: Purina Mills, Inc., Gonzalez, Texas. RECALLED BY: Manufacturer, contacted the one consignee on January 17, 2001.

DISTRIBUTION: Texas. QUANTITY: 44,355 pounds.

REASON: The ruminant feed product contains meat and bone meal (MBM) of bovine origin.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00692.html



DISTRIBUTION: California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, Colorado, Georgia, and Florida.

QUANTITY: 27,300 pounds of Catfish Food and 86,100 pounds of Freshwater Fish. REASON: The products, which contain meat by-products, were shipped without the required BSE warning label.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00691.html



DISTRIBUTION: Ohio.

QUANTITY: Approximately 350 pounds of hog feed (7/50 pound bags).

REASON: The animal feed contains protein derived from mammalian tissues and must bear the statement "Do not feed to cattle or other ruminants" on the label to prevent the establishment and amplification of BSE through feed. This statement does not appear on the label.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00690.html



DISTRIBUTION: Ohio.

QUANTITY: Approximately 900 pounds of feed (9/100 pound bags).

REASON: The animal feed contains product derived from mammalian tissues and must bear the statement “Do not feed to cattle or other ruminants” on the label to prevent the establishment and amplification of BSE through feed. This statement does not appear on the label.

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR APRIL 11, 2001.

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ENFORCE/2001/ENF00688.html



i'm tired here of listing all these mad cow feed in commerce recalls, that was just of what I had documented for 2001. You can see 2002 and up to 2006 here ;

http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2010/01/cvms-or-develops-new-pcr-based-method.html



and this whopper here in 2007 ;


In 2007, in one weekly enforcement report, the fda recalled 10,000,000+ pounds of BANNED MAD COW FEED, 'in commerce', and i can tell you that most of it was fed out ;

10,000,000+ LBS. of PROHIBITED BANNED MAD COW FEED I.E. BLOOD LACED MBM IN COMMERCE USA 2007

Date: March 21, 2007 at 2:27 pm PST

RECALLS AND FIELD CORRECTIONS: VETERINARY MEDICINES -- CLASS II

___________________________________


PRODUCT

Bulk cattle feed made with recalled Darling's 85% Blood Meal, Flash Dried, Recall # V-024-2007

CODE

Cattle feed delivered between 01/12/2007 and 01/26/2007

RECALLING FIRM/MANUFACTURER

Pfeiffer, Arno, Inc, Greenbush, WI. by conversation on February 5, 2007.

Firm initiated recall is ongoing.

REASON

Blood meal used to make cattle feed was recalled because it was cross- contaminated with prohibited bovine meat and bone meal that had been manufactured on common equipment and labeling did not bear cautionary BSE statement.

VOLUME OF PRODUCT IN COMMERCE

42,090 lbs.

DISTRIBUTION

WI

___________________________________


PRODUCT

Custom dairy premix products: MNM ALL PURPOSE Pellet, HILLSIDE/CDL Prot- Buffer Meal, LEE, M.-CLOSE UP PX Pellet, HIGH DESERT/ GHC LACT Meal, TATARKA, M CUST PROT Meal, SUNRIDGE/CDL PROTEIN Blend, LOURENZO, K PVM DAIRY Meal, DOUBLE B DAIRY/GHC LAC Mineral, WEST PIONT/GHC CLOSEUP Mineral, WEST POINT/GHC LACT Meal, JENKS, J/COMPASS PROTEIN Meal, COPPINI - 8# SPECIAL DAIRY Mix, GULICK, L-LACT Meal (Bulk), TRIPLE J - PROTEIN/LACTATION, ROCK CREEK/GHC MILK Mineral, BETTENCOURT/GHC S.SIDE MK-MN, BETTENCOURT #1/GHC MILK MINR, V&C DAIRY/GHC LACT Meal, VEENSTRA, F/GHC LACT Meal, SMUTNY, A- BYPASS ML W/SMARTA, Recall # V-025-2007

CODE

The firm does not utilize a code - only shipping documentation with commodity and weights identified.

RECALLING FIRM/MANUFACTURER

Rangen, Inc, Buhl, ID, by letters on February 13 and 14, 2007. Firm initiated recall is complete.

REASON

Products manufactured from bulk feed containing blood meal that was cross contaminated with prohibited meat and bone meal and the labeling did not bear cautionary BSE statement.

VOLUME OF PRODUCT IN COMMERCE

9,997,976 lbs.

DISTRIBUTION

ID and NV

END OF ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR MARCH 21, 2007


http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/enforce/2007/ENF00996.html



NEW URL


http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/EnforcementReports/2007/ucm120446.htm



see from 2006 and up here ;

FEDERAL OVERSIGHT OF FOOD SAFETY


http://fdafailedus.blogspot.com/



http://madcowspontaneousnot.blogspot.com/



MY point of the above listing was simple, it was a refute of what was said here by ;

Jere L. Dick Associate Deputy Administrator National Animal Health Policy and Programs Veterinary Services

We also wish to clarify that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 1997 ban on ruminant-to-ruminant feeding is the primary measure in place to protect animal health with regard to BSE. Protection of public health from BSE is achieved by the removal from the human food supply of the animal tissues-often referred to as specified risk

Mr. Terry S. Singeltary, Sr. Page 2

Jere L. Dick Associate Deputy Administrator National Animal Health Policy and Programs Veterinary Services

===


This person was either terribly misinformed, or simply does not have a clue. ...TSS

CJD USA RISING, with UNKNOWN PHENOTYPE ;

5 Includes 41 cases in which the diagnosis is pending, and 17 inconclusive cases; 6 Includes 46 cases with type determination pending in which the diagnosis of vCJD has been excluded.

http://www.cjdsurveillance.com/pdf/case-table.pdf



Saturday, January 2, 2010

Human Prion Diseases in the United States January 1, 2010 ***FINAL***

http://prionunitusaupdate2008.blogspot.com/2010/01/human-prion-diseases-in-united-states.html



my comments to PLosone here ;


http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F04ce2b24-613d-46e6-9802-4131e2bfa6fd&root=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F04ce2b24-613d-46e6-9802-4131e2bfa6fd




Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Bacliff, Texas USA 77518