Does "Mad Cow" call for an immediate response? Apparently not.

I was kind of horrified last weekend to read that the US Department of Agriculture wouldn't let a cattle processor - Creekstone Farms - test all of their cattle for mad cow disease (See Uncommon Thought Don't Test Those Cattle 4/12/04 or backup copy here). Now I read in USA Today (4/15/04) that Cattle feed rules unchanged. Despite all the hoopla and "looking busy" that happened with the cow from Washington state that was found to have the disease, the action was mostly for show.

The agency has yet to write or publish new rules. "We're still working on it," says FDA spokesman Brad Stone. "We don't have a set time frame. We hope it will come up very soon."

Apparently the "intelligence community" is not the only one with "systemic problems." The US "food safety" community seems to have similar problems. On reading the article I was immediately reminded of the recent 9-11 Commission hearings with all the claims of the "system" being to blame. I was particularly reminded of Condoleeza Rice's testimony where she claimed that terrorism was a "priority" of the administration; that the problems with in the intelligence departments were structural and systemic and 233 days were too short a time to make the necessary changes (but they were made immediately after September 11, 2001.

I believe that most of us thought that the official discovery of mad cow disease in the US would have been a similar "wake up" call. I guess not. Perhaps similar structural and systemic problems exist at the FDA and DoA. According to FDA spokesperson Brad Stone:

"the purpose of our announcement was to give a strong indication of the fact that this is a practice on its way out. We anticipate that that's a message that was received by the industry."

Well, apparently that is not the message being received by the "industry":

Not so, says Rex Runyan of the American Feed Industry Association. "It's business as usual until they publish those rules. I don't know of any companies that have made any major changes based on rumors or speculation."

Perhaps the message wasn't for the "industry" at all, but for the public. It said "we know your concerns and are responding immediately and approrpriately." The "industry" apparently knows that tactic and figured that any changes were well down the road - if they were there at all.

The article does contain a hint of where the strucutral issues might lie. Not so surprisingly, they seem to reside at the same address as the intelligence community's structural problems - 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.:

"There's significant work being done on these FDA regulations ... at the White House level," says Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The Bush administration is catering to industry concerns."

Read em and weep.

Posted by rowan at April 16, 2004 7:07 AM | TrackBack | [eMail this article!] |