The Secretary has called for a team of international experts to review our investigation and make national recommendations. They will conduct this review following the completion of the epidemiological investigation of the single BSE-positive cow in the United States. The team will be similar to the group that conducted such a review in Canada, and will be led by Dr. Ulrich Kihm, the former Chief Veterinary Officer of Switzerland, who now owns a consulting company, Safe Food Solutions, Inc. In addition to Dr. Kihm, USDA has tentative commitments from: William Hueston, Director of the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety, University of Minnesota; Dagmar Heim, chief of BSE control program in the Swiss Federal Veterinary Office; and Stuart MacDiarmid, a BSE expert with the government of New Zealand. We are very much looking forward to getting that groups' review of the operations we are currently conducting as well as recommendations about how we can continue to build upon an already-robust program to prevent BSE from taking hold in the United States.
On December 30, 2003, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced additional safeguards to bolster the U.S. protection systems against Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, and further protect public health. The policies will further strengthen protections against BSE by removing certain animals and specified risk material and tissues from the human food chain; requiring additional process controls for establishments using advanced meat recovery (AMR); holding meat from cattle that have been targeted for BSE surveillance testing until the test has confirmed negative; and prohibiting the air-injection stunning of cattle. The Secretary also announced that USDA will begin immediate implementation of a verifiable system of national animal identification. The development of such a system has been underway for more than a year and a half to achieve uniformity, consistency and efficiency across this national system.
On the morning of December 25, the BSE world reference lab in Weybridge, England, confirmed USDA's December 23 preliminary diagnosis of BSE in a single nonambulatory dairy cow that had been slaughtered on December 9 at Vern's Moses Lake Meats in Washington State.
At the time of USDA's preliminary diagnosis on December 23, USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a Class II recall for the facility's entire day's production. The recall was classified as Class II due to the extremely low likelihood that the beef being recalled contains the infectious agent that causes BSE.
The herd the affected animal came from is under a State quarantine in Washington. While USDA has not made any decisions on the dispositions of this herd, any cattle that die on the farm will be tested for BSE.
USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has determined the following additional information through its traceback investigation:
- The Canadian health certificate, dated August 28, 2001, lists 82 eartag numbers from cattle that were part of a herd dispersal in Alberta, Canada. One of those eartag numbers matches that number on the BSE-positive cow. As mentioned earlier, USDA and Canada are working together to confirm the identification of this cow through DNA testing. Nine of the 82 are part of the index herd in Washington State. Currently, USDA has information that suggests that only 81 of the 82 animals crossed the border into the United States. However, since USDA cannot rule out the possibility that all the animals came into the United States, USDA is looking at import/export records, as well as on-farm records, for all remaining 72 cattle.
- The positive cow had three calves while in the United States. The first was stillborn. The second, a yearling heifer, is under a hold order on the index farm. The third, a bull calf is in a group of calves at another location, which is also under a hold order. The hold orders are not because BSE is contagious or is in any way spread directly from animal to animal. They are to ensure that USDA maintains the location of all animals of consequence or otherwise relevant to the investigation.
- Downer Animals. Effectively immediately, USDA will ban all downer cattle from the human food chain. USDA will continue its BSE surveillance program.
- Product Holding. USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors will no longer mark cattle tested under the BSE surveillance program as "inspected and passed" until confirmation is received that the animals have, in fact, tested negative for BSE. This new policy will be in the form of an interpretive rule that will be published in the Federal Register.
- Specified Risk Material. Effective immediately upon publication in the Federal Register, USDA will enhance its regulations by declaring as specified risk materials skull, brain, trigeminal ganglia, eyes, vertebral column, spinal cord and dorsal root ganglia of cattle over 30 months of age and the small intestine of cattle of all ages, thus prohibiting their use in the human food supply. Tonsils from all cattle are already considered inedible and therefore do not enter the food supply. These enhancements are consistent with the actions taken by Canada after the discovery of BSE in May.
- Advanced Meat Recovery. AMR is an industrial technology that removes muscle tissue from the bone of beef carcasses under high pressure without incorporating bone material when operated properly. AMR product can be labeled as "meat." FSIS has previously had regulations in place that prohibit spinal cord from being included in products labeled as "meat." The regulation, effective upon publication in the Federal Register, expands that prohibition to include dorsal root ganglia, clusters of nerve cells connected to the spinal cord along the vertebrae column, in addition to spinal cord tissue. Like spinal cord, the dorsal root ganglia may also contain BSE infectivity if the animal is infected. In addition, because the vertebral column and skull in cattle 30 months and older will be considered inedible, it cannot be used for AMR.
- Air-Injection Stunning. To ensure that portions of the brain are not dislocated into the tissues of the carcass as a consequence of humanely stunning cattle during the slaughter process, FSIS is issuing a regulation to ban the practice of air-injection stunning.
- Mechanically Separated Meat. USDA will prohibit use of mechanically separated meat in human food.
