Posted on 01/27/2004 8:03:01 AM PST by erasmus605
January 27, 2004 Rules Issued on Animal Feed and Use of Disabled Cattle By DENISE GRADY and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The Food and Drug Administration imposed new rules yesterday to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, including a ban on feeding cow blood and chicken wastes to cattle. The agency also banned using dead or disabled cows to make products for people like dietary supplements, cosmetics or soups and other foods with traces of meat.
The rules, described by Mark B. McClellan, commissioner of food and drugs, in a telephone news briefing, take effect in a few days, as soon as they are published in The Federal Register, a spokesman for the agency said. The quick start of the rules after their announcement is a departure from the usual slower process.
Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, the parent of the food and drug agency, called the rules "a giant step forward" but said in a telephone interview that even stricter regulations on animal feed might be imposed in the future.
The rules are meant to prevent human exposure to the agent that causes mad cow disease and mirror the steps that the Agriculture Department took last month to protect meat supplies. The two sets of changes are a reaction to the discovery last month that a cow in Washington State had the brain disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Officials theorize that the cow was infected by contaminated feed in Canada, where it was born.
Contaminated feed is widely believed to have started the mad cow epidemic in animals in Britain in the 1980's. Scientists suspect that feed can transmit the disease if it includes bone meal or other material rendered from the carcasses of sick cows, particularly the brain and spinal cord. The United States banned the use of cow parts in cattle feed in the 1990's but let producers feed cow blood to calves as a milk substitute.
Blood can no longer be used, because studies have suggested that it may also be infectious.
Also banned is the use of composted "poultry litter" as a feed ingredient for cows. The litter consists of bedding, spilled feed, feathers and fecal matter swept from the floors of chicken coops. The ingredient that worries health officials is the spilled feed, because chicken feed can legally contain meat and bone meal rendered from beef.
Animals can no longer be fed "plate waste," the agency said, meaning the meat and other scraps that diners leave on their plates in restaurants and that is rendered into the meat and bone meal added to feed. That material interferes with tests for prohibited proteins in the animal feed, the agency said.
Finally, the new rules say equipment that makes feed with meat or bone meal can no longer be used to make cattle feed.
Consumer groups praised the rules on animal feed but said there should be even more restrictions.
Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group in Washington, said: "This is long, long overdue. I wonder whether it's too little too late.
"They've been legally on notice for seven years that they need to close all these loopholes. Everything they're doing, science organizations have requested long ago."
Dr. Michael Hansen, a scientist at the Consumers Union, said, "It's a good step forward, but it's not good enough."
A remaining loophole, Dr. Hansen said, is allowing rendered matter from cows to be fed to pigs and chickens and rendered pigs and chickens to be fed back to cows. In theory, that sequence could bring the disease full circle, back to cows. In Europe, cows cannot be fed any animal matter.
Dr. Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the food and drug agency, said there was no evidence that pigs or chickens could transmit mad cow disease.
Nonetheless, Mr. Thompson said the rules might be changed in the future to stop such practices.
"We're looking at that," he said. "It's reasonable to say it could be changed in the future."
With regard to products meant for people, the new rules say that from now on material from animals that die on the farm or from "downer" cows, which cannot walk, will be banned from use in cosmetics and dietary supplements. The ban will also apply to foods with traces of meat, items that the food and drug agency rather than the Agriculture Department regulates.
Also banned from products for humans will be the tissues most likely to carry the infectious agent like the brain, skull, eyes and spinal cord of animals 30 months or older and the tonsils and part of the small intestine of all cattle. Because a product called mechanically separated meat may carry infectious tissue, it will also be banned.
Dr. Murray M. Lumpkin, principal associate commissioner of the food and drug agency, said he did not expect any products to be recalled. Cosmetics carried little if any risk, Dr. Lumpkin said, but "certain supplements contain as a major constituent cattle neuronal tissue or other parts from cows."
Because those tissues are not allowed in foods, they should not be allowed in supplements, either, he said.
Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com, an independent laboratory that tests dietary supplements to see whether they contain the active ingredients that they claim, said high-risk cow products were most likely to be contained in "glandulars," supplements made from brains, pituitary glands and testicles of cattle and promoted to enhance muscle and bone growth and to prevent Alzheimer's disease or cure other disorders.
He estimated that $50 million to $100 million of "glandulars" were sold annually in the United States.
This stuff makes "pig slop" look like haute cuisine.
I am resolved to raise my own livestock this year, and live off it, entirely. It'll take some convincing to get my wife to agree to it, but I think this article will go a long way towards helping her to go with the program.
Remember, you are what they eat. I have no interest in consuming chickenshit and/or its bovine counterpart, let alone the feedlot equivalent to roadkill.
Bingo. I'm as opposed to insane statist over-regulation of life, but only a madman (or peddler of snake-oil or spoiled meat) could rationally object to stuff like the Pure Food and Drug Act.
If you look at the history, it was puke-city before that law was passed, and sadly, it looks like we're pretty much right back where we started. Time to go back to the original intent of that law: pure food.
Cows are such pigs, they literallly eat just about anything. I have a farmer friend who raises pigs. He gets the local grocery store's throw away food items to feed to his pigs, and they are very healthy. He also has a few head of cattle that he feeds grain, fruits pits, and hay. I must say they are very healthy looking animals, without having to resort to cannibalism.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.