QandO

April 10, 2004

Eat More Chicanery
Posted by Jon Henke

Odd story at WashingtonMonthly (Kevin Drum). He links to this NYTimes story...

The Department of Agriculture refused yesterday to allow a Kansas beef producer to test all of its cattle for mad cow disease, saying such sweeping tests were not scientifically warranted.

The producer, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to use recently approved rapid tests so it could resume selling its fat-marbled black Angus beef to Japan, which banned American beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington State last December tested positive for mad cow. The company has complained that the ban is costing it $40,000 a day and forced it to lay off 50 employees.

Life lesson: when you read something that seems utterly irrational, it's worth a further look. So, I did. From the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy....

The department told Creekstone Farms of Arkansas City, Kan., yesterday that its request for a license to use rapid BSE tests in a private marketing program cannot be granted...

"The test is now licensed for animal health surveillance purposes," Hawks stated. "The use of the test as proposed by Creekstone would have implied a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted."
...
The USDA announced a major expansion of its BSE testing program in mid-March but has rejected calls for testing of all cattle, saying it is not scientifically justified. Hawks' statement today mentioned the plan to increase testing and noted that an international panel of BSE experts concluded that testing of all cattle is unnecessary because the disease doesn't appear in younger animals.

The USDA is simply unwilling to license them to market their meat with misleading scientific claims.

Doesn't sound so ridiculous anymore, does it?

Of course, not everybody checked further before calling shenanigans.

UPDATE: Nosey Online responds with a different take, though I think he's missing the point with this....

So it has nothing to do with certifying all animals are safe. Only that some scientists came to the conclusion that young animals do no need to be tested. That is what Mr. Henke claims is not "scientifically warranted."

Why not test all animals? I'm sure that old cattle aren't the only ones we need to be worried about.

He also calls us "conservatives" - not in a particularly complimentary way -,"idiots", and says we've left out an important part of the story - though, even that part of the story only indicates that the USDA has approved some BSE rapid-testing kits. Not, as was the case with Creekstone, the license to use those rapid-test kits to market beef - including underage cattle - as "safe".

Conservatives? I suppose he hasn't read QandO, or he'd know we're fairly equal opportunity libertarians. However, judge for yourself.

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