December 27, 2003
PORTLAND, Ore. — Cow parts — including hooves,
bones, fat and innards — are used in everything from
hand cream and antifreeze to poultry feed and gardening
soils.
In the next tangled phase of the mad cow investigation,
federal inspectors are concentrating on byproducts from
the tainted Holstein, which might have gone to a half-dozen
distributors in the Northwest, said Dalton Hobbs (search),
spokesman for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
Now, it's the secondary parts, the raw material for soil,
soaps and candles, that are being recalled.
While some people fear consumers could be infected by
inhaling particles of fertilizer or other products containing
the mutated protein responsible for mad cow disease, a
bigger concern is stopping tainted byproducts from infecting
animal feed, believed to be the main agent for spreading
the disease.
But tracing all of the sick cow's parts to their final
destination, including numerous possible incarnations in
household products, has proved challenging.
"It's like the old Upton Sinclair line — 'We
use everything but the squeal,"' Hobbs said. "We
have nearly 100 percent utilization of the animal. But
when you have so many niche markets, it makes it incredibly
challenging to trace where this one cow may have gone."
Los Angeles-based Baker Commodities, Inc. (search), announced
Friday it has voluntarily withheld 800 tons of cow byproduct
processed in its Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., plants. The
company, like other "renderers," takes what is
left of the cow after it is slaughtered and boils it down
into tallow, used for candles, lubricants and soaps, and
bone meal used in fertilizer and animal feed.
If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (search) determines
that the material is tainted, the company's loss could
total $200,000, said spokesman Ray Kelly.
"It's obviously a tragic thing for the whole beef
industry, but it's definitely a sizable hit for us," he
said.
Darling International, Inc., the nation's largest independent
rendering operation in the U.S., has also been contacted
by the FDA. But officials at their Tacoma and Portland
plants, as well as at their international headquarters
in Irving, Texas, declined to comment on how their operation
has been affected.
"Our first priority was to make sure it didn't go
into the food supply," said Hobbs, reiterating that
meat sent to two Oregon distributors was recalled earlier
in the week.
Companies that use bone meal from cows to create fertilizers
popular with rose growers may find themselves under the
spotlight. At the height of Britain's mad cow epidemic
in the 1990s, three victims of the human form of mad cow
were found to be gardeners.
In 1996, the Royal Horticultural Society of London released
an advisory, cautioning gardeners to wear face masks after
it was reported that the dust from the bone-meal soil could
carry the mutated protein.
But Scientific American editor Philip Yam said there was
no conclusive evidence the gardeners died from inhaling
soil containing the infected cow tissue.
A far greater risk is the cow material — including
roughage and offal — used in animal feed, said Yam,
whose book, "The Pathological Protein," is a
scientific account of the disease.
In 1997, the FDA banned cow feed that included cow byproducts,
after scientists concluded that the feed was the main transmitter
of mad cow disease. The disease, formally known as bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is found in a cow's
nervous system.
Yam points out that while giving cow feed to cows was
outlawed, feeding it to poultry is still legal. Some farmers,
he said, are still in the habit of feeding their cows "chicken
litter" — the remains of the poultry feed, scooped
off the ground, feathers and all.
"It's one of those loopholes," Yam said. "It
sounds good in theory — don't feed cow to cow, feed
the remains to chickens. But in practice things happen."
Critics also speculate that while chickens cannot contract
BSE, they could act as carriers of the disease if they
pick up prions in their feed and are themselves processed
into cattle feed. Consumer advocates have also questioned
whether feed processing plants have all strictly separated
cow feed from other feed produced at the same facilities.
The Food and Drug Administration has said it will probably
write new regulations that could require companies that
slaughter "downer" livestock — animals
that are sick or injured — to dispose of the brain
and spinal cord before mixing animal feed and pet food,
expanding on the 1997 ban.
Robert Assali, who manages Southern Oregon Tallow in Eagle
Point, Ore., said he sees the end of his profession if
the mad cow hype continues.
"We're going to become a mortuary service — just
hauling animals to landfills," Assali said.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/
0,2933,106784,00.html
