12:02 AM CST on Sunday, January 11, 2004

By RENA PEDERSON / The Dallas Morning News

     If you happen to be having liver and onions, I suggest you not read this.

A longtime cattle producer sent me an e-mail the other day suggesting that the problem with mad cow disease is that it isn't a disease. Cows don't "catch" it from each other. They eat it. So the answer isn't to test a million cows to stop the possible spread, he suggested; the answer is to test the feed that might contain recycled gunk from diseased animals.

It seemed a good point, so I started checking around. I learned more than I really wanted to know about the underside of the food chain.

     Dr. Michael Greger, the mad cow coordinator for the Organic Consumers Association, said, yes, you can test feed to see if it contains "ruminant protein" - a polite term for recycled cow brains, bones and offal not fit for the dinner table. The problem, he said, is that we currently can't test the feed for the prions connected to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more commonly known as mad cow disease.

But wasn't there a law passed banning the use of ruminant protein as cattle food?

     Yes again, Dr. Greger said. A law also was passed in 1997 requiring that the ingredients in feed be labeled. The problem is that the laws haven't been enforced stringently.

     As he put it, "You can go in a feed store and buy a bag, and no one asks if you are going to feed it to pigs and chickens or to cattle. If it is the cheapest feed available, some people are still going to feed it to their cattle."

     In Great Britain, he pointed out, when mad cow was discovered in the 1990s, slaughterhouse material was banned as feed but not as fertilizer. Even with the scary headlines about people dying from a human variant of the disease, some dairymen continued to buy the ruminant fertilizer to feed to their cows. So the Brits added a ban on ruminant material even for fertilizer.

     The fertilizer-feed makers then shipped the stuff to Europe, where there soon were BSE cases in every country but Sweden, Dr. Greger said. The ruminant feed also was shipped to developing countries in Africa and to Japan, which now has nine cases of BSE.

     In the United States, he added, it still is legal to use ruminant feed for poultry and pigs. What's troubling about this is that poultry litter often is scraped off the bottom of broiler sheds and used in cattle feed. That means it is possible for the ruminant feed spilled on the cage floor with the litter to find its way into the cow chow.

     Amy Lanou, a Ph.D. nutrition director with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says that if we really want to stop the spread of BSE, we must stop feeding ruminant material to all animals. And she agreed with Dr. Greger that we ought to stop feeding cow blood to calves as a substitute for their mothers' milk. The calves can't suckle milk from their mothers, you see, because the milk is siphoned off to sell in grocery stores. So what's called "spray-dried blood concentrate" often is fed the calves instead.

     That probably is a repugnant image for those who already feel queasy about the notion of making carnivores out of herbivores. Those who favor such practices say you have to dissociate the source and just think of it as protein - and cheap protein at that. In the past, the beef industry has contended that blood feeding was safe. But at least one case now has turned up in Britain of a person contracting the human variant of mad cow from a blood transfusion.

     And then, moving down the food chain, there is the problem of the animal scraps in pet food. Apparently, it isn't uncommon for rendering plants to include processed carcasses of euthanized animals from humane societies as well as road kill and slaughterhouse parts in the recycled material for pet food. The idea of Fluffy the cat or Spot the dog eating other recycled pets and contracting a variant of BSE may be what it finally takes to really mobilize Americans.

In the meantime, there are several common-sense options. There is no need to panic over one confirmed case of BSE in a cow that was contaminated in Canada. But the best way to ensure the economic health of the American beef industry is to reassure consumers here and abroad.

     That might require more regulatory steps, like enforcing the ban on ruminant feed and testing more animals. Estimates are that increasing tests could add anywhere from 3 cents to 20 cents to the cost of a pound of hamburger, but most consumers probably would be glad to swallow it.

     There also is a market solution. More consumers may want to turn to certified "organic" cuts of meat from cows that got fat the old-fashioned way, eating grass and grain. Whereas organic foods used to be considered something of a quaint offshoot of the 1960s, we should remember that all food used to be organic.

     Mad cow may just take us back to the future.

REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS - SEE FOLLOWING NOTE DATED 1/13/2004 FOR THE WRITER OF THE ARTICLE.

you're welcome to pass the column along. i got a call today from someone representing the pet industry that no dogs have ever gotten BSE from pet food, but apparently cats have. that correction aside, you're welcome to it. all the best, Rena