January 7, 2004 USA TODAY editorial

As nations from Great Britain to Canada have struggled with mad cow disease and its punishing financial consequences since the 1980s, the U.S. government and meat industry rejected tough reforms adopted elsewhere. Their logic: The fact that not one infected cow had surfaced in the U.S. testified to the effectiveness of existing regulations.

Now, of course, that history has changed. The identification of a Washington state Holstein infected with the disease gave lie to the argument that the U.S. had adequate safeguards. A tacit admission came with last week's quick adoption of rules the industry had fought for years. They include banning sick cows and the high-risk parts of older cows from entering the food chain, and creating a national cattle-tracking system. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that an offspring of the infected cow and 450 other calves will be destroyed as a safety precaution.

But in spite of these moves, the industry and government are using the same old arguments to defend decisions that stop short of more comprehensive testing adopted by other countries. USDA and industry officials say the new regulations are more than adequate, even in the face of the severe financial fallout from one infected cow: a nearly 20% drop in cattle prices and bans on U.S. beef by more than two dozen countries.

This time they may be right, but they are making a costly gamble. It's one that other countries facing similar circumstances have decided isn't worth the possible consequences. The new U.S. testing for mad cow disease falls short on two counts:

* Numbers. While the USDA says it will double its testing program from 20,000 to 40,000 cows next year, that's only a small fraction of the 37 million slaughtered annually. In Europe, by contrast, all cows older than 30 months sent to slaughter are tested for the disease, which doesn't manifest itself until cattle are 3 to 4 years old. In Japan, every cow sent to slaughter is tested.

* Methods. Europe and Japan use a two-step screening process. An initial quick test identifies suspect cows. Their tissues are then sent to labs for more definitive tests that can take several days. The U.S. skips the quick screening and uses the longer test on a random sample and all cows that look sick.

The government and industry say comprehensive testing is too expensive and unnecessary because mad cow disease is so rare in the U.S, unlike Europe, where more than 200,000 cases have been confirmed since 1986. What's more, they say the risk is more minuscule here because cow parts that could pass on the disease were banned from cattle feed in 1997, after the infected 8-year-old Holstein was born.

Such reasoning ignores loopholes that make the feed ban far from airtight. Calves, for instance, are fed cattle blood as a substitute for milk. Chicken feed that contains beef often makes its way into cattle feed. And enforcement often has been spotty.

Japan didn't resort to similar arguments after it confirmed its first case of mad cow disease in 2001. Instead, it opted to set in place the most stringent tests in the world along with less-porous cattle-feed bans. The tests quickly helped to restore confidence in the safety of Japan's beef, even as the nation has identified eight more cases.

A similar overabundance of caution is the best way to ensure that U.S. beef -- and consumers -- stay safe.