Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 23, 2003
By Tim Harper, Washington Bureau

A Bush administration official took dead aim at Canada's surveillance of its cattle stock yesterday as questions mounted here over why it took almost four months to diagnose an Alberta Black Angus with mad cow disease.

Bill Hawks, undersecretary of agriculture in charge of regulatory programs, told a Senate hearing yesterday that surveillance results in the United States take only eight days, and he and another government official said the lag in reporting in Canada was due to a backlog of test results that would not be tolerated in the U.S.

"We do our routine surveillance within eight days of the sample being taken," Hawks said.

"So, it is something that obviously we should be addressing with our counterparts in Canada."

He was responding to questions by a Wisconsin Democrat, Herbert Kohl, who said such a delay would be "intolerable" in the United States.

Another Democratic senator, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, will hold a press conference today to repeat demands that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman investigate the lengthy delay in reporting that the cow, which was slaughtered last Jan. 31, had been stricken with the disease.

Dorgan has suggested that it was either the work of an incompetent Canadian system or the result of a cover-up in Canada.

Hawks also said Washington was considering a quarantine of all Canadian cattle in the United States.

Kohl pushed the government officials to explain how the Canadian diagnosis could have taken four months.

"That kind of backlog would not be tolerated by you here," Kohl told agriculture officials.

"The fact that they have it up there is as intolerable as it would be if it were true here in the United States, because ... 80 per cent of cattle they raise are being exported to us. Whatever problems they have are our problems, isn't that true?"

Elisa Murano, the undersecretary of the department in charge of food safety, agreed with Kohl.

Murano told senators Washington audits Canada's cattle testing programs at least once a year because of the volume of beef imported in this country.

"It's not that their test is any different than ours; it's the same test," Murano said.

"Their backlog caused their delay in having that sample collected in January, and not analyzed until now."

Hawks said isolating Canadian cattle and beef products already in the United States was an option being studied to keep this country free of mad cow disease.

"No decision has been taken at this particular point in time," he told reporters after his Senate testimony.

"There are all kinds of options (including) isolation."

One privately owned company, Swift & Co., based in Colorado, has already separated its Canadian cattle from the rest of its herd.

Yesterday, the agriculture department said there will be no barriers to the slaughter or sale of Canadian beef products that entered the United States before mad cow disease was discovered in Alberta this week.

The USDA said it will permit the use of any Canadian ruminants or ruminant meat shipped across the border before a cow in northwestern Alberta was found infected with the fatal disease.

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