Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 22, 2003
Renata D'Aliesio
The Edmonton Journal

Eight weeks after a single case of mad cow disease was found in Alberta, the province remains in the grip of a crisis. A Journal special report examines who is suffering and how.

EDMONTON - While the federal government contemplates new measures for the beef industry, a single case of mad cow disease has already forced change upon renderers in Alberta.

In late June, rendering plants in Edmonton and Calgary began charging five cents a pound for every dead animal collected. Previously, they picked up the carcasses for free, but the mad cow crisis has dried up markets for meat and bone meal made from rendered cattle and other ruminants.

The charge has led some cash-strapped cattle producers to leave their dead animals for scavengers. Dead cows are also turning up illegally in rural landfills, Alberta Agriculture says.

"Because we're producing a product that no longer has value, we had to start charging," says Humphry Koch, executive vice-president of West Coast Reduction Ltd., which owns Northern Alberta Processors in Edmonton and Alberta Processors in Calgary.

Before the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a northern Alberta cow May 20, West Coast Reduction exported 50 per cent of its rendered products.

Now, most of its product is being stockpiled.

Rendered products, which include cattle parts that people don't eat, are cooked at temperatures about 200 C. The cooking kills most disease agents, but not prions, which are linked to mad cow disease.

West Coast, Western Canada's largest animal waste processor, has changed its production to regain some of that business, no longer rendering ruminants at its plant near Vancouver. It hopes the United States will respond kindly, approving a request to resume trade of West Coast's non-ruminant products.

More changes are coming, Koch said.

On Friday, federal Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief announced that cattle brains, spinal cords, eyeballs and other high-risk tissues will be removed from the food chain and destroyed. The rule change applies to cattle older than 30 months.

About 85 per cent of cattle slaughtered in Canada are younger than that age.

Koch suspects West Coast will have to create a separate facility to deal with the removal of high-risk cattle tissues. The change takes effect July 24, but details of how high-risk materials will be removed have yet to be sorted out, Vanclief said.

The cost will be borne by the industry.

Another possible change that would affect the rendering industry is a ban on feeding meat and bone meal from ruminants to hogs and poultry.

Such a ban could cause an environmental disaster, said Koch, who is also chairman of the National Renderers Association, representing renderers in North America.

With basically no market for protein feed, rendering plants would stop collecting dead animals. This could lead to the spread of disease, with remnants of carcasses seeping into gutters, water tables and landfills.

In 2000, Europe banned the use of rendered cattle and other ruminants in feed for all animals except fish and pets.

The ban was introduced to eliminate the possibility that BSE-infected renderings could be fed to cattle by farmers cheating on their feeding practices.

Beef industry representatives in Canada have lobbied against a similar ban. In a report prepared for the federal government, the industry estimates the ban would cost $195 million a year, raising the cost of a kilogram of meat by 20 cents.

http://www.canada.com/health/madcowdisease/story.html?id=82EBD922-E9B8-41C2-81BE-DB93DF41FB83