03:23 PM PDT on Friday, May 30, 2003

By JIM KLOCKOW / KING5.com

SEATTLE - As the recent discovery of mad cow disease ravages the beef industry in Canada, testing for the disease in the Northwest has come to a dead stop, the victim of bad publicity at one processing plant.

In Britain, the epidemic of mad cow disease that started in the late 1980s infected nearly 200,000 cattle and caused the deaths of more than 120 people from infected meat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests for the disease, technically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, through its inspection arms in every region of the country.

AP graphic

"My surveillance program went out the window," said Linda Carpenter, of the USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service in Olympia. Carpenter's program attempts to monitor BSE in the Northwest Region of the U.S., which includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Utah.

Carpenter and other officials are unclear on how to estimate what if any immediate risk the non-existent testing has on the food supply. Mad cow disease had never been found in the United States and the country is considered to be at low risk.

It was not immediately clear how the presumed risk faced by U.S. producers will be affected by the discovery in late May of a BSE infected cow in Alberta. Canadian cattle are routinely traded across the U.S.-Canadian border.

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"We know the Canadian cattle are here," Carpenter said. "The risk to the American consumer, we do not know what it is. That's why we have surveillance ... I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to reinstate testing."

Others, such as Washington State Veterinarian Bob Mead with the Washington State Department of Agriculture, said the impact on food safety is negligible.

"At this stage, it's so negligible that you can't measure it," Mead said.

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In the meantime, the magnitude of the Canadian scare was still being mapped Friday as Agence France Presse reported that some of the rendered material from the affected cow may have made it into dog food in the U.S.

Why the testing stopped

The testing for mad cow disease in Washington came to an almost instant stop last October after Seattle-based KIRO TV did a 4-day special on the Midway Meats processing plant during the Fall ratings period. The story focused on the plant's acceptance of so-called "downer" animals, the industry term for animals that are unable to walk to their slaughter.

Portions of the KIRO story have since been discredited in other publications for the unsupported link made between downer cows and diseases such as E. Coli. But the series effectively ended Midway Meats use of downer cows, which also happen to be the prime Northwest source of cows used for mad cow disease testing.

Midway Meats owner Bill Sexsmith says downer cows can refuse to walk for any number of reasons, ranging from plain stubbornness to sore feet or pinched nerves. The cows were concentrated at Midway because as a custom cutter of meats, it is a small operation whose process is not particularly slowed by the extra effort it takes to move a cow that refuses or is unable to walk, according to Sexsmith.

But inability to walk is also one of the symptoms of the advanced stages of BSE, which is why the USDA program to test for the disease focuses on them.

Experience in Europe suggests that random testing of healthy animals is not an effective way to test for the disease, according to USDA spokeswoman Hallie Pichardt in Arlington, Va.

But after the TV story ran, not only did Midway stop accepting downer cows, everyone else in the Northwest did too.

Sexsmith said that's the message he has to give ranchers when asked where they can bring their downer cows.

"We're telling them that down cows are not something that can be done anywhere at any time. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, there's no one I know of that will receive them," he said.

Food safety

Without Midway Meats as a source for the greatest concentration of non-ambulatory cows, the USDA has to rely on farmers or their vets to notify them of downer cows or those experiencing neurological symptoms like those associated with BSE.

Some have in the past, but since the TV story ran, only one has in the Northwest region, according to Carpenter's records.

For comparison, in fiscal 2002, 2,237 cows were tested in Washington. In the current fiscal year, which includes the period when the TV story ran, only 262 have been tested, only one of those since October of last year.

"Private individuals are much less likely to call us," Carpenter said.

That raises the question, where are all the downer cows, the presumed high-risk group for BSE, going?

The answer may lie in mobile slaughterhouses, so-called ''kill trucks" allowed under Washington State law. State law allows kill truck operators to slaughter an animal without the need for a meat inspection. That's because the resulting meat cannot be sold. It can only be consumed by ranch employees and family.

Carpenter and others suggest that it is a stretch to assume that the 4,000 or so cows that likely bypassed testing since last Fall have ended up on ranchers' plates or buried.

"These animals are going through, but we can't say where," Carpenter said.