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Last Updated: Aug 1, 2008 - 10:24:18 AM |
TURSDAY April 24, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) -- To further reduce the risk of mad cow disease in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration on WEDNESDAY released a new rule to prohibit certain cattle materials from use in all animal food including pet food, which will appear on Friday April 28 in Federal Register.
The rule was proposed on Oct. 6, 2005. And the FDA has received more than 840 comments. The prohibited risk materials specified in the final rule include the following:
--- The entire carcass of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)-positive cattle;
--- The brains and spinal cords from cattle 30 months of age and older;
--- The entire carcass of cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption that are 30 months of age or older from which brains and spinal cords were not removed;
--- Tallow that is derived from BSE-positive cattle;
--- Tallow that is derived from other materials prohibited by this rule that contains more than 0.15 percent insoluble impurities;
--- Mechanically separated beef that is derived from the materials prohibited by this rule.
The prohibited materials are deemed to be risky because it has been known that these materials are more likely than others to carry an abnormal form of a protein known as prion, which is widely recognized as the causative agent for mad cow disease even though what really causes the fatal brain wasting disease in cattle remains to be further researched.
It's also recognized that risk materials from cattle with mad cow disease when used to prepare animal feed can spread the disease to the cattle that are fed the tainted feed because of the abnormal protein, which is known to be extremely resilient and hard to destroy.
The new rule is at least in part based on the results of a so called Harvard-Tuskegee Study completed in 2001, which suggested that "
with the protective measures in place in the United States in 2003, the introduction of BSE would result in limited spread, and the disease would be eliminated over time." The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) released in mid-July 2006 a further revised Harvard Risk Assessment, which confirmed the original findings in the Harvard-Tuskegee Study and provided a revised model predicting that "
removal of specified risk materials (SRMs) from all animal feed would result in a substantial reduction of any residual BSE disease agent not eliminated by the 1997 feed ban, because doing so eliminated transmissions resulting from cross-contamination and on-farm misfeeding."
The current ruminant feed ban (21 CFR 589.2000) implemented in the country prohibits use of certain mammalian origin proteins in ruminant feed, but allows the use of these materials in feed for non-ruminant animals and evidence has showed that such a measure is no sufficient to eliminate all transmission of BSE. For instance, new cases continued to be found in cattle born in the U.K. after implementation of a ruminant-to-ruminant feed ban. In the United States, although compliance with the 1997 feed ban by the U.S. animal feed industry has been very high, inspections of feed manufacturing firms have identified some instances of inadequate cleanout procedures, mislabeling and recordkeeping deficiencies, according to the rule. The FDA also believe that certain cattle derived risk materials in the non-ruminant feed supply presents a potential source of exposure in the United States.
Buy a copy of the 144 page "Final Rule" from foodconsumer.org
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