US Beef: Japan, Commerce and Public Safety

As reported previously in this space, US beef shipments to Japan have been suspended (again) as of January 20, 2006. This is due to a breach in the US/Japanese agreement to prevent specified risk material (SRM) from being included in beef shipments. SRM are animal parts that are known to raise the chance of BSE (Mad Cow Disease) being transferred to humans. In this instance, spinal columns made their way to Japanese importers.

At the end of January the USDA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released an audit report on safeguard techniques within the US cattle industry that are designed to prevent BSE from entering the food supply. What the report found is startling:

The inspectors were unable to determine whether slaughterhouses and meat packers complied with rules to safeguard consumers.

OIG has found that USDA has not maintained a complete database of all meat renderers so that so that the Department can trace any possible infection back to its origins.

Inadequate documentation at nine of 12 slaughterhouses audited made it impossible to determine whether guidelines to detect high-risk material were followed.

Since USDA’s expanded testing and surveillance program is voluntary, it is unclear whether its sampling design was sufficient to make conclusions about the prevalence of BSE in the United States. The report emphasized the need to ensure that limitations in the testing and surveillance program are apparent to the public given that industry stakeholders could misinterpret USDA’s conclusions.

USDA did not conduct tests of clinically normal aged cattle in a statistically valid manner. This is important because countries in Europe have had a small number of cases with BSE from these clinically normal aged cattle. The OIG found that USDA put forth a half-hearted effort to conduct this testing, and focused on younger cattle -- guaranteeing their findings would be largely meaningless.

OIG could not determine if SRM procedures were followed due to a lack of record keeping at many establishments. OIG also found that inspectors responsible for ensuring proper SRM removal were not always experienced to identify problems. This limits their ability to know when requirements for removing risk materials are not met.

Stan Painter, a USDA inspector and chair of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, the inspectors union, notified the USDA`s management in a letter in December 2004, he was aware of instances where the riskiest parts of older cows were not being marked or removed from processing.

The USDA did not respond to Painter`s concerns until he made his letter known to news outlets.
On Dec. 28, 2004, the agency charged Painter with personal misconduct for not revealing the names of the inspectors who told him of the SRM violations. Officials also told him he was under a formal investigation, which was dropped in August 2005, after the release of internal documents (noncompliance reports) revealing more than 1,000 violations of the USDA`s SRM regulations. [see page CRS-10 of the report and note that as an excuse the author cites that the sampling of these reports consists of only 0.002% of the total cattle slaughtered during the research period, implying that it shows low-incidence; the fact remains that if these type of errors are occuring in 0.002% of cattle based on a very low n-sample (~600,000) who knows what inspectors are missing. The USDA should follow Japan's lead and inspect every cow.]

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's comments.

Product requirements for Japanese exports from the USDA.

The entire (130 page) USDA audit report, January 2006.

Previous post on topic.