The incident has put a spotlight on health standards in the $175 billion beef industry in the United States. It has also highlighted the U.S. trade offensive against Canada and other countries.

Mad cow disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is a progressive neurological disease in cattle that is fatal. People can contract a variant of the illness, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, by eating beef products made from the brain, spinal cord tissue, or intestine of cattle.

Among the new USDA measures are a prohibition on the slaughter of “downer cows”—those that cannot stand or walk due to illness or injury.

Previously, downers—200,000 a year—were slaughtered and stamped “approved.” The meat would be sent to market while the brain and spinal cord would be tested for diseases.

“In the last year we have tested 20,526 head of cattle for BSE,” Veneman declared in a December 23 news conference. “Our surveillance and detection program is working.” She didn’t say, however, that only downers—and less than 2 percent of these animals—were tested for BSE.

The Agriculture Department has issued a recall of meat from 20 cows that were slaughtered with the cow that was discovered to be infected with BSE in Washington State just before Christmas. Before the case was discovered, the sick cow’s meat had been shipped to at least nine states.

Beef products made from the area of the skull, spinal cord and spinal nerve tissue of any cow older than 30 months will be banned for human consumption along with the small intestine of cows of any age.

The mixing of cattle blood into the feed of young calves would still be permitted, a practice that Stanley Prusiner, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine for his work on the proteins that cause mad cow disease, called “a really stupid idea.”

A 2001 study by the Government Accounting Office found that one-fifth of U.S. feed and rendering companies that handle prohibited material had no system to prevent the contamination of cattle feed. A follow-up study in 2002 said the Food and Drug Administration’s “inspection database is so severely flawed” that “it should not be used to assess compliance” with the feed ban.

So far, cattle on three farms in Washington State have been placed under quarantine. One of them is a calf-feeding farm where the bull calf of the infected cow is believed to be present. USDA officials have said that probably all of the farm’s male calves under 30 days old will be killed and tested for BSE.

Restoring the confidence of export buyers and domestic consumers in the safety of U.S. beef has been the central concern of the Agriculture Department since the discovery of the presence of the disease. In a Christmas Eve press conference Secretary Veneman gave assurances that it is safe to eat beef and that it “would be among the items served at her family’s Christmas dinner.”  
 
Trade rivalry with Canada, Australia
USDA officials have seized on the possible origin of the infected cow being from Canada to buttress their claim that U.S. beef is safe. But Ottawa’s chief veterinarian, Dr. Brian Evans, said that any conclusion as to the origin of the infected cow was “premature.” Evans said details on the cow’s records in the United States do not match those kept in Canada. “As yet there is no definitive evidence that confirms that the BSE-infected cow originated in Canada,” he said.

On January 2 the USDA announced it would continue to enforce a ban on import of cattle from Canada that was imposed last May when a cow in Alberta tested positive for mad cow disease. It is the latest trade dispute between Washington and Ottawa.

“If somebody’s lax enforcement of feed rules was the culprit, please Lord, let it be Canada’s,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins January 3.

More than 30 governments have banned import of U.S. beef. The ban has resulted in some $300 million worth of beef backed up in ports, on roads, on ships at sea, or in customs offices around the world, according to the U.S. Meat Export Federation. Refrigerated fresh beef is worthless after about 60 days in storage and the quality of frozen meat deteriorates significantly.

The move was led by Tokyo, which purchased $800 million in U.S. beef last year, a third of total U.S. exports. Australian agriculture minister Warren Truss described the ban on import of U.S. beef as a golden opportunity for the Australian beef industry. “Australia could pick up a lot of business to Japan and Korea, replacing U.S. exports,” said Richard Rains, a chief executive of the beef export company Sanger Australia. The stocks of the Australian Agricultural Company, another large beef exporter, rose from $A0.14 to $A1.23 on the Australian Stock Exchange. Australia, the world’s largest beef exporter, is Washington’s main competitor.

Capitalists in Argentina, among the largest beef exporters in semicolonial countries, also expect to cash in on the ban on U.S. beef imports. Argentina exports its beef mainly to Germany, the United Kingdom, Holland, Italy, Brazil, Chile, and Israel. Argentine beef exports have suffered from restrictions in many countries, including the United States, since an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in 2001.

Worldwide there have been more than 180,000 reported cases of mad cow disease in cattle since it was first diagnosed in Britain in 1986. U.S. capitalists have sought to benefit from the resulting economic blows dealt to their competitors in the United Kingdom and more recently in Canada  
 
 
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