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Information Concerning Canada’s BSE Policy Disturbing

published: August 19th 2008
source: RCALF

Billings, Mont. – On Aug. 15, 2008, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) announced the detection of yet another case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a 6-year-old Alberta beef cow, the third case of the disease in Canada in 2008 alone and the country’s 15^th native case.

“It’s also the ninth case in an animal born after Canada’s 1997 feed ban and the eighth case born after March 1, 1999, a date USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) uses to try to convince us that any Canadian cattle born after that date are safe to import into the United States,” said R-CALF USA President/Region VI Director Max Thornsberry, a Missouri veterinarian who also chairs the group’s animal health committee.

“This particular animal would have been eligible for export to the U.S., and that should concern everyone,” he continued. “For quite some time now, Canada has not been testing herd mates of infected cattle to see if there might be other cases of BSE in a particular herd, and the U.S. is missing a huge opportunity to get a more accurate assessment of just how bad Canada’s BSE problems really are. USDA should require Canada to test herd mates for the disease if they want to continue exporting cattle and beef to the United States.

“CFIA’s mantra that every new BSE case in Canada was identified by ‘the national BSE surveillance program, which has been highly successful in demonstrating the low level of BSE in Canada’ is simply absurd, in the extreme,” Thornsberry pointed out. “Of course, it’s true that all the BSE cases detected in Canada have been through CFIA’s surveillance – CFIA doesn’t allow anyone else to test for BSE – but that hardly means that CFIA’s testing program has been ‘highly successful in demonstrating the low level of BSE in Canada.’ The program, instead, has definitively shown that Canada and the U.S. have inaccurately predicted – numerous times over the past five years – that BSE has virtually been eliminated there.”

The risk assessment model used by USDA to predict that the United States would import 19 BSE-infected cattle from Canada over the next 20 years was based on the erroneous assumption that Canada had only four BSE-infected cattle remaining after August 2006 in its entire cattle herd. Already, Canada has detected one and one-half times more BSE-infected cattle than what was included in the risk model. 

“This fact demonstrates conclusively that the risk of importing BSE cattle into the United States from Canada is substantially greater than what USDA has told the public,” said Thornsberry.

R-CALF USA stands firm in its belief that Canadian cattle, particularly the high-risk cattle over 30 months of age, should not be imported into the United States.

“It is downright irresponsible for USDA to continue to allow these older cattle that were born when BSE was still circulating in the Canadian feed system into the United States,” Thornsberry asserted. 

“Canada has reduced its BSE testing of older animals and has ceased testing high-risk herd mates, and reports indicate it is planning to reduce its incentive program to test for BSE,” he added. “The only plausible reason USDA is accepting this diminished testing at a time when new BSE cases in Canada have shown no sign of decreasing is that USDA would rather not know about additional cases of BSE in Canadian cattle, now that USDA has declared Canadian cattle safe and allowed them to be imported by the hundreds of thousands a year.”