 be fed animal byproducts, which are believed to be the cause of mad cow disease. Organic beef is available, but it's a very small percentage of the beef that's available in today's supermarkets.
We at FoodFit have provided guides on how to buy organic, and you can check at FoodFit.com for those kinds of tips or ask your supermarket in the meat counter if they have any organic meat available.
Member question: Since the disease progresses slowly, cows could have the disease but show no symptomstherefore go into the food supply. Wouldn't this be a possibility because they are not downer cows?
Haas: Downer cows are only one example of the problem. To detect the prevalence of BSE easiest is to do adequate testing of the animals. That's why it's so necessary for the USDA to embark on an aggressive program of testing. Also, the whole processing chain needs more frequent testing, as well.
At one time we had a continuous testing of our system. We have gone in the last 20 years to more industry controls and a reduction of continuous inspection. I think this problem today reveals a need for reviewing our food safety protection.
Member question: Does cooking beef fully not kill the germs that are carried with the mad cow disease?
Haas: Unfortunately, cooking the beef completely does not help in this case as it does in other food borne illnesses. The contamination is there and cannot be cooked away. That's why one case has created so much action and concern.
Member question: Aside from nationalism, why is it so important that the infected cow in Washington came from Canada?
Haas: There are two issueseconomics and healththat are very intertwined in this whole mad cow episode of 2003. The health issues involve finding the root of all this; where is it coming from, where the originator cattle was; so we can track it and prevent disease in humans.
The other issue is the economic trade issue, and knowing which country is most responsible. This is an enormous issue because the economic losses to cattlemen have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars because of this. Thirty countries have banned U.S. beef because of the understanding that this was a U.S. food safety problem, but in this case it has been found, just yesterday, that it was a problem that did originate from Canada. We have a $3 billion a year beef export business and if you think about 30 countries banning our beef, you could see what an economic crisis this is for American and Canadian cattle producers.
Member: Right now I don't think it is really an issue of who is more responsible, but rather what changes are to be made by all cattle-producing countries
Member question: Isn't our testing system woefully inadequate? I heard that the French inspect as much meat in a month as the USDA inspects in a year.
Haas: There has been a great deal of consumer criticism about the state of our meat and poultry inspection system, and the growing incidence of food borne illness in this country. For more than 20 years there have been calls for increased testing and necessary prohibitions like the one on advanced meat recovery, but they've been slow in coming. For the US, which is a trade leader, to continue to have the safest food supply we've got to keep up with changes in technology.
Those new changes, such as advanced meat recovery, bring new problems for the consumer. If you can recover hundreds of millions more pounds of beef the industry will do it, but it also increases risk, so the government must adapt the inspection system to meet the technological advances. There's nothing wrong with technology but we've got to keep up with regulations to protect public health, because public health has got to be the driver of the system, not the economics.
Because today there is no single food safety agency in the U.S., but instead the consumer has conflicting agency protections from the FDA, the USDA, Dept of Commerce, Environmental Protection Agency, and others, we are facing overlapping and inadequate food safety systems. BSE is a wakeup call for making those changes in the federal struct