US Food and Drug Administration introduces mad cow ‘firewalls’
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration introduced a series of measures to further protect cattle and consumers from mad cow disease and its human equivalent Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
First, meat from so-called ‘downers’, cattle which are too sick to stand or walk to slaughter, will be prohibited from use in canned soup, pizzas, dietary supplements and cosmetics. The FDA has also strengthened its 1997 ban on using meat from infected cattle in feed given to other cattle. The stronger rules prohibit the use of blood from cattle being fed to other cattle. New research has identified blood from slaughtered cattle as a potential means for transmitting mad cow disease. It can no longer be used to feed calves to replace milk.
Mark McClellan an FDA commissioner, stated “The set of actions we are implementing will strengthen a series of ‘firewalls’ that will protect Americans against the agents that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).”
Lester Crawford, a deputy FDA commissioner, noted that blood from the
These new rules follow closely on those issued last month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Like the USDA rules that ban the sale of meats containing certain risky components such as the brain, spinal column and nervous system, the new FDA rules bans those products from cosmetics and dietary supplements.
It was also suggested that the new feed bans would be expanded to keep such cattle tissue from being fed to goats and sheep, but not to pets. The duties of the FDA and the USDA overlap in that the FDA regulates human food products that contain small quantities of meat, such as canned soup and pizzas, while the USDA regulates meat.
