010206 FDA Says Texas Cattle Ate Banned Feed

New York - About 1200 Texas cattle were given feed containing ground-up meat and bones from other cattle, a violation of federal rules designed to keep mad cow disease out of the American food supply, government officials reported.

However, the Food and Drug Administration said, the chances of the cattle having contracted mad cow disease are “exceedingly low.” The animals used in the feed were domestic, and there have been no known cases of mad cow disease in US cattle.

More properly known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease has been detected in a growing number of European countries, sparking fears of more widespread outbreaks of the human form of the disease. That brain-wasting disorder, known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), has been largely confined to the UK. Scientists believe people first contracted vCJD by eating meat contaminated with mad cow disease.

In 1997, the FDA banned the practice of feeding ruminant, or cud-chewing, animals any product containing other ruminants. The practice of feeding ground up cow and sheep carcasses to cows is believed to have triggered the spread of mad cow disease among cattle in the UK. Federal officials announced last week that they had quarantined the Texas cattle after the feed mill involved notified the FDA it may have violated the agency's rules.

According to the FDA, Purina Mills, which owns the feed mill, will buy all the animals. The cattle cannot be used in any way that will allow them into the human food chain, but the company is not obligated to destroy the animals, an FDA spokeswoman said.

The agency also says it believes Purina Mills “has behaved responsibly by first reporting the human error that resulted in the misformulation of the animal feed supplement and then by working closely with State and Federal authorities.”

However, earlier this month the FDA reported that one quarter of the nation's rendering plants and feed mills are not in compliance with its mad-cow regulations. It said government inspections since 1998 have shown that, among other shortcomings, many rendering plants do not have systems in place to prevent “commingling” of rendered protein from ruminants with that from other animals. Rendering plants send these materials to feed mills.

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