What You Need to Know About The Beef You Eat

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The meat industry now uses a mechanical process called Advanced Meat Recovery (AMR) to strip every scrap of meat from the bones. AMR increases the risk that spinal cord and other nervous tissue that can harbor BSE will enter the food supply. The Food Safety and Inspection Service has tightened the regulations about which parts of the animal can be stripped, but the process is not risk free.

Mad Cows and You

Most of the beef we now consume comes from cattle that were born after the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) removed the most hazardous ingredients from cattle feed and banned sensitive beef tissue from the human food chain. Therefore, your risk of vCJD is lower than it was a couple years ago and much lower than it was 10 years ago.

For many people, however, these safeguards are not enough. Some maintain that the USDA is testing too few cattle to get an accurate measure. In other words, if they tested more animals, they’d find more disease. Another cause for concern is that BSE has been found in ordinary meat from sheep, not just the brain, intestines and spinal cord. Some fear that prions might be found in the steaks and roasts of cattle, as well.

Centralized beef processing magnifies whatever danger exists. If tissue from just one BSE-infected cow is ground into hamburger and mixed with meat from other cattle, tons of meat would be contaminated. This is what has happened many times already with E. coli 0157:H7 contamination. Unlike other food-borne diseases, cooking does not destroy the prions that cause mad cow disease.

Japanese health authorities are equally skeptical about the safety of U.S. beef. To protect the health of Japanese citizens, they test every animal for BSE, including the beef imported from the United States. Many people urge the United States to adopt the same rigorous standards.

So far, the USDA has refused to extend its testing program, claiming there is no scientific justification for such an extraordinary measure. It also asserts that wide-scale testing might give the false impression that the U.S. beef supply is unsafe. To maintain the aura of safety, the USDA prevented individual companies from testing their own cattle. (Read more about this in Mad Cow Disease: Should the USDA do More? December 2007/January 2008.) When Creekstone Farms, a Kansas cattle company, successfully sued the USDA in federal court to be allowed to begin testing for BSE in June 2007, the government agency filed an appeal, blocking the testing. In an unprecedented move, the USDA has even banned the marketing of BSE test kits, saying that the test procedures have not received their official approval. Since 2003, dozens of countries have issued total or partial bans of U.S. beef because of their concerns about mad cow disease. Some have since been lifted.

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