Beef up livestock rules.

Byline: The Register-Guard

That single Holstein in Washington state found to be infected with mad cow disease is turning out to be a billion-dollar animal. More than 30 countries have banned imports of American beef, closing 90 percent of foreign markets to U.S. producers, and domestic sales are also affected. Tighter rules for slaughtering and processing beef, long resisted as unnecessarily expensive, will now prove essential.

The deficiencies of systems for tracking cattle and beef products have already been revealed. Authorities have been unable to identify the birthplace, or even the age, of the infected cow. After its slaughter on Dec. 9 and subsequent diagnosis, 10,000 pounds of beef distributed in Oregon, Washington, California and Nevada were recalled. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Sunday, however, that the beef may have been distributed to four other states and Guam as well.

Difficulties in tracking the cow's past complicate the task of discovering how it contracted the disease, while problems in pinpointing where the beef went after slaughter make it harder to mount an effective recall. These uncertainties undermine the credibility of other assurances, such as the USDA's statement that the cow's brain and spinal cord - the organs believed capable of transmitting mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy - were removed before the carcass was processed.

Dr. Kenneth Peterson, the head of the USDA's food safety agency, insists that even the recalled meat "represents essentially zero risk to consumers." From a public health standpoint, he's probably right. The risk of transmission to humans is low - in Great Britain, where 180,000 cattle were found to be infected with mad cow disease in the 1980s, fewer than 150 fatalities resulted. A single diseased cow in the nation's herd of 97 million represents a negligible danger.

But mad cow disease is more than a public health problem. A natural tendency to err on the side of caution makes it an economic threat. Foreign countries will protect their own people and livestock herds by banning U.S. imports, just as the United States banned Canadian beef when a single case of mad cow disease turned up in that country. Many consumers in this country will reason that the risk, however small it may be, can be avoided altogether by not eating beef. The result is a calamity for Oregon's No. 2 agricultural industry, with $500 million in sales in 2001.

The economic threat puts the cost of tighter regulations in perspective. More rigorous testing and tracking protocols would add to producers' costs, but they might have prevented the slaughter of the cow in Washington state, and certainly would have made it easier to recall any suspect beef. Yet only 20,000 of the 37 million cattle slaughtered each year in the United States are tested for mad cow disease.

Similarly, existing controls leave open a potential route of transmission. Cattle are believed to get mad cow disease when infected bovine protein is added to their feed. The United States has banned the use of bovine protein in cattle feed since 1997, but it still can be used in other livestock feed. Cattle can consequently be exposed to mad cow disease if the feed for different types of livestock is combined.

The United States has also resisted limits on the slaughter of "downer" or nonambulatory cattle. An inability to walk is a primary symptom of mad cow disease; the infected cow in Washington state was a downer. Critics of the livestock industry have been calling for a ban on the slaughter of downer cattle for years.

These precautions might not have prevented mad cow disease from appearing in this country; the origin of the single case is still a mystery. But they would strengthen foreign and domestic confidence in the safety of American beef - confidence that is easily shaken by even a remote risk. One billion-dollar cow is all it takes to make tighter rules look like cheap insurance.