Bush Admin fights to stop meat packers from testing all carcasses for mad cow disease

The BBQ Pit
1

No, really. You didn’t misread “stop from” for “force to.”

At present, the Ag Dept. tests 1% of all beef carcasses for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. One meat packer, Creekstone Farms, wants to test all its carcasses, at its own expense. But other packers fear if Creekstone did that and could label its beef “tested and safe,” they would have to do the same.

So the Ag Dept. tried to stop Creekstone. They lost; the federal court said the government doesn’t have that authority.

So now the Admin is appealing.

Story here.

Errmmm . . . so? :dubious:

2

Your OP is incorrect.

This adminstration has never been appealing.

3

Um…where does it say in the article that this has anything to do with the ‘Bush Admin’? The article seems to be talking about the Dept of Agriculture…and doesn’t say what the source is. I’m guessing your assumption is it comes directly from the Secretary of Agriculture? I’m rather doubting that Bush is involved in this at all however…though if I missed his direct involvement in the article let me know.
Personally, I can see both sides of this. If I were a small meat producing company it makes sense to want to do such a test and then put such a lable on the packaging (and probably charging a premium for it, since its ‘safe’). By the same token, if I’m a very large meat producing company who deals in quantity it would be extremely expensive to test all the cattle…and I’d be forced to pass that price along to the consumers. Wonder what such a mass test would do to the price of beef in the US. I assume that you can’t just test once and be done, but have to test pretty much on an ongoing basis (at least until cattle on the hoof=meat).

-XT

4

Whose administration is he in, if not Bush’s?? Ever heard of the president’s cabinet? They’re not referring to the furniture.

5

:smack: Never mind…it only says it in the first line of the article. I guess I don’t get why they are involved, as this seems to be coming from the Dept of Agriculture…but I totally missed that it says that right there on the first line.

-XT

6

Eat mor chickn.

7

Or, you could just comply with federal guidelines, continue to only test a portion of your cattle, and market to the people for whom untested but cheaper meat is more desirable. Capitalism, baby. Unless they’re scared of a little competition.

8

:rolleyes: I’m well aware that the Secretary of Agriculture is part of the Bush administration…what was unclear to me when I originally read the article was if this directive came from the SoA or from a lower level. Obviously reading the first paragraph would have been helpful to me.

As I said though, the article itself says " The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease ."…which I failed to note when I read through the article the first time. So…since I didn’t catch that until I re-read it, I’ll just say BG was quite correct in his assumption. I’ll have to dig into this a bit more though…the details are a bit lacking in this article.

-XT

9

Agreed. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

10

“The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.”

Not knowing much about mad cow or the meat industry in general, can this be a reasonable concern? When they get a positive, can’t further testing then confirm it or show it to be a false positive before there’s any harm? Or is this difficult or impossible for some reason?

11

I think the “harm” they’re talking about is the publicity from a false positive leading to public worry about the safety of beef and a short-term drop in beef sales.

BFD. Americans are beefeaters now and, barring ecological catastrophe, we’ll be beefeaters 20 years from now.

12

One good thing Bush has done is to show everyone just how incompetent government bureaucracy can be. From war to natural disaster to justice to cows. He has given a mountain of ammunition to those of us who argue that ordinary people are just as capable of solving problems as Washington fat cats.

13

Except, this isn’t a case of the bureaucracy being incompetent, as in Hurricane Katrina. This is a case of the bureaucracy doing – quite effectively, unless and until they lose the appeal – exactly what the biggest business interests want.

14

So you thought, and still apparently harbor the possibility, that some rogue, breakaway element within the Department of Agriculture is bringing a court appeal that the Department and the Administration disagree with?

If someone in the Department of Agriculture does or says something, whose responsibility is that?

If the Secretary of Agriculture does or says something, whose responsibility is that?

15

Well, it’s a point with some considerable validity. Your test may have a very high sensitivity and specificity, but if you test millions upon millions of uninfected carcasses, the probability of a false positive rockets, and the informational value of a given positive result decreases accordingly. Have a look at this article for an explanation of why even a test with apparently magnificent sensitivity and specificity can end up giving you almost no valuable information when applied to a vast, predominantly uninfected population.

This page seems to indicate that a typical specificity for the sort of test in question is about 1 in 30,000, or 99.997%. Sounds great, right? But according to this page the annual US cattle slaughter is of the order of 34 million animals, of whom the absolutely overwhelming majority are uninfected. If you were to test all of those with a specifity of 1 in 30,000, you’d expect around 1100 false positives per year.

By contrast, your story lists three confirmed cases of BSE in the USA in the last 5 years (well, 3 cases ever, but let’s count from when the first one was spotted), so that’s a rate of just over half a case a year. It’s impossible to assess how many cases went undetected, if any, but even if we’re missing half the infected cattle, that means that in a full testing scheme, the probability of a carcass being infected given a positive result would drop to a staggeringly low 0.09%.

Now consider the USDA’s position. It has to minimise risk to the population, but it also has to maintain a degree of sanity about proceedings. Managing the perception of these 1100 new “cases” of BSE would be a nightmare; all of a sudden the public is convinced there’s an epidemic, herds are slaughtered, companies go bust and for little or no concrete benefit in safety. In a situation where every carcass slaughtered is tested, the only concrete result is that the meat is more expensive, and we still don’t really know which cattle are infected, because for every one genuine case we find, we find 1100 false ones.

I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of the USDA going to court to withhold a test from a company, but I do think that it’s a perfectly valid view to take that this company is guilty of making a cheap marketing gesture that won’t noticeably increase protection for the consumer, and stands a good chance of significantly damaging the testing process that exists already. The alternative certainly exists that the USDA is simply in the meat companies’ pockets, but don’t just sniff at their statistical argument, it’s got a lot going for it. What use is a testing program where a positive result has less than a one in 1000 chance of being correct? The statistics of mass testing are far from trivial, and blithely assuming that testing everything must be better is seductive but fallacious reasoning.

16

Using that logic, I guess the testing should be completely prohibited.

This is yet another example of the internal logical inconsistencies in the Bush administration: the DOE has recently resumed random polygraph testing of its employees - this despite a 2003 DOE-sponsored study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences which found that the number of false-positives in polygraph testing rendered such tests worse than useless and that the DOE should revise their policy.

http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn041803.html

17

If this is the same company I heard a story about earlier this year, their reason for testing is to try to enter the Japanese markets. The company was trying to market an American answer to Kobe beef, but the Japanese would not allow imports that were not tested for BSE. I don’t know that it’s fair to categorize it as a cheap marketing gesture.

18

Not at all. Tests that are unsuitable for mass testing of healthy populations (and that’s most of them) can still have considerable value, but they need to be used as part of an intelligent diagnostic process, not blindly used as a catch-all panacea that is in large part an illusion.

It’s certainly inconsistent with the DOE’s actions, but that’s because the DOE’s actions are quite clearly wrong. Would you prefer if the administration were uniformly statistically illiterate?

I believe it is the same company, and no I suppose not, but it’s certainly not an altruistic move for the benefit of the US consumer; it’s a self-interested move to get them more business. Which of course is entirely to be expected and is not bad in and of itself, but the USDA is perfectly within its rights to question what effect this will have on the US food industry, and whether it will help or harm the US consumer. This, after all, is its regulatory role. On the face of it, it’s highly questionable whether the US consumer will be made any safer at all, and it seems quite apparent that there would be a significant cost associated with mass testing, both in financial terms and in terms of the credibility of the USDA’s testing programme. Some might scoff at the latter, but it’s highly important that the public trust the programme. If tests are generating false positives at a rate of 1100 to one, what confidence is the public going to have in the scheme?

As an addendum, I should point out that in young cattle, the sensitivity (i.e. the probability of an infected cow testing positive) of the test is also questionable, due to doubt that the prions show up in sufficient levels to be detectable at that age. Given this, you can end up with a situation where the test is actively endangering the population, by conjuring false negatives due to inappropriate use. Far more effective measures, such as limiting the age of cattle that enter the food chain, are already in place. But these are all rather boring, and don’t have that sciencey tang that a good mass screening programme provides.

It’s exactly the same as the current fad for hospitals pushing precautionary CT scans on healthy patients. High rates of benign occurrences being flagged lead to unnecessary surgery for many, and the high chance of such an unfocussed diagnostic procedure can give many with genuine problems an unfounded sense of security. But this nuance is easily lost, because “more testing is good” is good old horse sense, right? Nope. It just isn’t that easy, unfortunately.

19

Encouraging… our leaders are incompetent, and we reg’lar folk are just as good!

20

Hey, don’t blame me. I voted for Kerry. According to defenders of the status quo, I’ve gotten what I deserve.