Is it part of the FDAs regulatory role to manage the economics of the food industry? Does the federal government have the constitutional authority to prevent a private firm from paying for and performing test beyond what the government requires?
The article presents no evidence that it’s to do with Bush & co.
Umm… exactly who said? An intern could count here. Without a name, I’ll take this with a huge pinch of salt.
Whatever. Whoever’s behind this is being boneheaded; if a company wishes to test everything then it should be free to do so.
I think that if something has gotten as far as a court case, it’s reasonable to assume that someone in the administration (and not just some bureaucratic lackey) is aware of it.
Here’s a story that has more attributed material to the Department of Agriculture: Ny Times
Here’s a link to the filing that the company originally made, which I assume led to the decision that the lackey in the bowels of the Department of Agriculture is now appealing.
I mean, if an intern ended up causing the Department to be a respondent in a lawsuit that has already led to a decision, one imagines that the intern is in for a hell of a day when his supervisor finds out.
I don’t know, and as I said, I don’t really want to get into that aspect of it, because I think it’s a bit secondary; I presume the court will hash out the legal niceties of it. Part of me is queasy at the thought of the government specifically banning private testing, but on the other hand I’m familiar enough with the execrable state of science reporting in general that I can practically smell the hysteria that would follow a trend towards 100% testing.
I’m neither here nor there on the regulatory rights or wrongs; what I’m taking issue with is the seemingly unchallenged assumption that the USDA is definitely acting with base, neglectful motives. There are extremely good reasons why mass screening programmes should not be blithely assumed to be beneficial, which I’ve outlined above. Regardless of what you think of the role of government in regulation of private testing, there’s a very important debate to be had about whether this sort of mass testing has any positive value, and it’s one which is being completely glossed over in this thread.
There’s four things at issue here, to my mind:
-
Will one company precipitate a consumer demand for full testing?
-
Is full testing beneficial, harmful, or neither?
-
Does the USDA have a regulatory right to restrict private testing in (what it sees as) the public interest?
-
Is the USDA acting because it’s a bunch of mendacious shits, corrupted by long contact with the Bush admin?
-
is debatable; I can see it going either way. 2) is far less clear-cut than some have been making out, 3) is an orthogonal point that will be cleared up by the courts one way or another, and I don’t see how 4) can even be addressed before you talk about 2) in a sensible fashion.
That’s my view. Clear as mud, eh?
The executitve departments of the US Government work for him. He’s ultimately responsible for their doings.
Yes – the right side (if this outfit can get a competitive edge by testing all its meat, good for them) and the wrong side (WAAA!! WAAAAA!!! Guvmint, protect us from competition!!!)
- Beats me.
- Ditto.
- Absolutely not.
- Probably.
At a 1% sampling, rate, however, you still get 11 false positives a year, depending on sampling error which I don’t feel like calculating.
Instead of forbidding testing by those who want to do so, why not require retests of any positives, which should get the false positive rate down to something more reasonable. It is not to the benefit of any meatpacker to announce what could be a false positive, after all.
The difference is that the FDA is using the program as an indication of the number of infected cows in the population, and 1% of millions is plenty for that. The Japanese, and this company, want to use the test as a screen. When you do a 100% screen you always wind up with false positives. (Or close enough to always for engineering purposes.) The decision about this depends on an economic analysis of the cost of a false negative (an escape) and a false positive.
Given that the company is marketing to Japan, and that the FDA will say that it is not necessary, I doubt if US meat producers will be hurt. All bets are off if a bunch of people come down with the disase, though. Then the perceived benefit of 100% testing might become a lot more appealing.
That’s true, but I think you went too far in that post implying that the FDA should step in if it thought the meat industry might be damaged, economically, by the action of this one company. Call me cynical, but that seems like a real stretch of an argument of the government to make, and could be made about any product and any testing procedure. Is there any precedent at all to the US government telling a company it can’t test its product to a higher level than the government recommends? The mind boggles…
Yes, yes…and no sparrow falls without notice and all that. Got it already.
:rolleyes: And the thought that it could cause a panic with the public with a false positive has, of course, nothing to do with it…its just black and white, ehe?
-XT
Quite. I was more commenting on the NY Times article than the story itself. Even your link nowhere identifies a Bush appointee as the person responsible. This could be a standard bureaucratic fuckup, never having reached the exalted levels of appointees. Without a cite, it’s simply poor - if sensationalist - journalism to lay it at the feet of Bush.
It’s still a stupid move.
More like no sparrow is named as a defendant in a lawsuit without getting hit by a clue-by-four.
“Oh, by the way sir, just one more thing. One of our interns decided to forbid a small meat packing company in Kansas to test 100% of their carcasses for mad cow disease, and now we are being sued.”
“Yes, yes. Fine. Whatever you think is best. The key thing is: Have you made my travel arrangements to Scotland yet? I can’t wait to hit the links.”
And people call you a knee-jerk defender of the Bush administration. Wherever would they get that impression?
I don’t think I implied that, and if I did, I didn’t particularly mean to; as I say, I’m not particularly interested in the regulatory rights and wrongs. I’m more concerned about the scientific credibility of the testing process, and whether a trend towards full screening will be beneficial to the public at large. Clearly, I tend to believe it will not. The process at present is used in an informational way to assess the spread of the disease (as Voyager rightly points out). The transition to it being a publically marketed certification procedure for “safe” beef producers is absolutely transformative, both in terms of accuracy and effect, and regardless of what you think the regulators’ role is in restricting this transformation, I think a debate about screening’s benefits is crucial.
As I said before, I share your misgivings about regulation in this style, but it seems to me that the USDA has been put in this position more by misguided (or opportunistically protectionist) measures implemented by Japan than by any other interest. The company wishing to introduce testing has a valid reason for doing so; it wants to regain a market it lost due to Japan’s import regulations. Equally, however, the USDA has a valid reason for opposing the move. I tend to think that the majority of a regulator’s work can be achieved by ensuring that the public are provided with accurate and comprehensible information, allowing them to make an informed, un-meddled-with choice about what they buy. From such a viewpoint, I can certainly sympathise with concerns about meat being marketed as “certified BSE free” in the domestic market, when the truth is far more complex, and the knock-on ramifications far from trivial. Granted, it’s a fair stretch to go from providing the public with good information, to actively restricting their access to information you think will be presented in a misleading manner, but it’s the same ballpark. After all, hormone-free producers are forbidden from claiming that their food is safer (I believe), although they are allowed to label their hormone-free status. That’s information restriction of a sort.
As I say, I haven’t decided exactly where I stand on this, but I’d certainly really like it if someone started raising awareness right now about the sort of problems with mass screening that I’ve detailed above. There’s definitely a serious debate to be had here about the role of the regulator in domestic markets, but I did rather want to puncture the OP’s facile representation of what’s at issue here. This is not just a matter of the evil Bushiviks trying to hide BSE from the consumer so their ranch buddies can make a swift buck.
God, I hate it when I get forced to defend the Bush admin. 
Indeed, but no one is effectively marketing this procedure to the public as a beef certification effort, which is pretty much my point. Due to the doubts over whether testing cattle young enough to enter the food chain will actually work, and the specificity problems already mentioned, it seems to me it simply isn’t fit for purpose at present. By both implementing a 100% screening programme and presenting it as a guarantee of safety, you’re decreasing the quality of your information, while simultaneously presenting it as far more valuable than even what you had before. Not good. And while you could indeed insist on re-tests, the probabilities of successive false positives aren’t independent, nor is re-testing on the sort of scale required practically consistent with the sort of precautionary measures typically taken when real cases are identified (isolation of the herd, etc.).
As you point out, all sorts of factors may contribute to a push towards screening, but I fear few of them will have any sort of rational scientific grounding, and that the cause will instead be led by the sort of shrill anti-scientific voices that caused such a damaging uproar over the MMR vaccine, for example. If I had more confidence in science reporting in the media I might be less inclined to defend the USDA, but I think there is a very real risk that sheer stupidity might cause a completely unnecessary crisis here, at great expense and no real benefit. We can have a discussion about whether that should be allowed to happen on principles of freedom, or whether regulators should step in to prevent such an occurrence, but the concern is real, IMO.
Aaaand … the current Google ads are for the Dakota Beef company, cow ringtones, organic beef for sale and LaCenseBeef.com. Gotta love the AI providing the advertising content for these debates … I especially like the “cow ringtones”
[sorry]
Am I the only one who sees the irony in this particular poster starting a thread that’s basically about mad cow disease? 
That’s based on the premise that the false positives are randomly distributed among tests, which may not be the case. Some false positives aren’t due to a particular test going awry, but are reproducible, and will always be positive for a given individual. If, for example, the test is searching for a particular protein that’s produced by BSE-infected tissue, and a small number of individuals have a (harmless) genetic mutation that produces that protein, then they will always test positive, no matter how many times you run the test. I don’t know how the test for BSE works, but it might be that retesting positives won’t do any good.
OK, that clears things up more. But again, we’re talking about the legality of this move. I just can’t see that the FDA had a case. Maybe someone with more legal background could clarify that. I can see where they could advise against doing it, or even publicly say it was bad policy… but to try and use the justice system to prevent a private entity from doing something like this? I don’t see it.
The only ‘people’ who call me that are the one’s who generally have lots of foam on their muzzles…like you Hentor. 
-XT
Actually they are in the process of approving chicken from Chinese farms and processing plants, which are highly questionable and most independent studies have found them lacking when it comes to food safety standards. In exchange china might consider accepting our mad cow beef.
I’m surprised no one has brought up the most important variable and perhaps the deciding criteria, or at least weight in evidence. What is the total number of actual cases of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, Mad Cow’s human antecedent?
Is it a realistic and impending epidemic and has the industry discontinued their soylent green cost shaving and profit before safety?