[Mb-civic] CBC News - U.S. ACCUSED OF COVERING UP MAD COW CASES

Wed Apr 13 04:26:39 PDT 2005

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U.S. ACCUSED OF COVERING UP MAD COW CASES
WebPosted Tue Apr 12 20:41:20 2005

OTTAWA---The United States has covered up cases of mad cow disease in the
past eight years, a former U.S. agriculture inspector said Tuesday at a
House of Commons committee.

Leslie Friedlander repeated a claim he has made before that cases of
bovine spongiform encephalopathy surfaced in the U.S. long before the
disease showed up in Canada, devastating this country's beef industry.

Friedlander, who was fired from his job as head of inspections at a meat-
packing plant in Philadelphia in 1995 after criticizing what he called
unsafe practices, says he's willing to take a lie detector test to prove
he is telling the truth.

Washington has denied the allegations.

But the testimony raises a question that has been asked many times: how
the U.S. industry has been able to essentially escape BSE when Canada's
much smaller industry, observing almost identical safety and testing
practices, has had four cases.

 CBC investigation probes case in New York

Part of the answer could be in a slaughterhouse in Oriskany Falls, N.Y.,
which eight years ago may have become the home of the first American case
of mad cow.

Bobby Godfrey, who worked at the plant, remembers a cow that
arrived one day.

"I thought it was a mad dog, to tell you the truth," he told CBC's
Investigative Unit. "Didn't know what the hell it was. Never seen a cow
act like that in all the cows I saw go through there. There was
definitely something wrong with it."

The suspect cow, which was recorded on video obtained by CBC News, was
suspected of being the first American case of BSE.

Dr. Masuo Doi was the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarian
    in charge of investigating the cow.

"Me and my vet, including our inspector, they thought it [the cow] was
quite different. They thought it was the BSE," he said.

Doi, who recently retired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says
he's haunted by fears the right tests were not done and that the case was
not properly investigated by his own department.

"I don't want to carry on off to my retirement. I want to hand it over
to someone to continue, to find out. I think it's very, very
important," said Doi, who has never spoken out publicly about his
concerns, until now.

 Validity of tests called into question

Documents obtained by CBC News show that the U.S. government was
preparing for the worst. Initial signs pointed to mad cow disease. But
further tests were negative.

The final conclusion from an independent university lab: a rare brain
disorder never reported in that breed of cattle either before or since,
but not BSE.

But CBC News has learned that key areas of the brain were never tested.
The most important samples somehow went missing.

It's all in a USDA lab report that was left out of the documents
officially released by the department. It proves the scientist in charge
knew his investigation of the case was limited.

Without the samples, the question remains: Could scientists really rule
out mad cow disease?

Ds. Karl Langheindrich was the chief scientist at a USDA lab in Athens,
    Ga., the lab that ran some of the early tests on the cow. Now
    retired, he too never spoke publicly about this case before being
    interviewed by CBC.

Without the missing brain tissue, he says, the USDA will never be able to
say for sure what was wrong with the cow.

"Based on the clinical symptoms and the description given by the
veterinarian you can verify, yes this animal had CNS, central nervous
system disease, but you can't specify it in your findings further than
that," he said.

 Second suspected case surfaces at same plant

With questions about the first cow still lingering, three months
later at the same meat plant there was a second American cow with
suspicious symptoms.

The second cow's brain was sent for testing and officials were told
verbally the tests were negative.

Doi made repeated requests for documentary proof of the negative tests.
To this day, he's seen nothing.

"How many are buried?" he wonders. "Can you really trust our
inspection [system?]

For weeks, the USDA told CBC that it had no records for the second cow.
Then just a few days ago, it suddenly produced documents that it says
proves that a cow was tested and that the tests were negative for mad
cow disease.

But the documents also prove, once again, there were problems with the
testing. This time, so much brain tissue was missing it compromised the
examination.

The problems were so severe that one USDA scientist wrote that his own
examination was of "questionable validity" because he couldn't tell what
part of the cow's brain he was looking at.