New Rules on Animal Feed and Use of Disabled Cattle

The Food and Drug Administration imposed new rules yesterday to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, including a ban on feeding cow blood and chicken wastes to cattle. The agency also banned using dead or disabled cows to make products for people like dietary supplements, cosmetics or soups and other foods with traces of meat…

Contaminated feed is widely believed to have started the mad cow epidemic in animals in Britain in the 1980’s. Scientists suspect that feed can transmit the disease if it includes bone meal or other material rendered from the carcasses of sick cows, particularly the brain and spinal cord. The United States banned the use of cow parts in cattle feed in the 1990’s but let producers feed cow blood to calves as a milk substitute.

Blood can no longer be used, because studies have suggested that it may also be infectious.

Also banned is the use of composted “poultry litter” as a feed ingredient for cows. The litter consists of bedding, spilled feed, feathers and fecal matter swept from the floors of chicken coops. The ingredient that worries health officials is the spilled feed, because chicken feed can legally contain meat and bone meal rendered from beef.

Animals can no longer be fed “plate waste,” the agency said, meaning the meat and other scraps that diners leave on their plates in restaurants and that is rendered into the meat and bone meal added to feed. That material interferes with tests for prohibited proteins in the animal feed, the agency said.

Finally, the new rules say equipment that makes feed with meat or bone meal can no longer be used to make cattle feed…

A remaining loophole, Dr. Hansen said, is allowing rendered matter from cows to be fed to pigs and chickens and rendered pigs and chickens to be fed back to cows. In theory, that sequence could bring the disease full circle, back to cows. In Europe, cows cannot be fed any animal matter…

With regard to products meant for people, the new rules say that from now on material from animals that die on the farm or from “downer” cows, which cannot walk, will be banned from use in cosmetics and dietary supplements. The ban will also apply to foods with traces of meat, items that the food and drug agency rather than the Agriculture Department regulates.

Also banned from products for humans will be the tissues most likely to carry the infectious agent like the brain, skull, eyes and spinal cord of animals 30 months or older and the tonsils and part of the small intestine of all cattle. Because a product called mechanically separated meat may carry infectious tissue, it will also be banned. [NYTimes]