By Alex Binkley
True North Perspective
Originally written for Ontario Farmer
Now that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has found the country’s 13th confirmed case of BSE in five years, it’s time for some answers.
As of early July, we knew the animal discovered was a five-year-old Holstein cow found on a British Columbia dairy farm. Nothing yet on the animal’s origin.
CFIA used the usual reassuring phrases about how the case was consistent with previous ones. However, we’re talking about an animal that was born in 2003, six years after the 1997 feed ban that was supposed to stop the spread of the disease. If the ban was any good, we wouldn’t keep finding BSE in cattle born after 1997 which many of the 13 cases have been.
That ban was finally replaced last year by new rules requiring the removal of brain and nervous system tissue that most likely harbour the BSE prions. The extra costs this requirement imposed on processors recently helped knock out an independent Ontario packer and has many other smaller operators struggling to survive.
CFIA says the evidence so far indicates the latest animal was exposed to a very low amount of infective material, probably during its first year of life. In other words, six years after the ban was implemented, there were still traces of BSE infected material in the feed system.
To put it in perspective, the B.C. cow was young enough that its mother could have been born after the 1997 ban. CFIA should explain how that happened instead of trying to gloss over the situation by saying a small number of additional cases is fully expected. What will agency say in a couple of years when the next young animal is found?
Of course, until the grandstanding class action suit against the federal government over BSE is out of the way, federal lawyers probably won’t let CFIA tell us anything that could be used against it in the courts.
After every case, CFIA conducts an investigation of the feed used on the farm where the case was discovered. But we still don’t seem to know what went wrong in the feed system during the 1990s other than cattle were imported from Britain when BSE was on the spread there and they were allowed to be rendered into livestock feed. That doesn’t explain away how six years after the ban our latest case could begin.
BSE has been a disaster for the country’s beef and dairy farmers. Governments have helped a great deal only to have much of it undone by the rising value of the loonie. It has to pointed out this is primarily a situation that started in Alberta and spilled over into British Columbia. Some answers on that are deserved as well.
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