Mad cow recall extends to secondary products

Raw material for soaps, candles, soil and feed can be hard to track

08:12 PM CST on Saturday, December 27, 2003

Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press

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PORTLAND, Ore. – Cow parts – including hooves, bones, fat and innards – are used in everything from hand cream and antifreeze to poultry feed and gardening soils.

So in the next tangled phase of the mad cow investigation, federal inspectors are concentrating on byproducts from the tainted Holstein, which might have gone to a half-dozen distributors in the Northwest, said Dalton Hobbs, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Now, it's the secondary parts, the raw material for soil, soaps and candles, that are being recalled.

While some people fear consumers could be infected by inhaling particles of fertilizer or other products containing the mutated protein responsible for mad cow disease, a bigger concern is stopping tainted byproducts from infecting animal feed, believed to be the main agent for spreading the disease.

But tracing all of the sick cow's parts to their final destination has proved challenging.

"It's like the old Upton Sinclair line – 'We use everything but the squeal,' " Mr. Hobbs said. "We have nearly 100 percent utilization of the animal. But when you have so many niche markets, it makes it incredibly challenging to trace where this one cow may have gone."

Los Angeles-based Baker Commodities Inc. announced Friday that it has voluntarily withheld 800 tons of cow byproduct processed in its Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., plants. The company, like other "renderers," takes what is left of the cow after it is slaughtered and boils it down into tallow, used for candles, lubricants and soaps, and bone meal used in fertilizer and animal feed.

If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determines that the material is tainted, the company's loss could total $200,000, said spokesman Ray Kelly.

"It's obviously a tragic thing for the whole beef industry, but it's definitely a sizable hit for us," he said.

Darling International Inc., the nation's largest independent rendering operation, has also been contacted by the FDA. But officials at the company's Tacoma and Portland plants, as well as at its headquarters in Irving, declined to comment on how their operation has been affected.

Companies that use bone meal from cows to create fertilizers popular with rose growers may find themselves under the spotlight. At the height of Britain's mad cow epidemic in the 1990s, three victims of the human form of mad cow disease were found to be gardeners.

In 1996, the Royal Horticultural Society of London released an advisory, cautioning gardeners to wear face masks to avoid dust that could carry the mutated protein.

A far greater risk is the cow material used in animal feed, said Philip Yam, author of a scientific account of the disease. Such feed was banned in 1997.

Mr. Yam points out that while giving cow feed to cows was outlawed, feeding it to poultry is still legal. Some farmers, he said, are still in the habit of feeding their cows "chicken litter" – the remains of the poultry feed, scooped off the ground, feathers and all.

"It's one of those loopholes," Mr. Yam said. "It sounds good in theory – don't feed cow to cow, feed the remains to chickens. But in practice things happen."

Robert Assali, who manages Southern Oregon Tallow in Eagle Point, Ore., said he sees the end of his profession if the mad cow hype continues.

"We're going to become a mortuary service – just hauling animals to landfills," he said.