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Ranchers.net

This Canadian author is seeing the Canadian cattlemans attitude much the same way as I posted in a post a couple of months ago...As long as we're back on the US gravy train, we'll just pooh pooh anything new away and when we wake up it'll just have been a dream :roll: ...Canadian producers don't even seem to want to know or care about all these feedban violations- even after the investigations lead the CFIA to announce that there will be more cases in ALL western provinces :???: .... WHY FOLKS-WHY????? WHY WILL THERE BE MORE CASES? WHY ARE THEY SURE THEY WILL BE IN ALL WESTERN PROVINCES?

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Canada must scrutinize the feed industry



Aug. 29, 2006. 01:00 AM

SYLVAIN CHARLEBOIS

The Star

Canada



Canada's largest market for beef, the United States, postponed plans to allow more imports of Canadian cattle over the age of 30 months in light of this country's latest case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) found in Alberta.



It is Canada's fifth case in 2006 and the eighth since 2003, when the disease was first found in this country.



Number 7 this summer was only 4 years old, though. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) seemed far from concerned, stating that no part of the latest cow's carcass entered the human food or animal-feed systems.



Finding more BSE cases in Canada should be expected, but more work to manage future cases is certainly required.



This summer, the United States announced it would cut its mad-cow testing program by almost 90 per cent, after data collected over two years showed a very low level of the disease in the domestic herd.



This would suggest that North American authorities are perhaps becoming nonchalant about the BSE scare without knowing much about the disease itself.



The last Canadian BSE case in July was born five years after the feed ban that prevented parts from cattle and other ruminants being used in feed for such animals.



For years, the CFIA argued that the 1997 feed ban would eradicate most latent BSE cases from Canadian herds.



With this last case, some have suggested that an old bag of feed produced before the bans or accidents that occurred in feed mills may have caused the disease to spread.



The possibility of maternal transmission of BSE, from cow to calf, was also mentioned after the latest case was found.



As we continue to learn about BSE and international trades concerning food safety, a guessing game is hardly an astute strategy for reassuring our trading partners.



Indeed, surveillance of the disease itself has become an even more important issue.



So far, Canada has tested almost 50,000 cases, a great improvement from 3,000 a few years go — but it is still far from enough.



Increased monitoring across the supply chain would not only serve the purpose of managing risks, it would help us understand how the disease is contracted and how it evolves in time.



Although the CFIA recently strengthened feed control in Canada, the feed industry needs to be better scrutinized. Monitoring will lead to more evidence-based analysis, which is essential for scientific research.



It would also allow the supply chain to equip itself for future threatening diseases that could someday strike the cattle industry.



Methods to detect the disease should also be reviewed.



For example, a Canadian company based in Alberta is confident it has a cheap, groundbreaking test for mad-cow disease. The only approved BSE test in Canada has to be performed post-mortem on the animal.



It is now technologically possible to test live animals and detect the disease at an early stage.



Similar technologies exist in the United States and Europe.



These would decrease the costs of monitoring capabilities while increasing our monitoring capacity and accuracy, and, at the same time, vastly increasing our knowledge of the disease itself.



Over the last three years, we have realized that the Americans are the "canaries" signalling to us when it is time to take action.



Since the Americans are reluctant to test all their cattle for BSE, Canada is synchronistically also not ready to do so, and the CFIA adamantly defends current food-safety policies. It has no other choice but to do so.



The CFIA applies rigorous methods to manage domestic risks, both for the industry and consumers.



Better monitoring, though, would democratize the entire process for both the industry and Canadian consumers.



The focus now should also be on learning, not just on managing risks. Canadian consumers deserve better protection.



In enhancing our BSE monitoring strategy, scientists will acquire better knowledge of the disease itself, and so will our trading partners have better reassurance on the quality of our products.




With the discovery of the eighth BSE case in Canada, study of the disease and improved monitoring clearly represents a far more reasonable course than the "business as usual" tack prevailing in the industry and in the Canadian policy approach since the initial crisis with the discovery of the first BSE case in this country.





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Sylvain Charlebois is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Regina.





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