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Ban on beef too little, too late

Friday, May 23, 2003 | 6:06 a.m.

The U.S. ban on Canadian beef and cattle imports, following on the heels of a "mad cow" disease case in Canada, represents too little too late. The U.S. Department of Agriculture claim that there has been no confirmed cases in the U.S. rings hollow.

Too little, because U.S. authorities test 20,000 animals for "mad cow" disease each year -- that's only 0.05 percent of the cattle slaughtered, and Canadians do even less. Europeans test that many animals every day. Moreover, most cattle are slaughtered before the age of four, before "mad cow" disease symptoms develop. The afflicted Canadian cow was 8 years old.

Too late, because last year the U.S. imported 1.7 million head of cattle and more than a billion pounds of beef from Canada. This accounts for 7 percent of U.S. beef consumption, and North American Free Trade Agreement regulations make sure that we don't know which 7 percent. Consumption of infected beef leads to development of the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob dementia in humans.

It's getting harder every day to trust the judgment of USDA officials to tell fact from fiction.

LAWRENCE LAMBERT

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