Without a trace

In between holiday carols on the radio, news bulletin after breathless news bulletin updated listeners on the nation's first presumptive case for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), as well as the ensuing traceback investigation undertaken by USDA authorities, who found themselves poking around a cattle farm in Mattawa, Wash., before they finally set their sights on Calmar, Alberta, where the so-called "index cow" originated.

It was quick work by USDA. And quick policy too. On December 30, just a week after Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman broke the news of the infected cow, she followed up with a lengthy list of "additional protection measures" USDA planned to undertake in order to prevent further outbreaks of BSE in the U.S. (see sidebar). A little more than a week later, Veneman announced that USDA would begin accepting license applications for BSE tests.

Throughout the long month of January, USDA also continued to issue daily updates on its efforts to locate remaining cattle from the source herd in Calmar, an investigation that led to the examination and identification of more than 75,000 animals in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and to the depopulation of 255 of them, all of which tested negative for BSE.

A meat inspector on January 5 checks cattle carcasses hanging in a Wichita, Kansas, slaughterhouse just days after mad cow was discovered in the U.S.

On February 9, USDA issued its "final" such update and the case, as they say, was closed.

Or was it? USDA has since acknowledged that it located only 24 of the 80 cattle that entered the U.S. with the infected cow. Nor did the agency fare much better with the cow's progeny; in January, authorities destroyed 450 bull calves in Washington state because they could not determine which one was the infected cow's offspring.

So some unfinished business remains, not the least of which is a USDA mandate that the beef industry fast track plans for a national identification system to track cattle from birth to slaughter and beyond. The industry could end up adopting a system similar to Canada's Cattle Identification Program, which relied upon Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to trace the infected cow to Calmar. For the uninitiated, RFID uses electromagnetic or electrostatic coupling in the RF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit signals. Hence, a typical RFID system consists of an antenna and transceiver, which read the radio frequency and transfer information to a processing device, and a transponder, or tag, which is an integrated circuit containing the RF circuitry and information to be transmitted.

If that sounds like a mouthful, imagine implementing RFID or a similar technology among the 95 million dairy and beef cattle grazing in U.S. pastures. A number of systems suppliers can imagine it, though it remains to be seen how quickly the industry responds with a definitive plan. For her part, Veneman told the Senate Agriculture Committee in January that USDA planned to "expedite" implementation of a national identification program that would enable the agency to trace any animal to any location in the U.S. within 48 hours. However, some weeks later she backpedaled when she acknowledged, "I don't have a timeline."

One reason is that the U.S. Animal Identification Plan (USAIP), a proposed RFID-based system endorsed by USDA, needs to be modified to account for the peculiarities of mad cow disease, which can lie dormant in cattle for years. In the meantime, a consortium of some 70 industry groups, including the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Holstein Association USA, continues to press forward with the program.

The Holstein Association, which proposed 1999's National Farm Animal Identification and Records (FAIR) system, upon which USAIP is purportedly based, currently is storing data for two pilot projects and has pledged to manage the data for a national system, once it is in place. Moreover, the consortium expects to have phase one of USAIP -- Premises ID -- in place by this July. Phase one provisions require that standardized premise identification numbers be established for all production operations, markets, assembly points, exhibitions and processing plants. Planners meanwhile are working toward a target date of July 2005 to have systems ready so producers can label their animals with national ID numbers. Meanwhile, bills mandating a national animal identification system were in both houses of Congress at press time.

"A national identification program is critical not only to food safety, but to source verification of our meat products," says Steve Van Lannen, general manager with Packerland Packing, the largest beef company east of the Mississippi River. "We installed National FAIR eartag readers in our facilities three years ago."

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman: USDA and FDA have teamed to tighten several sets of regulations in response to the mad cow discovery.

There's probably no arguing that traceability is a concept whose time has come, and not simply for cattle producers, or for processors who incorporate beef into their products. As mandated by the federal Bioterrorism Act, the FDA indicated last year it was proceeding with a Food Source Identification and Tracking System so that FDA officials not only will be able pinpoint where food has been, but where it is going as it travels from ports, factories or distributors within the U.S. More recently, the National Pork Producers Council indicated that while the swine industry has had mandatory identification requirements in place since 1988, the program is no substitute for a "coordinated across-species mandatory identification system." At stake, the Council continued, is no less than "the loss of international markets" in the event of a foodborne illness or criminal food contamination.

Fruits and vegetables too

The problem extends fruits and vegetables, as evidenced by the hepatitis outbreak at Chi-Chi's restaurants last year, which claimed three lives and infected more than 600 before the virus was traced to green onions imported from Mexico. Needless to say, many larger restaurants and food retailers have begun to demand a verifiable trace-back system because of potentially overwhelming liability issues. ConAgra, for instance, demands that the feed yards selling them cattle certify that those cattle have never been fed ruminant feed, while McDonald's now pays a higher price for beef that can be traced back to its original birth herd.

However, most parties involved agree that some logistical and financial hurdles need to be cleared before a nationwide system can be put in place. Even as the USAIP model moves forward, Veneman admits that it's unclear whether there should be a single system organized and funded by the government, or whether USDA simply should set standards that ranchers and the meat industry can apply in a variety of ways. It's also unclear what specific food types would be covered under USAIP. In a recent executive summary of its activities, a USAIP steering committee indicated support for the following species and/or industries: bison, beef cattle, dairy cattle, sheep, goats, camelids (alpacas and llamas), horses, cervids (deer and elk), poultry (eight species, including game birds), and aquaculture (eight species).

There is also the question of whether one size will fit all. "It's got to work for all producers," Scott Stuart, chief executive officer with the National Livestock Producers Association, recently told MSNBC. "There are roughly 100 million head of cattle in the country, and the average herd size is 30 head. That means there a lot of small guys and some big guys."

And a lot of small budgets and some big budgets. RFID tags currently cost about $3 each, although that price is predicted to fall below below $1 in a national rollout. The overall price looks steep when multiplied by 95 million cattle in the U.S., and the information technology costs behind each could be substantially more. The Holstein Associates estimates the total cost of implementing a nationwide, full-scale RFID program for cattle alone to be $600 million over six years.

Vendors fill the void

While the National FAIR program presumably would provide the national database and model, product vendors are rushing to fill in individual company implementations.

* Syscan International of Quebec (

In general, system capabilities vary from vendor to vendor. Some systems are designed for use in the rugged "dissassembly" environment of meat and poultry plants, while others are more R&D-oriented and designed to meet the R&D, in-process testing and regulatory requirements of dairy, food and beverage processors, according to Schaumburg, Ill.-based vendor Intentia.

Some laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and enterprise quality management (EQM) systems may be of particular benefit to non-meat manufacturers and processors. With LIMs, for instance, Intentia notes that sample information generated by chromatographs and other analytical instruments can be fed into the PC or networks of PCs, then sorted and organized to provide useful reports about ingredients and/or manufacturing processes. Moreover, advanced LIMs offer extensive query and reporting capabilitis, data acquisition and data reduction functionality; many are also Web-enabled and are closely connected to the processes that the lab supports, particularly manufacturing, processing and R&D.

Clearly, a myriad of options are available to food industry members. It's also clear that the sooner traceback systems become a fact of life in the U.S. the better. As this story went to press, a House Committee was challenging USDA's contention that the infected Holstein slaughtered in December was lame -- a significant point, since USDA targets "downer" cattle for testing of mad cow, and because evidence to the contrary suggests that what the industry sees isn't always what it gets.

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