FDA Enacts Feed Ban to Deter ‘Mad Cow Disease’

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration banned the use of virtually all slaughtered-animal parts in U.S. livestock feed Tuesday because of links to “mad cow disease.”

That disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, caused public panic when the British government announced last year that a new version of a fatal human brain illness might have been caused by eating infected beef. At least 10 Britons died of this new type of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The U.S. government insists it has found no signs of mad cow disease in American cattle. But animals can get the brain disease by eating the tissue of other infected animals, so the FDA issued the long-expected ban to ensure that U.S. livestock remain disease-free.

A Consumers Union official, however, said the ban is inadequate because it exempts pork.

The FDA first proposed in January that no cows, sheep or goats eat feed made from ground cows, sheep, goats, deer, elk or mink, species known to be vulnerable to the diseases that eat holes in the brain. Putting these “ruminant” products in animal feed not only recycled otherwise unusable parts of slaughtered animals, it added protein.

But the FDA’s final rule extended the ban to using any mammalian protein except pure pork or horse, which are not known to get the brain illnesses naturally.