From: Randall Parker 

Joe,

Okay, so $300 mil per year to probably eliminate the risk of BSE getting passed to
humans in the United States. But would that really prevent any human infections?
Doing the math on the NY Times article below makes it look like the US slaughters 30
mil head a year. At $10 a head that would be $300 mil and at $20 a head that would be
$600 mil if all were tested.

But DeHaven of the USDA says it would cost between $25 to $50 per head. At the
$50
per head figure it would cost $1.5 bil per year for all slaughtered cattle in the US
for a disease that has not yet been shown to have been caught by a single human in
the United States from cattle raised in the United States. I don't know about you but
I'd rather the $1.5 bil per year was spent on basic research on cancer or
heart disease or perhaps on some neurological disease we have a real chance
of getting like
Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

Note also DeHaven's comment that the current testing system is a surveillance system.
That is what I expected. They were just trying to monitor to see if the disease has
shown up in United States cattle at all ever. Well, they finally found a case. So the
USDA probably ought to scale up and modernize their testing facilities.

It would be interesting to know the rate at which Japanese tests find the disease.

The NY Times a relevant article as well:
http://nytimes.com/2003/12/26/national/26DETE.html
    Excerpt:
The officials declined to say exactly what they would recommend, but acknowledged
that European and Japanese regulators screened millions of animals using tests that
take only three hours, fast enough to stop diseased carcasses from being
cut up for food.

United States inspectors have tested fewer than 30,000 of the roughly 300 million
animals slaughtered in the last nine years, and they get results days or weeks later.

But the American system was never intended to keep sick animals from reaching the
public's refrigerators, said Dr. Ron DeHaven, the Agriculture Department's chief
veterinarian.

It is "a surveillance system, not a food safety test," Dr.
DeHaven said in an interview on Wednesday.

Statistically, it is meant to ensure finding the disease only if it exists in one in
a million animals, and only after slaughter.

A beef industry spokesman said Wednesday that cattlemen would endorse adopting more
rapid tests.

Western European countries generally test all cattle over two years old, all sick
cattle and a small percentage of apparently healthy ones. Last year, they tested 10
million cows. Japan tests all the cows it slaughters each year, 1.2 million.

Dr. DeHaven said Japan tested too much, "like a doctor testing every patient who
comes through the door for prostate cancer."

Joe Hunt wrote:
> Here is one citation of the cost of a test for BSE, from an article in
> the Wall Street Journal, 2003/12/26 - pg. A6 (by Susan Carey and Tim
> Burton)
>
> "...Abbott (Abbott Laboratories), of North Chicago, Ill., and Bio-Rad
> (Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc.), Hercules, Calif. are the major publicly
> traded companies in the testing industry, which in total generates a
> little more than $100 million in annual sales, principally in Europe.
> These companies' quick chemical test kits, which sell for $10 to $20
> each, work much faster than does the current system employed by the
> U.S. Agriculture Department...Abbott licenses its test from Ireland's
> Enfer Scientific..."
>
> An overall estimate is provided in another article in the same issue,
> from pg. A1 (by Scott Kilman, Steve Stecklow and Laurie McGinley)
>
> "...Based on the European Union's experience, the cost of a
> comprehensive mad-cow testing program can be quite high.  In the EU,
> all cattle over the age of 30 months are tested before they enter the
> food chain.
>
> Bruno Oesch, chief executive of Prionics AG, a mad-cow testing firm in
> Zurich, figures that it would cost the U.S. roughly $300 million to
> implement a similar program..."
>

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