FDA announces new rules on cattle feed

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday plans to announce new restrictions to keep mad cow disease from being spread through cattle feed, livestock industry sources said Wednesday.

The feed restrictions are aimed at closing loopholes in a rule issued in 1997. That rule bans the use of cattle protein in feed for other cattle. A misshapen protein is blamed for mad cow, a fatal, brain-wasting disease also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

In January, the FDA announced additional restrictions on feed ingredients, including a ban on the use of cattle blood. The American Feed Industry Association said Wednesday that the FDA will announce more restrictions Friday.

The trade group said the FDA’s new proposals would be in line with recommendations made in February by an international panel created by the Agriculture Department. The association’s statement did not specify the possible additional restrictions, and the international panel had a range of recommendations.

The United States has had one case of mad cow, diagnosed in a Washington state Holstein in December.

The FDA’s January proposal also called for cosmetics and dietary supplement manufacturers to stop the use of cattle tissue that might harbor the BSE protein, including tissue from animals that could not stand at slaughter. A livestock industry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an FDA official had said the agency was planning to have such a ban take effect Friday.

Mad cow has been linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare but fatal disease in humans, but the FDA has said the world’s known cases of that have been linked to actually eating beef.

FDA officials were not available for comment late Wednesday on the specifics of their announcement, but officials have said they were planning it for Friday.