Johanns wants 1,000 cattle tested each day

WASHINGTON (AP)--The U.S. government plans to indefinitely maintain its faster level of testing for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, rather than scaling back testing in December as originally envisioned, according to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

With the lucrative Japanese market poised to reopen to U.S. cattle, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns says he wants government scientists to continue testing about 1,000 cattle a day.

"I have just been very reluctant to even set a date as to when we would bring that to a close," Johanns said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's safe to say the enhanced surveillance is going to extend beyond the end of December."

Johanns said his decision is not about Japan, which bought more U.S. beef than any other foreign customer until the U.S. discovered its first case of BSE. Johanns said he wants to make sure testing represents all regions of the country and that healthy animals are tested.

Still, critics of the department said higher testing levels are needed to reassure Japan and other trading partners.

"I've said time and time again, there is little risk of BSE in U.S. beef, but it is obvious that we have not yet convinced key trading partners of that," Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said Nov. 11.

Harkin and other lawmakers have been pressuring the department to do at least 20,000 more tests on cows that are healthy before testing is scaled back.

The government has been testing only sick, injured or dead cows, those deemed to be at "high risk" of having BSE. "High risk" means animals showing signs of mad- cow disease, such as nervous system problems or emaciation, "downer" animals that can't walk or dead animals.

Tests are done on brain tissue from cows, so animals must be killed before they can be tested. There is no test that can confirm the disease in a live animal.

Johanns' predecessor, Ann Veneman, promised to test healthy animals based on recommendations from a panel of international experts on BSE. Johanns said he recently reread Veneman's comments on testing healthy animals in transcripts from a congressional hearing.

"Very clearly, she made a commitment to do it," Johanns said. "That's good enough for me. I intend to honor that commitment. So we've been working our way through 20,000 healthy animals."

The nation's first case of BSE was confirmed in December 2003 in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state. In response, the USDA increased its testing in June 2004 from an average of about 55 daily to more than 1,000 a day.

Authorities have tested 516,496 animals and turned up a second case in a Texas-born cow that tested positive in June. The number of cows tested is about 1 percent of the 45 million adult cows in the U.S.

As part of its campaign to protect against the spread of BSE, the government also inspects processing and rendering plants and tests animal feed. The only way BSE is known to spread is through feed containing certain tissue from infected cows. Adding animal protein to feed was common practice to speed growth until the U.S. banned it in 1997.