Canada to turn over feed records: Pete Hisey on 1/18/05 for Meatingplace.com: The Canadian Food Inspection Agency will make all of its compliance records concerning Canadian cattle feed producers available to Canadian and U.S. investigators.

A spokesman said that a compilation of all records dating back to the institution of the feed ban in August 1997 would be released to the public. The records show a compliance rate of 95 percent to 99 percent and contain an audit that shows, for instance, what kind of feed was produced and when, where it was sold, cleaning and flushing procedures and the like.

The report is likely to attract more questions than it answers, however. Stan Eby, president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, told the Calgary Herald that critics will want to know what happened with the incidents that were not in compliance. The issue of allowing plants to add bovine offal to chicken feed, which in some cases eventually gets ground up with chicken litter and added to cattle feed, is going to get a fresh airing.

A technical team from USDA, as well as an independent team of international experts, is probing the Canadian cattle industry, focusing on the feed issue. Separately, a nine-person fact-finding group from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association is arriving in Canada to review the entire industry, from the feed issue to backlogs of cattle awaiting export.

The four Canadian cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, including one animal that had been sold to a U.S. grower, have spooked the entire North American cattle industry. The fourth case, discovered in late December 2004 but not revealed until early January, is particularly worrisome, since that animal was born some six months after a ban on ruminant materials in ruminant feed was put into effect in Canada. The farmer who owned the animal told authorities that he bought an authorized feed supplement in the spring of 1998; the feed ban went into effect in the fall of 1997, after a one-month grace period from enactment in August of that year.

The date of that animal's birth raises several questions. Were feed producers ignoring the ban on ruminant material? Was adulterated feed the result of using inventoried feed produced before the ban or the result of cross-contamination at the plant or during the shipping process? And, if the animal was fed safe feed, will the industry now have to reassess the commonly held belief that BSE infection is the direct result of oral ingestion of prions from bovine central nervous system material?