Ethics Newsline®

SEATTLE
The federal government has opened a criminal investigation into allegations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) falsified records to bolster confidence in its testing system for mad cow disease.

The USDA, accused of having an inadequate testing system for mad-cow disease, filed reports documenting that the nation’s first known carrier of mad cow disease, slaughtered last December, was a “downer,” meaning it was too infirm to stand and had been flagged for testing.

The USDA’s testimony contradicts three people — the man who slaughtered the animal, the hauler who transported it, and the slaughterhouse owner — who say the cow was not a downer.

“That cow was a walker,” Dave Louthan, the man who says he killed the infected cow, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer earlier this month. “I’ve been screaming about this for two months and they didn’t do anything about it.”

In a sharp break with the USDA and a slaughterhouse vet, Louthan said he believes the government’s documents were changed after the fact, disputing the officials’ records of the cow and its condition.

If Louthan and the others are right, the fact that the cow was tested may have more to do with sheer luck than with a reliable screening system as the USDA has been maintaining, according to critics.

“The fact that this cow was found to have mad cow was a fluke,” Jack Pannell, communications director for the watchdog Government Accountability Project, contended to the Post-Intelligencer. “The surveillance system should be examined to see whether it’s scientifically based and designed to actually find [mad cow].”

The USDA continues to deny any wrongdoing, insisting its records are accurate.