EDMONTON – One of the biggest questions asked by farmers, reporters and industry officials about the recent bovine spongiform encephalopathy case is why it took almost four months to test the head of the cow.
For officials, the finding of a diseased animal, even four months after it was slaughtered, is proof of the inspection system’s success, not its failure.
“Our system does work. If the animal was suspected to have BSE, or was for slaughter into the food chain, it would have been processed immediately,” said Alberta Agriculture minister Shirley McClellan.
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“If this animal was to go into the food chain, this would have been tested as a priority. This animal was condemned and it did not go into the food chain,” said McClellan.
An inspector at a provincial abattoir pulled the cow out of the line of animals that were to be used for food.
The head from any animal that is condemned is sent for testing at the provincial laboratory.
Because the meat was not for human consumption, this test dropped to the bottom of the queue behind tissue samples from deer, elk and other animals in which the meat was to be used for food.
“If samples aren’t high risk, they are left to the lowest priority,” said Gerald Ollis, Alberta’s chief provincial veterinarian.
“Even if we had all the money in the world, we would still priorize,” he said.
Combined with a backlog of tests from cervids is a shortage of pathologists to work in the
Edmonton lab.
Ollis said eliminating pathology services at labs in Airdrie, Fairview and Lethbridge in 1998 to save money didn’t increase the diagnosis time.
If the department was still providing routine diagnostic services in the provincial labs, the government wouldn’t have the resources to properly search for diseases like BSE or chronic wasting disease in cervids, he said.
“I argue it’s been a benefit,” said Ollis. “The privatization of routine diagnostics has enhanced the surveillance of BSE and CWD.”
But some are skeptical and it’s a question McClellan is asked almost daily by reporters.
“I don’t want to spend the whole scrum plowing the same ground we’ve already plowed for the past four days,” McClellan told reporters when she was asked again about the delay.
When federal officials are asked, they simply point to the province.
Federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief didn’t have an estimate of how long testing takes in an animal condemned in a federal inspection plant, but he said the federal system works more quickly.
“I can’t give you an exact time, but out of the federal plants, tests are much, much quicker,” he said.
Joyce Van Donkersgoed, an Alberta veterinarian and a member of the provincial government’s foreign disease group, said she doesn’t know if the diseased animal would have been caught earlier if the provincial pathology labs were still open.
“It probably plays no role,” she said, but she believes changes will now be made to ensure a quicker turnaround time.
“I’m sure there’s going to be an evaluation of that system, big time,” she said.
“Maybe some of the cutbacks weren’t good cutbacks.”
Alberta premier Ralph Klein has said there will be a complete investigation of the food inspection system from “farm to fork.”
