NR APPC
AU Harden,B.
TI 'We Were Lucky About One Thing' - Company Owner Says Meat All Went to Same Customer
QU Washington Post, Thursday, December 25, 2003; Page A01
IA http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29005-2003Dec24.html
PT Zeitungsartikel
VT
MOSES LAKE, Wash., Dec. 24 - There was homemade Christmas fudge in the room where butchers pull on their rubber boots. And just past a sign that said, "Beef. It's What's For Dinner," there were dozens of Christmas cards from longtime customers of Vern's Moses Lake Meats.
But every last drop of holiday cheer on this Christmas Eve had been drained out of this old one-story slaughterhouse on the southwestern edge of Moses Lake, a farm town in eastern Washington's semi-desert country. It was here that the first cow in the United States to test positive for mad cow disease was slaughtered two weeks ago.
"I have so much nervous energy I prefer to stand," said Tom Ellestad, who, with his older brother Larry, runs the meat company where the Holstein cow was slaughtered.
Pacing on the walkway in front of the faded red, concrete-block slaughterhouse that his father bought 33 years ago, Tom Ellestad said he learned less than 24 hours ago that the infected cow had been butchered here.
He received a call from federal officials about the time that Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman was telling the nation about the discovery of the disease but saying that she planned to serve beef for her holiday dinner.
Since then, at the government's insistence, Ellestad has sent a letter recalling all 10,000 pounds of meat from the 20 cows - including the one that tested positive - slaughtered here Dec. 9. He said he is doing everything he can to cooperate with the government.
"We were lucky about one thing," he said. "We shipped that entire day's production to one customer in one truck."
The customer has been identified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as Midway Meats Inc., in the western Washington town of Centralia. From there, it is believed that some of the meat from the infected cow was also sent for processing to two plants in the Portland, Ore., area, according to the USDA and an official with the Washington State Beef Commission.
On one thing, though, Ellestad said he disagreed with the government. Federal officials have described the cow in question as a "downer" animal, meaning that it was unable to walk, which raises questions about whether it should have been slaughtered and put into the food supply.
But Ellestad remembers seeing the animal. "It was not a downer cow," he said, trying to hold back his anger. "I saw it walking."
Federal officials have said the cow suffered from obturator nerve paralysis, a common injury cows suffer while giving birth. It damages a big nerve that runs through the cow's pelvis.
Ellestad said that his slaughterhouse has a policy of refusing to slaughter cows that look too sick or injured. "There are some animals that we will not accept," he said. "This cow looked relatively healthy. I saw her up and walking."
Vern's Moses Lake Meats, though, does specialize in slaughtering older dairy cows culled from farms because they are injured or no longer produce milk in sufficient quantity.
Because of that specialty, Ellestad said, he agreed three months ago to participate in a USDA testing program for mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
As part of the test, tissue from the brain or spinal cord of an animal believed to be at risk of contamination is sampled and sent to a federal laboratory. Ellestad said the cow that tested positive was a likely candidate for the procedure - although he did not say why.
BSE is known to infect cow brain and spinal tissues. Meat and milk, however, are not believed to carry the infectious agents.
Ellestad said that Dec. 9, one of his butchers, as a routine part of slaughtering the cow, separated the brain and spinal cord from the rest of carcass. The carcass, he said, was loaded onto a truck bound for the meat plant in western Washington, and all the other waste products from the cow were sent to a rendering plant. He declined to name the rendering plant.
A report in Thursday's Seattle Times said the rendering plant is in Spokane, Wash. The newspaper quoted an executive from the company that owns the rendering plant, Ray Kelly, as saying the tissue was processed but was still in the plant.
Ellestad also declined to say where the cow came from. But a spokesman for the Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine identified the dairy farm as the Sunny Dene Ranch in Mabton, Wash., about 100 miles southwest of Moses Lake. The spokesman, Charlie Powell, said that he spoke to the ranch's owner, Bill Wavrin, who told him that the cow came from his dairy herd of more than 4,000 animals.
"I was struck by how logical and reasonable Dr. Wavrin sounded in the face of all this," Powell said. The ranch is under USDA quarantine. Wavrin did not respond to a message left with a woman who answered his business phone.
Here in Moses Lake, Ellestad said he thinks that any spinal tissue carrying BSE was stripped away from the cow's carcass before it was sent off "to be turned into hamburger."
"We are not a modern facility," Ellestad said. "We are a traditional slaughterhouse. But we can visually tell if we have gotten all of the spinal cord out of a carcass or not."
As for the future of Vern's Moses Lake Meats, Ellestad said he is very worried and trying to be hopeful.
"We are working today," he said. "We are continuing to do the testing. The inspection system works, because we caught this cow."
AD Blaine Harden, Washington Post Staff Writer
SP englisch
PO USA