Cow Parts Used in Candles, Soaps Recalled (and a warning for gardeners)
 

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Cow parts - including hooves, bones, fat and innards -
are used in everything from hand cream and antifreeze, to poultry feed and
gardening soils.

In the next tangled phase of the mad cow investigation, federal inspectors are
concentrating on byproducts from the tainted Holstein, which might have gone to
a half-dozen distributors in the Northwest, said Dalton Hobbs, spokesman for
the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Now, it's the secondary parts, the raw material for soil, soaps, candles, that
are being recalled.

Los Angeles-based Baker Commodities, Inc., announced Friday it has voluntarily
withheld 800 tons of cow byproduct processed in its Seattle and Tacoma, Wash.,
plants, said company spokesman Ray Kelly. The company, like other
``renderers,'' takes what is left of the cow after it is slaughtered and boils
it down into tallow, used for candles, lubricants and soaps, and bone meal used
in fertilizer and animal feed.

If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determines that the material is
tainted, the company's loss could total $200,000, Kelly said.

``It's obviously a tragic thing for the whole beef industry, but it's
definitely a sizable hit for us,'' he said.

Darling International, Inc., the nation's largest independent rendering
operation in the U.S., has also been contacted by the FDA. But officials at
their Tacoma and Portland plants, as well as at their international
headquarters in Irving, Texas, declined to comment on how their operation has
been affected.

``Our first priority was to make sure it didn't go into the food supply,'' said
Hobbs, reiterating that meat sent to two Oregon distributors was recalled
earlier in the week.

But tracing all of the sick cow's parts to their final destination, including
numerous possible incarnations in household products, has proved challenging.

``It's like the old Upton Sinclair line - 'We use everything but the squeal,'''
Hobbs said. ``We have nearly 100 percent utilization of the animal. But when
you have so many niche markets, it makes it incredibly challenging to trace
where this one cow may have gone.''

Companies that use bone meal from cows to create fertilizers, a kind of soil
popular with rose growers, may find themselves under the spotlight. At the
height of Britain's mad cow epidemic in the 1990s, three victims of the human
form of mad cow were found to be gardeners.

In 1996, the Royal Horticultural Society of London released an advisory,
cautioning gardeners to wear face masks after it was reported that the dust
from the bone-meal soil could carry the mutated protein.

But Scientific American editor Philip Yam said there was no conclusive evidence
the gardeners died from inhaling soil containing the infected cow tissue.

A far greater risk is the cow material - including roughage and offal - used in
animal feed, said Yam, whose book, ``The Pathological Protein,'' is a
scientific account of the disease.

In 1997, the FDA banned cow feed that included cow byproducts, after scientists
concluded that the feed was the main transmitter of mad cow disease. The
disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is found
in a cow's nervous system.

Yam points out that while giving cow feed to cows was outlawed, feeding it to
poultry is still legal. Some farmers, he said, are still in the habit of
feeding their cows ``chicken litter'' - the remains of the poultry feed,
scooped off the ground, feathers and all.

``It's one of those loopholes,'' Yam said. ``It sounds good in theory - don't
feed cow to cow, feed the remains to chickens. But in practice things happen.''
**



12/27/03 11:11 EST