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McDonald's to enforce tough compliance standards
Chicago, March 14: Mcdonald's Corp., which has been struggling with fears of mad cow disease in Europe, said it will enforce compliance standards for its US beef suppliers to ensure that the brain-wasting disease stays out of its US hamburger supply. McDonald's, among the largest purchasers of beef worldwide, has given its suppliers an April 1 deadline for providing documentation that the cattle they buy meet US Food and Drug Administration standards for feed, a spokesman said on Tuesday. The company, based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Illinois, expects 100 percent compliance from its beef suppliers, said the spokesman, Walt Riker. "We wanted to help build extra firewalls of safety around the food supply chain in the U.S.," Riker told Reuters. "We have a pretty big shopping cart, and when we come down the aisle people see it." Since animals are believed to contract the disease by eating infected tissue from other animals, the U.S. livestock industry in 1996 voluntarily agreed not to give cattle any feed containing remains of cattle or other cud-chewing animals such as sheep and goats. The following year the FDA officially banned the use of such feeds in the cattle industry, but the agency said in January that many companies that produce animal feed in the United States were not following the regulations aimed at keeping mad cow disease from spreading to humans if it enters the United States. Mad cow, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was discovered in Britain in 1986. (Reuters) Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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