Riker declined to comment on the analysts' reports. The company will update investors about first-quarter sales Wednesday. McDonald's, the nation's largest beef buyer, started notifying its slaughterhouses in January of the need to certify cattle. The action grew out of a meeting the company organized in December with government officials and representatives of the beef and rendering industries, Riker said. They recognized that there were holes in the government's enforcement of feed requirements.
Animals get the disease by eating the tissue of other infected animals.
So the U.S. livestock industry in 1996 voluntarily banned sheep and certain other animal parts from U.S. feed after an outbreak of the disease in Britain. The FDA also imposed paperwork and labeling restrictions associated with the ban. But the feed production and distribution systems remain vulnerable at many points. About 1,200 Texas cattle were quarantined in January after they ate animal feed containing the banned ingredients. The feedmaker, Purina Mills, told the FDA it may have mistakenly mixed meat bone meal into a cow feed supplement.