Brancel: FDA ready for advanced drug testing in milk

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is about to roll out its new program to test milk samples for a variety of veterinary drugs and Wisconsin - with its high number of dairy farms - is on the front line.

That was the word from state agriculture Secretary Ben Brancel in an address to members of Wisconsin's Dairy Business Association (DBA) at their recent annual meeting.

Brancel said the federal food safety agency informed his office that it is about to begin testing farm milk samples for drugs that have turned up in cull dairy cows and veal calves.

The reasoning of the agency is that if farmers are shipping animals with drug residue in the meat, they may also be shipping milk that contains these substances.

Traditionally, milk has been tested only for the beta lactam group of drugs - those that are in the penicillin family. But concern over the drug residues in dairy cull cows has prompted the agency to consider testing for additional drugs in different classes.

The FDA has been trying to work out a way to do this testing for several years. Dairy processors have been concerned about possible recalls of their products if it turns out that their milk shippers test positive.

Farmers have been concerned that they wouldn't have any processor willing to take their milk if they got bad results in one of these tests.

Everyone involved in dairy is concerned that the information might give the dairy industry a black eye. Brancel said he worries about how the FDA will use the test results.

"It makes us nervous. We are concerned about how they will report this to the public. It's a huge issue."

There is also concern that the process could interfere with market activities. "It could affect you in the future," he told the DBA.

Brancel explained that in this testing protocol there will be a set of milk samples taken from 900 farms that have previously sent cull animals to market with drug residues. There have been 1,800 dairy farms that have had "tissue violations" in their cull cows or bob veal calves.

In a compromise with the industry, the agency will also test milk from an equal number of randomly selected dairy farms that have not had these tissue violations. The test protocol has been set up so the identity of the farms will be kept off the samples.

Though samples will be taken by agency officials, the testing will be done at a commercial lab to further keep names and identities secret. Testing, which will take about seven days, will look for 26 different drug residues in the milk.