Two former USDA veterinarians and one scientist still serving at USDA have come forward to charge that at least two 1997 investigations concerning severely ill cattle were not performed correctly.

Dr. Masuo Doi, a retired USDA veterinarian, Dr. Karl Langheindrich, chief scientist at the USDA laboratory in Athens, Ga., and Lester Friedlander, a former veterinarian and USDA inspector who was fired in 1995 after allegedly criticizing safety practices within the inspection system, have all made charges that USDA botched two tests that might have confirmed the cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

The Canadian Broadcast Corporation, working with documents and videos it obtained from USDA and elsewhere, reports that an animal that arrived at a slaughterhouse in Oriskany Falls, N.Y. may have been the United States' first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but tests that cleared the animal were conducted on the wrong parts of its brain.

According to CBC, three months later another animal appeared at the same slaughterhouse, exhibiting similar symptoms. The animal's brain was sent out for testing, and Dr. Doi was told verbally that it tested negative. He says he demanded to see the test results, but they were never provided.

CBC finally got those test results. According to notes from the scientist who conducted the test, so much of the brain was missing that the test was probably compromised. He wrote that the results were of "questionable validity" because he couldn't tell which part of the brain he was testing.

Langheindrich told CBC that no one can ever say for sure what the results were in either incident, other than both animals suffered from a central nervous system disease. In the videos, one animal is seen lunging at workers and staggering hunchbacked in the yard; the other animal is disoriented and unable to stand.

Ed Loyd, press secretary for Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, disputes the entire scenario. "They're really reaching if they have to go back to the mid-90s, when we were testing six hundred or seven hundred head of cattle per year," he told Meatingplace.com. USDA has to be transparent in its testing, he said, "because if we lied we would jeopardize everything we have worked for, we would lose consumer confidence and all those markets we have worked so hard to open would close right back up."

James Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation, says the charges "are devoid of factual information. Those samples were sent to the National Veterinary Lab in Ames, Iowa, and were tested and retested. And they came back negative for BSE; it was clear and unequivocal."

Meanwhile, Friedlander has made news across Canada with his charges in testimony to the House of Commons that veterinarians within USDA who are nearing retirement age have told him that tests conducted by private labs returned positive BSE results while tests at USDA labs on the same samples returned negative results. He refused to identify his sources, saying that they would be fired if their names were revealed.

Friedlander's charges have been met with skepticism, and he offered on Tuesday to undergo a lie detector test.

In another recent event, an animal in St. Angelo, Tex. which exhibited the classic symptoms of BSE was simply not tested by USDA, and was sent for rendering instead.

USDA's Loyd concedes that the Texas case was a mistake. "It was a miscommunication between APHIS and FSIS," he says. "It was very unfortunate, and we have since had intensive training to make sure everyone is using the same standard. We want to test every high-risk animal, and that one should have been tested." The animal was rendered he said, but the resultant products were quarantined and never made it into the food supply.