McDonald's gave its suppliers a deadline of April 1 to provide documentation that their cattle hadn't been fed with meat and bone meal from cattle or other ruminants. The Food and Drug Administration banned the use of mammal proteins in livestock feed in 1997, but those standards have been ignored by many cattle ranchers.

The day the steps were announced, McDonald's spokesman Walt Riker told the Wall Street Journal, "We could do better from a prevention standpoint. Because of the [mad cow] issue in Europe, we thought it was absolutely prudent and common sense to say, 'Let's look to see if anything needs to be tightened up.'"

The company also said it would create a blue-ribbon committee of doctors, scientists and other experts to find ways to eliminate the risk of mad cow disease in McDonald's products.

Time after time, U.S. officials have stated that regulations here will prevent the introduction of mad cow disease in the U.S., only to be discredited by embarrassing revelations, the latest of which was news in January that feed manufacturer Purina had shipped the wrong meal to a Texas ranch. As a result 1,222 cattle were fed banned meat and bone meal. The cattle were quarantined and ultimately tested negative for BSE. But the embarrassment only got worse when an investigation by the FDA showed widespread noncompliance with the regulation.

The scary news led to a crackdown and tougher enforcement -- by both government regulators and companies like McDonald's, which stand to lose the most if foot-and-mouth or BSE is ever discovered in the United States. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, McDonald's convened a meeting on Dec. 18, over a month before the Texas incident, to determine whether its suppliers were adhering to federal standards.

In some respects, these scares have been overly hyped. The United States moved very early to keep BSE from coming to these shores. It banned the import of beef and other ruminants from the United Kingdom in 1989; it banned imports from continental Europe in 1997, following outbreaks there.

But the new auditing procedures, no doubt, were also influenced by the frighteningly close call McDonald's had in Italy earlier this year. In January, cows were discovered at the Italian meat processor Cremonini that were suspected of being infected with BSE. The announcement shook McDonald's foundations, since Cremonini is the company's exclusive supplier of hamburger patties in Italy. The company quickly announced that there were no cattle earmarked for Big Macs at the plant where the suspected cases were found. But the fact that the scare hit close to home demonstrated how important it is for companies like McDonald's to be able to determine the provenance of the food products they sell.

"The problem has always been with ground beef," says journalist Nicols Fox, author of "Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It." "One has the potential of including those infectious bits of the cow, and that's why McDonald's has taken this proactive stance, as you noticed last week."

"How do you know what's in a hamburger?" she asks. "There's something called 'mechanically recovered meat' and that's a serious, serious problem. It can have spinal cord in it, and that's the infectious part with regard to mad cow disease. People are going to look a little more suspiciously at hamburger, at least in Europe. I don't think most Americans have any idea about recovered meat," she says.

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