WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - Federal regulators overseeing the livestock feeding industry say fewer than 100 U.S. companies have violated regulations meant to prevent the spread of mad cow disease.

The Food and Drug Administration's database on feed inspections shows 12 recent cases which the FDA said warranted its most serious action. Another 80 firms had minor violations.

All of the dozen firms listed on April 23 as FDA's most serious cases had problems noted by inspectors during the past five months. Those had violations that have the potential for mixing prohibited material or had serious labeling or record-keeping problems, said Steve Solomon, deputy director of the FDA's office of regional operations in Washington.

The other 80 active cases were recommended for voluntary action; two were referred to state regulators, records show.

Most firms make corrections very quickly, Solomon said.

The bulwark of the United State's defense against bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is a 1997 ban on feeding cattle protein or bone meal made from other cattle or other ruminants.

It was put in place because the most likely means for mad cow to spread is by feeding livestock meal that contains nervous system tissue from infected animals. People who eat beef tainted by the aberrant protein that causes BSE can get a fatal variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It's also know as mad cow disease.

"We still think it needs a lot of vigilance and we want to make sure nobody becomes complacent to the regulation. We think it is a credible firewall," Solomon said.

The FDA's database, updated last week, includes 14,037 companies still in business. The inspection data is current to April 17. The agency's online database allows checks of a company's compliance with mad cow rules at its last inspection.

Since the 1997 ban, FDA has issued more than 50 recalls on livestock feeds, including about a dozen recalls in the past year, he said.

Among those firms listed by the FDA for official action at their last inspections were livestock feeders in Oklahoma, Indiana and Texas; a major feed manufacturer in Ohio; and smaller nonlicensed feed mills and distributors in Kansas, Georgia, West Virginia, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas.

On the Net:

FDA database: http://www.accessdata3.fda.gov/BSEInspect/

AP-WS-04-27-04 1741EDT