Mad Cows and Americans

Lax testing standards for North American cattle could be masking a wider
contagion

By John Stauber
In These Times magazine
January 15, 2005

On January 2, Canadian officials announced that an Alberta dairy cow had
tested positive for mad cow disease ‹ the third time a North American bovine
has been diagnosed with the neurological disease. [NOTE: In the week it
took this article to be printed, another mad cow was confirmed in Canada,
the 4th indigenous North American mad cow.]

Most Canadians and Americans believe that their governments have taken the
necessary measures to stop the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), the scientific name for mad cow disease. For a decade the official
line of both governments and the corporate meat and livestock industry has
been that the disease could not occur in either country because of extensive
safeguards such as the ³1997 firewall feed ban² that officials claimed
prevented the feeding of cattle protein to cattle, the means of infection
for the deadly brain disease.

However, the regulations adopted by the United States and Canada in 1997
were too little and too late. For example, it is still legal in both
countries to wean calves on formula containing cattle blood as a protein
source.

Why have only three mad cows been discovered to date in North America? Both
Canada and the United States have increased the number of cattle tested by
each government for the disease, but the testing remains woefully inadequate
by the standards of the European Union nations and Japan.

Of the 36 million cattle slaughtered in 2004 and put into the human and
animal food supply, only 176,468 were tested. In at least three instances
U.S. cattle have tested as possibly having mad cow disease on sophisticated
³quick tests,² but further testing has led the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) to announce the results to be negative. However, the
government testing is secretive and suspect. No independent scientists or
laboratories have reviewed or confirmed any of the suspected mad cows. Each
time the USDA has announced a suspect cow the cattle futures market has been
thrown into temporary turmoil, and the industry is pressuring the government
to stop announcing suspect animals altogether.

It was private mad cow testing that eventually revealed the presence of the
disease in Germany. So it is not surprising that when the Kansas-based
Creekstone Farms Premium Beef company reached an agreement with Japan to
sell beef that the company had tested to the Japanese, the USDA, invoking a
1913 law, warned that mad cow testing by private U.S. firms is illegal.
Creekstone hoped to save hundreds of company jobs by testing its cattle and
reopening its market with Japan.

The first rule of public relations in a crisis is to ³manage the outrage.²
The December 23, 2003, announcement of a mad cow in the United States
resulted in a media feeding frenzy, but a well-prepared and coordinated USDA
and industry PR campaign tamed it within weeks. Since then the media has
primarily echoed soothing assurances by the secretary of agriculture and
various industry-funded third-party voices such as the brilliantly named
Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Consequently, most Americans think that
the necessary protective measures against mad cow disease have been taken,
and there is not the public outcry, such as the one that took place in
Europe, which might force the U.S. government to follow Europe¹s lead and
institute a total feed ban on feeding livestock to livestock, along with
extensive animal testing.

As mysterious a killer as mad cow disease and its human equivalent,
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) are, the steps needed to fix the problem are
simple and straightforward. The disease is spread via an infectious protein
dubbed a ³prion² by U.S. Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner. When
infectious animals are fed to people and livestock, mad cow disease can be
transmitted. Banning the feeding of livestock to livestock is the solution,
but that deprives the livestock industry of a method to turn a waste
product‹slaughterhouse offal‹into a valuable resource: livestock protein and
fat supplements.

Had the United States heeded experts and implemented a British-style ban on
feeding livestock to livestock, and tightened the ban further in 1996 when
humans began dying, the mad cow crisis in the United States could have been
averted. Instead, we now have mad cow disease in North America, calves in
the United States and Canada weaned on cattle blood, and the Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) quietly reviewing the mysterious deaths of young
Americans from sporadic CJD to see if the cause of death might be eating
U.S. mad cows.

Sporadic CJD is supposedly an exceedingly rare disease that kills, according
to the CDC, maybe one in a million people. Reports of CJD deaths among
people in their 20s, 30s and 40s have surfaced in the past five years in
California, Utah, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey,
Texas and other states. With a mad cow-type disease infecting U.S. deer,
called chronic wasting disease, and U.S. sheep long infected with scrapie
(the ovine form of mad cow disease), suspicions are growing that these
diseases might be moving into the human populations. Yet, most human
dementia deaths are not autopsied, and there is no nationwide requirement
for mandatory reporting or investigation of CJD deaths.

Mad cow disease was never seen before 1985. It was not confirmed that humans
were dying of it until 1996. No human mad cow disease spread through blood
transfusions was documented until 2003, the same year that the first two
cases of mad cows were confirmed in North America.

One of the biggest mysteries of these related diseases is the existence of
different strains, and the way new strains emerge when one strain moves into
a new host, as happens in laboratory tests or when a so-called species
barrier is jumped via the consumption of contaminated feed or an infected
animal.

A worst-case scenario can be imagined, and should inform the actions of
governments. For example, mad cow disease does not appear to spread from
animal to animal. But the equivalent disease in North American deer and elk,
chronic wasting disease, does appear to be horizontally infectious. One deer
can apparently infect another through saliva or feces. The nightmare: the
emergence of a fatal human dementia spread through kissing.