I lived in London over the summer of 2002 and I ate everything that found its way to my plate - including beef. I lived with a British family and I figured if they thought it was safe to eat, then it was okay.
After reading Mad Cow USA by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, I still don't worry about the beef I ate in London, but I am concerned that America didn't learn the lesson it should have from the British Mad Cow epidemic.
Join me on the flip, and don't worry - I'm not out to scare you away from eating meat.
About The Disease
"Mad cow," or bovine spongiform encephelopathy (BSE), falls within a class of illnesses called Transmissible Spongiform Encephelopathies, or TSEs. They are characterized by microscopic spongy holes in the victims' brains, and they are 100% fatal. TSEs have long incubation periods - a person may first show symptoms of the disease up to 40 years after they contracted it.
The first symptoms vary from strain to strain and from species to species. The victim may be forgetful, sleepy, anxious, clumsy, or aggressive. Eventually, the victim can no longer stand up, swallow, or talk. TSEs take anywhere from a few months to over a year to kill their victims.
In addition to BSE, there is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), kuru, and Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome (GSS) in humans; scrapie in sheep; and transmissible mink encephelopathy (TME) in mink. When tested, many if not all of these diseases are transmissible across a variety of species. However, the method of testing - injecting infected brains into the test subject - isn't exactly something that might happen to you by accident.
Despite decades of study, TSEs are not well understood. They don't provoke your body to get a fever or produce antibodies like you would if you got strep throat or a cold. Most illnesses are either transmitted genetically or they are infectious, but TSEs appear to be both. A current theory is that they are transmitted by infectious proteins called "prions."
There is no way to test whether you have a TSE while you are alive. One scientist claims to have invented a urine test to detect them, but he is strangely secretive about his methods so there's still no accepted way to test the living for TSEs. The only way to currently check for a TSE is to examine the victim's brain for microscopic spongy holes.
Creating an Epidemic
It seems that TSEs naturally pop up - rarely - through random mutations, affecting about one person in a million. Unless we do something stupid, we won't have an epidemic on our hands. Your chance of dying of a TSE will fall somewhere between your chance of getting a brain tumor from your cell phone and your chance of being eaten by an escaped zoo animal.
What qualifies as stupid? Look at the cannibalistic Fore tribespeople of Papua New Guinea. Presumably, there was an original case of kuru that one of the tribespeople got. If nobody had eaten them, then nobody else would have gotten kuru. As years went by, more and more people died of kuru, and each one was eaten, passing the disease onto the diners. The tribe faced extinction. Once cannibalism was identified as the cause and outlawed, the epidemic passed. However, Fore people who had engaged in cannabalism in the past continued to die of kuru up to 40 years later.
In the case of British cows, an original mad cow was fed to other cows, who were in turn fed to even more cows, and so forth. The problem was that given the long incubation period and the lack of a test for living cows, nobody knew they had an epidemic on their hands until it was too late. As each unsymptomatic mad cow was slaughtered, rendered, and fed to more cows, the problem grew but never registered on anyone's radar. Unsymptomatic mad cows went into the food supply. When tens of thousands of cows fell sick, the Brits recognized the problem - too late.
Averting an Epidemic
Prior to the British mad cow epidemic, scientists were aware of scrapie in sheep, TME in minks, and CJD in humans. Scrapie was identified several hundred years ago and humans lived alongside it in several countries, including the UK and the US. While efforts were made to stamp it out, scientists did not believe it was transmissible to humans. Of course, the way to find that out for sure - put a sick sheep's brain in a blender and inject some into a human - was unthinkable.
One method used to get rid of scrapie was "depopulation" - kill every sheep in an affected flock. Sometimes this practice was extended to flocks where sheep from the affected flock came from as well. Still unknown was whether or not a premise remained contagious even after the sick sheep were gone.
When mad cow entered the scene, there was an assumption made that cows got the disease from sheep. In the 1980's, it became popular to feed cows the rendered remains of sheep, cows, etc. Such a practice solved two problems: it provided an outlet for waste that would otherwise go to a landfill (slaughterhouse leftovers, roadkill, dead pets, etc), and it fattened up the cows nicely. Knowing that TSEs are transmissible by eating infected material, it wasn't much of a jump to assume the epidemic began with a cow eating a sick sheep.
At least one scientist, Richard Marsh, had convincing evidence that perhaps mad cow began with cows, not sheep. When a mink farm broke out with TME, he examined their dietary records. The mink never ate sheep - but they did eat "downer" cows. It appeared that BSE appeared on its own in cows without any connection to sheep. By the way, this happened in 1985 in the U.S.
Downer Cow Syndrome is a garbage can diagnosis for any cow that falls down and can't get up anymore. It can happen for any number of reasons - and no doubt BSE is naturally rare. When scientists injected cows with infected mink brain, the cow showed no symptoms of BSE - it just fell over one day. Perhaps this points to a strain of BSE that developed here in the U.S. and transmitted only to mink who ate the downer cow.
Given this information, the British knew they had a BSE epidemic on their hands. They assumed it came from sheep with scrapie (despite the information from Richard Marsh) and they assumed it was not contagious to humans, as they assumed scrapie was not. As there is no test for living cows, the only way to keep sick cows out of the food chain would have been to keep ALL British cows out of the food chain (or test every single one after slaughter). Rather than face such severe economic consequences, the British did nothing.
Years later, when no one could deny the likelihood that British beef infected humans with a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and teenagers were dying, the British admitted that mad cow beef could infect humans. By that time, they had already ended the practice of cow cannibalism and the epidemic among cows was ending. Even though the vCJD victims were infected years before and currently British beef was most likely safe (or at least safer), the market for British beef crashed.
To prevent the mad cow epidemic in the first place, the British could have forbidden feeding mammals to mammals. No cow, pig, goat, or sheep can eat cow, pig, goat, or sheep. To prevent an epidemic here, we can do the same. If, god forbid, a sick cow slips by, at least it won't infect an infinite number of others.
True, this will create a dilemma if we end up with millions of pounds of animal waste per year that was formerly fed back to animals. On the other hand, the economic fallout of an American mad cow epidemic are unthinkable. It won't just affect ranchers, dairy farmers, truckers, slaughterhouses, and restaurants - it will also hurt the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries as they also use products from cows. We would also kill our markets for exports.
Are We Safe Here?
In the U.S., we've gone round and round with prevention strategies for TSEs. Without an actual epidemic on our hands, it's easiest for everyone to pass the buck. The cow people want to blame the sheep people, the sheep people want to blame the cow people, and so on.
When we had a fully funded depopulation approach to eradicating scrapie, someone was caught trying to cheat Uncle Sam out of cash by buying extra (low quality) sheep before reporting a case of scrapie and asking to be fully compensated for the destruction of his flock. When we had an unfunded depopulation program, anyone who reported a case of scrapie lost their flock in exchange for little or no reimbursement. Most people just buried the sick animals and hid the problem. When the sheep industry offered a voluntary scrapie-free certification program, nearly no one participated.
Another strategy, seen in the UK, was a rancher who reported an astronomical number of mad cows; apparently he had taken all of the mad cows in his area so that his neighbors could claim they were BSE-free.
This shows that nobody wants to take the financial hit for BSE prior to an epidemic. Somebody needs to be the grownup, because as long as we engage in risky behaviors like feeding rendered mammals to cows, the fact that we haven't seen many cases of BSE yet is no comfort.
During much of the British mad cow scare, the U.S. protected itself with a "voluntary ban" on feeding cattle to cattle. Note that the feed and rendering industries did not sign onto the ban. In other words, we did nothing.
In 1997, the U.S. banned feeding rendered meat and bone meal from ruminents to ruminents but provided loopholes bigger than the hole in the ozone layer.
First of all, pigs are excluded from the law, so it is okay to feed cows to pigs and pigs to cows. In experiments, pigs CAN contract BSE.
Second, it is okay to feed chicken litter to cows and it is okay to feed cows to chickens. Chicken litter includes dropped chicken food (they are messy eaters), including cows.
Third, it is okay to feed cow blood to cows.
Fourth, check out the way they avoid feeding cows to cows: they put a label on the bag of food that says Don't Feed This to Cows. Good thing that'll stop anyone from trying!
Additionally, we test some cows for BSE. Given that it could naturally occur in about one in a million cows, we would have to test a lot of freaking cows to find BSE. One way to help our odds of finding it would be to test rabies-negative cows (cows suspected of having rabies that test negative for it) or downer cows. I think we do that - although still on a pretty pathetically small scale. Keep in mind though that the average American cow or pig does not celebrate too many birthdays before you meet them on your plate. A disease with a long incubation period could never show symptoms.
Other countries test MANY more cows than we do. I think Japan tests every cow. We increased our testing a few years ago after finding our first mad cow, and then this year we decreased testing tenfold. I've quoted someone from a consumer advocacy group in a previous diary saying that the U.S. policy is "Don't look, don't find." Everyone seems to be holding their breath, just hoping we never find anything.
In the UK, the largest number of human deaths I've seen reported is about 157 people. In a country of over 50 million, most of whom ate beef while the disease was at its worst, that's an incredibly small number of people. When the first few human deaths were linked to BSE, experts were predicting that the UK could perhaps lose hundreds of thousands of people.
If you like beef, I'd bet it's safer to eat than spinach, despite all of the idiotic loopholes and poor rates of testing in our country. The threat of mad cow is probably less than the threat of E. coli or Salmonella. It's a strange concept, calculating "acceptable risk." Still, we take risks every time we drive a car or cross the street. As always, I prefer to know the people who grow my food and if I were a beef fan, I'd feel no different.
UPDATE: If you want to take action on a related topic, check out http://www.holdthehormones.org
This Tuesday they have a national call in day to Starbucks.
Coffee Drinkers Ask Starbucks To Hold the Hormones
WHAT: Coffee drinkers around the country will participate in a Food & Water Watch call-in day to ask Starbucks switch to milk produced without artificial growth hormones.
WHEN: Tuesday, December 5th
WHERE: Everywhere. Call Starbucks at 1 (800) 235-2883. The line should be staffed Mon – Fri 5 AM – 6 PM (PST)
It sounds like Starbucks is responding that they offer hormone free organic milk. True - but they only offer whole organic milk AND they charge extra for it. I also think I've found some Starbucks that didn't carry organic milk.