Secret French “Mad Cow” Epidemic Affirms U.S. Beef Safety
June 18, 2004
Want to feel safer about ‘mad cow’ and the U.S. beef supply? Just look at the latest headlines from France.
A shocking new report from French government researchers reveals that France had a
secret epidemic of more than 300,000 ‘mad cows’ before 2000. The official French line told the world that the country had only 103 confirmed BSE cases.
“The Unrecognised French BSE Epidemic,” by Virginie Supervie and Dominique Costagliola, has just been published in Veterinary Research, an international animal health journal.
The Veterinary Research authors, knowing that farmers and livestock veterinarians were reluctant to “panic the public,” used data on the total number of BSE cases now known, and the historic rate of its geographical spread to calculate the likely true extent of the French cattle infections. The authors estimate that France had 301,200 ‘mad cows’ before 2000, more than 2,500 times the official number. “Furthermore, 47,300 animals at an advanced stage of the disease entered the food chain before 1996, and 1,500 between July, 1996 and June 2000,” say the French researchers.
The editors of Veterinary Research, appalled at the implications of the article, had it verified by three independent scientists before its publication.
That means that the French ‘mad cow’ epidemic started in the 1980s, ten years before the government admitted a “mad cow” problem at all. The most charitable explanation is that French farmers simply didn’t report their sick animals.
The French government then dragged its feet on banning contaminated meat and bone meal from Britain. This feed had been unsafely rendered from an estimated 4 million ‘mad cows’ in the British Isles. Large numbers of French consumers were thus put at risk for an additional seven years!
Fortunately, it is very difficult for humans to get new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the “people version” of ‘mad cow.’ France has suffered only six (possibly seven) confirmed human deaths from vCJD despite its government cover-up and careless consumer protection.
The human ‘mad cow’ death toll in Britain, once predicted at more than 100,000, will apparently total less than 150. Cases of the newly-discovered and still poorly understood disease have tapered off sharply since the British banned the feeding of meat and bone meal rendered from ruminant animals back to other ruminants.
The U.S. has had only one diagnosed ‘mad cow’-last Christmas in Washington State. That animal had been born in Canada, before both Canada and the U.S. banned the contaminated feed, in 1997. That one animal’s infective nerve tissue was destroyed, instead of going into either the human food chain or the feed supply. No U.S. consumers were exposed to the tiny prions, or misfolded proteins, that cause the disease.
“Americans face near-zero risk from ‘mad cow,’” says Dr. Jan Busboom, an animal science expert at Washington State University.
As a further precaution, however, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has just launched a major increase in BSE testing of suspicious animals to make sure. Late in June, predictably, the first “false-positive” animal was found, and the headlines again screamed, “Mad Cow!” A week later another preliminary “mad cow” test came up positive. More sophisticated laboratory analysis rejected the results of both the preliminary radid tests. But USDA will continue trying to find any of the few BSE-stricken animals that might be out there.
The odds are that there will be another ‘mad cow’ confirmed in the United States . . . perhaps several. But that will be a far cry from the French problem, let alone Britain’s.
Dr. Busboom supports a “robust surveillance testing of a statistically significant portion of the U.S. cattle population to monitor the possible appearance of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).”
However, Dr. Busboom points out that America has no large reservoir of the disease among its cattle, as did Britain and France. The ban on feeding potentially-contaminated meat and bone meal has made the feed supply doubly safe since 1997. With that feed ban, the latest USDA tests, and the mounting evidence that “mad cow” has a very hard time infecting humans, we should feel very safe eating U.S. beef.
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