Brace yourself for more screaming “mad cow” headlines.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is starting to test hundreds of thousands of cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), hoping we won’t find any. The U.S. already banned feeding ruminant-based meat meal to cattle in 1997, effectively cutting off any potential “mad cow” epidemic. (Britain found that such contaminated cattle feed caused their massive number of “mad cows”.)
The huge number of screening tests will turn up “false positives,” and these will probably leak to the media. Preliminary tests are supposed to be confidential until confirmed by laboratories. However, the intense interest in “mad cow” virtually guarantees that anti-meat activists will find enough excuse to go publicly bonkers.
Americans disappointed the activists last Christmas, when they failed to panic over the first U.S. cow confirmed with BSE. Consumers pretty much ignored the activist noise and dashed their hopes of a meat crisis. BSE is barely contagious to humans, and this was only one cow out of many millions. Moreover, its dangerous nerve tissue was incinerated.
The anti-meat crowd hoped that we’d react in desperation, as many mothers did after the 1989 false alarm about Alar and apples on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes.” Then, frightened mothers flagged down school buses to snatch apples out of their kids’ lunch boxes.
Still, they’re trying. A New Jersey woman recently appeared on MSNBC claiming that meat served at a local horse track had caused 17 deaths from the human version of “mad cow”-new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The Centers for Disease Control concluded that none of the CJD deaths were the BSE variant of the disease. They had nothing to do with beef or the racetrack. Moreover, such random disease clusters appear all the time, like dice players in Las Vegas rolling seven on 10 straight passes. Still, the lady got herself on TV.
At an NPR radio taping in Philadelphia, a woman asked me if “mad cow” wasn’t causing our increase in Alzheimer’s disease. I told her that since we’d never had a human case from BSE in this country, it was almost certain that the rising number of Alzheimer’s cases is due to more people living longer.
For the next year or two at least, however, the activists will get lots more chances to panic us. USDA will look for reasons to test cattle for BSE. They’ll test sick cattle, cattle that fail their pre-slaughter veterinary inspections, any “downer” cattle, and any slaughter animals born before the 1997 feed ban.
The British, of course, have really been through “mad cow” anguish. The UK had hundreds of thousands of BSE-stricken cattle. Millions of Britons were exposed to BSE, as the nerve tissue from those sick animals was ground up into their sausages and meat pies for at least a dozen years. Some British physicians predicted more than 500,000 human deaths. Fortunately, the British toll has been only 153 human deaths and appears to be nearing its end.
Americans deserve to feel safe.
” For 25 years, America has had a chemically harsher rendering process for meat scraps than Britain, which was trying to avoid the use of eco-unfriendly solvents.
” American farmers have never fed Britain’s high levels of meat and bone meal to cattle, and especially not to young calves. We feed our calves soymilk instead.
” We still don’t know much about the tiny prions (misfolded proteins) that we think cause BSE. Britain broke the infection cycle, as we did seven years ago, by banning ruminant meat and bone meal from ruminant feeds.
” The one U.S. “mad cow” was born in Canada, before the feed ban, and may even have eaten contaminated feed imported from Britain.
” The USDA will incinerate any cattle confirmed with BSE. (Statistically, they’re expecting 5 to12 cases, from 35 million cattle slaughtered in the next year.)
So when the “mad cow” hoopla starts again, understand that it’s the tail end of a problem we’ve essentially solved.
