Mad Cow article in WSJ

[Guest guest]

I don't to the Wall Street Journal online service, and so cannot

access the article in today's front page, titled

Porous Borders: Despite Assurances, U.S. Could be at Risk for Mad Cow

Disease -- Scant Inspections, Imports of Animal By-products are among danger

signs, A Debate Over 'Plate Waste'.

If someone s to their online service, perhaps they could post it

here for folks to read.

 

Janice

 

************************************

" Those who can convince us to believe absurdities can convince us to commit

atrocities " -- Voltaire

[Guest guest]

Thanks for pointint out the article. Here it is:

 

What Happened

To Mad-Cow Disease?

By Bret Stephens. Mr. Stephens edits the State of the

Union column.

11/29 - Wall Street Journal

 

Of all the " issues " to have been eclipsed by the

events of Sept. 11, none seems to have evaporated

faster than talk of the threat posed by bovine

spongiform encephalopathy, better known as " mad-cow

disease. " Where did it go?

 

Actually, the disease is spreading. In the past three

months, Slovenia, Slovakia and Japan have received the

unwelcome news that a handful of cows in their herds

tested positive for the fatal brain-wasting ailment.

That brings the total number of afflicted countries to

11 (all but Japan being in Europe), a figure that is

almost sure to grow as further testing for the disease

is conducted. In the U.S., the Department of

Agriculture and Harvard University will release a

joint study tomorrow claiming the country is at little

risk of a BSE epidemic. But an examination of the

report by this newspaper's Steve Stecklow raises

questions about that conclusion: The U.S. was slow to

ban meat-and-bone meal (MBM) animal feed, widely

considered to be the most likely agent of the disease,

and shipments of MBM continue to arrive in the U.S.

from countries that may yet prove to have afflicted

herds.

 

State of the Union

 

 

A year ago, such news would have been a sensation, if

not a political scandal. But one of the side-effects

of Sept. 11 has been to rearrange European perceptions

of acceptable risk. Only a few years ago, EU

Commissioner Emma Bonino seriously urged the removal

of all gelatin capsules (most of them medicinal) from

the market, on the grounds that gelatin was a

byproduct of cow carcasses and so could be a vector

for the human form of BSE, known as variant

Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease. But if some 4,000 souls can

perish within the space of a morning, the 111 British

and four French fatalities from vCJD over the space of

five years, as sad as it is, puts the mad cow threat

in a different category of threat. And when weaponized

anthrax is being sent through the post, who seriously

can be afraid of the German-made " Mamba " jelly

candies, which had to be removed from store shelves in

Poland last year amid full-scale panic?

 

In fairness, much of the reaction to BSE and vCJD

stemmed from the experience of the AIDS crisis, which

sprang as if from nowhere to claim tens of millions of

lives. Then too, the mysterious nature of mad cow --

possibly caused by a poorly understood misshapen

protein called a prion -- naturally lent itself to

frightening speculations. In " Deadly Feasts, " science

writer Richard Rhodes raised the specter of " a new

disease agent [that] refuses to die. ... It survives

even the fiery furnace of a 700 degree oven. " No

wonder the public had a cow.

 

Still, BSE and vCJD ought never to have sparked a

fright-taking of such global proportions. And in this,

much blame must go to European health authorities and

the politicians they advised.

 

Although BSE did seem to spring from nowhere in 1986,

and its connection to vCJD didn't become apparent till

1996, the family of diseases to which they belong --

transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs --

have been extensively studied since Carleton Gajdusek

made his pathbreaking work on kuru in the late 1950s.

And one thing that was already well-known by 1996 was

that the principal source of BSE infectivity was in

cow brains and organ tissue, not in their muscle meat.

" If brain has about 10 million infectious units in a

gram, spleen might have 100, and red meat zero, " says

Dr. Paul Brown of America's National Institutes of

Health.

 

This should have been cause for reassurance. Instead,

too many British scientists sounded apocalyptic alarms

(Dr. Richard Lacey of the University of Leeds

predicted 200,000 deaths per year from vCJD by 2015),

and European governments were too quick to fall in

with the hysteria. British Prime Minister John Major

responded with an outright ban of beef-on-the-bone,

while Continental states slapped a quarantine on

British beef. Such efforts may have created the

impression of responsiveness from the top. But they

succeeded in doing little more than decimating the

British beef industry while fueling a grossly

distorted picture of the actual risks the public

faced.

 

As for reducing what danger did exist, the measures

taken created a false sense of complacency outside of

Britain. In France, public health authorities

literally buried cows suspected of having BSE before

their carcasses could be properly examined. And in

Bavaria, the health minister took the extraordinary

step of threatening legal action against a private

company that was testing cattle for BSE. " It's no

surprise [the government] didn't discover any cases of

BSE " until recently, says company founder Dr. Ingo

Malm. " They didn't find anything because they didn't

want to look. " As a result, when cases of BSE did

officially come to light, the public's sense of panic

was only compounded by the impression of a cover-up.

 

Fast-forward to the present and what we find is that,

even as BSE spreads, the incidence of vCJD seems to

have peaked. In a study to be released tomorrow in the

journal Science, a team of British and French

epidemiologists headed by Dr. Alain-Jacques Valleron

of the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris predict that

the total number of lives vCJD is likely to take will

probably not exceed 200. A second team from the London

School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine places an

" outer limit " of several thousand cases, well down

from the 100,000-plus they predicted four years ago.

 

The explanations for these new forecasts vary, with

Dr. Valleron suggesting that the low average age of

vCJD victims may mean older people are more resistant

to the disease. But whatever the explanation, it seems

clear that the spread of BSE will not pose anything

like the kind of threat to humans that was feared only

a year ago. Like scrapie in sheep, this is now mainly

a veterinary problem.

 

Among the chief hallmarks of medievalism was its

susceptibility to irrational scares. Looking back on

the bugaboos of the past few years -- from depleted

uranium to plastic softeners to genetically modified

foods -- one is tempted to say there was something

medieval about that time as well. How strange, and how

sad, that it took an act of unprecedented barbarism to

put lesser, if not imaginary, dangers in their proper

perspective.

 

-- From The Wall Street Journal Europe

 

 

 

--- Janice Rothstein <gata wrote:

> I don't to the Wall Street Journal online

> service, and so cannot

> access the article in today's front page, titled

> Porous Borders: Despite Assurances, U.S. Could be at

> Risk for Mad Cow

> Disease -- Scant Inspections, Imports of Animal

> By-products are among danger

> signs, A Debate Over 'Plate Waste'.

> If someone s to their online service,

> perhaps they could post it

> here for folks to read.

>

> Janice

>

> ************************************

> " Those who can convince us to believe absurdities

> can convince us to commit

> atrocities " -- Voltaire

>

>

 

 

 

 

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