of mad cows and americans

[Guest guest]

It Can Happen Here

Sheldon Rampton, E Magazine

July 11, 2001

 

As infections go, mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease don't have much in

common. Mad cow disease is hard to transmit, takes years to incubate in an

infected animal and is almost impossible to detect until symptoms emerge late in

the course of the infection. Foot-and-mouth, by comparison, is one of the most

contagious animal diseases known. Unlike mad cow disease, which is hard to

spread but always fatal, foot-and-mouth disease spreads quickly but rarely even

kills animals and is considered harmless to human beings.

 

 

The fact that both diseases have emerged in the United Kingdom is mostly a

matter of British bad luck. But both have something to teach us about the

virtues of precaution. Diseases of livestock and people lurk in hidden crevices

of the world, and the very technologies that we celebrate as emblems of modern

progress can also serve as vehicles for transforming those diseases into

epidemics. Just as AIDS spread throughout the world thanks in part to the speed

and ease of modern travel, other diseases are cropping up with increasing

frequency as a result of factors including increasing urbanization of wildlife

habitats and intensive livestock farming practices.

 

 

Origins of an Epidemic

 

 

The recent British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease began in early February on

a farm in Northumberland, England's most northerly county. By February 25, most

of the country had been declared a contaminated area. Its spread was assisted on

February 13 when 40 sheep were purchased in Northumberland and shipped to Devon,

a county on England's southwest peninsula. By the time the outbreak was

identified as foot-and-mouth disease, consignments of sheep and pigs had already

been shipped from infected areas throughout the country and to other parts of

Europe. By March 1, the number of detected cases had reached 30, with new

outbreaks occurring in Ireland and Scotland. Europe started slaughtering animals

imported from Britain as soon as the epidemic became apparent, but by then,

antibodies to foot-and-mouth were already being found in Germany. By March 21,

nearly 400 cases had been detected, and the army had been called in to help with

the disposal of carcasses as thousands of anim!

als were slaughtered in an effort to eradicate the disease.

 

 

Europe will spend billions of dollars bringing this particular outbreak under

control. But outbreaks of foot-and-mouth have risen throughout the world, due to

activities that spread the disease, such as illegal smuggling of animals,

international tourism and the globalization of trade. " The last two years have

been among the worst on record, with more than 60 countries experiencing

outbreaks, including many which have not had one in generations, " reports the

Guardian of London. Examples include Taiwan, Korea, Brazil and South Africa, as

well as an outbreak last year in Japan that was traced back to diseased straw

imported from China via Russia.

 

 

Unlike foot-and-mouth disease, which has vexed farmers for centuries, mad cow

disease is a recent phenomenon created by technical innovations in agricultural

production itself. The innovation that caused it was actually quite simple. In

order to dispose of slaughtered animal parts that have no commercial value, the

meat industry put them through a " rendering " process that consisted of grinding

them up and cooking them in large vats to produce a product called " meat and

bone meal " that was then fed back to other animals. This created what was

essentially a cannibalistic feeding loop, as cows consumed the remains of other

cows, sheep were fed to sheep, pigs to pigs, chickens to chickens and so forth.

 

 

Common sense might dictate that this practice is a bad idea, but the scientists

and farmers who used this material genuinely believed it would be safe. What

they didn't realize was that this feeding loop was also an amplification loop

through which mad cow disease -- something that had never even been detected

prior to the 1980s -- would become a devastating epidemic that has so far killed

more than 170,000 cattle and began to kill human beings in 1996. To date, nearly

100 people have died, presumably from eating infected beef, and scientific

projections for the eventual death toll in Europe range from a few hundred to

100,000.

 

 

Renderers like to point out that they deserve credit for helping to dispose of

large quantities of animal waste that would otherwise putrefy and create a

massive disposal problem. But modern large-scale agribusiness has created a

problem that it only partially manages to solve. Even today, notwithstanding the

nightmare that mad cow disease has meant for Europe, the U.S. meat industry and

regulatory agencies have failed to take all the precautions needed to protect

animal and human health. Europe has adopted tough regulations that ban the use

of animal meat and blood in livestock feed.

 

 

Inadequate Protection

 

 

The U.S. has adopted regulations too, but with glaring holes. In March, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture (USDA) confiscated two flocks of sheep imported from

Europe, which they believe may have been exposed to mad cow disease.

Unfortunately, U.S. agencies continue to rely heavily on attempts to interdict

foreign imports that may carry the disease, while winking and nodding at

practices that could cause equally devastating homegrown equivalents to emerge.

It is still legal in the U.S., for example, to feed rendered cows to pigs, whose

remains are fed in turn back to cows. And it is still perfectly legal to use cow

blood in cattle feed, a practice banned in Europe. The regulations that do exist

are limply enforced. Bovine meat and bone meal is supposed to be labeled, " Do

not feed to cows, " but a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigation found

that hundreds of feed makers are violating the law.

 

 

Modern feedlot farming, which force-feeds animals " scientifically blended

rations " designed to maximize growth and minimize costs, has also introduced a

variety of other practices that threaten to spread diseases. In addition to the

rendered remains of their cousins, livestock today consume a variety of

substances that are quite different from the grass and hay on which they

conventionally have been nurtured, including industrial wastes, such as sawdust,

wood chips, twigs, ground-up newspapers, cement dust from kilns and even treated

manure and sewage sludge from municipal composting plants. This may not make

particularly appetizing reading as you are about to sit down to dinner, but from

industry's perspective, there is no harm in it. These materials help cut down on

costs, dispose of wastes and translate into benefits for the consumer in the

form of lower prices for your Chicken McNuggets.

 

 

As far as industry is concerned, there is no proof that these practices are

dangerous, so why should they hesitate? But scientific research is still lacking

in regards to the risks associated with these practices. No one knows how the

recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease arrived in England, but it got there

anyway. No one knew in advance that feeding livestock rendered meat and bone

meal would cause an epidemic of mad cow disease, but it did. And no one knows

today whether the introduction of genetically modified organisms into our food

supply will create previously unknown allergies or other health problems in the

people who consume them.

 

 

An International Problem

 

 

What we do know is that illnesses stemming from modern agriculture seem to be a

growing problem worldwide. In October of last year, the United Nations Food and

Agriculture Organization warned that increasing movements of people, animals and

animal products for trade are leading to a greater spread of animal diseases

across national borders. It noted that a number of livestock diseases have been

diagnosed for the first time outside their " normal " areas of origin -- sometimes

thousands of miles away. In Yemen, close to the Saudia Arabian border, some 100

people have died from the first known outbreak of Rift Valley fever outside

Africa. Outbreaks of bluetongue disease, a viral disease of sheep, have been

reported in Bulgaria and Sardinia, locations where the disease was previously

unknown. In addition to mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease, the United

Kingdom saw an outbreak of classical swine fever, a disease believed to have

been eradicated in the UK many years ago. The!

recent infection is thought to have been introduced through imported meat

products.

 

 

Foodborne diseases among people also appear to be rising. In 1990, the Food and

Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences attributed the increase to

" automated food processing, increased reliance on fast foods, greater use of

prepackaged foods and microwave ovens, urbanization, public naivete about food

production and slaughter methods and lack of knowledge about the hygienic

precautions required at all stages of food handling. " The foodborne nature of

many illnesses often goes unrecognized by the victims, but government agencies

have estimated that as many as 81 million cases of foodborne illness occur in

this country each year, accounting for approximately 9,000 deaths.

 

 

The most common killers are not exotic diseases like mad cow disease, which the

USDA has yet to detect in the U.S. They include E.coli O157:H7, Salmonella

typhimurium and Listeria monocytogenes -- bacteria that have become ubiquitous

in the human food supply. Severe forms of E. coli food poisoning, often

originating from fast food, kill 500 people a year.

 

 

Salmonella, which causes an intense flu-like illness that can be fatal, has been

linked to the consumption of eggs, poultry, milk and dairy products and a

variety of other foods. The FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition

estimates that two to four million cases of salmonellosis occur every year in

the U.S. The Center says, " [salmonella] isolations from humans have shown a

dramatic rise in the past decade, particularly in the northeast United States

(six-fold or more). "

 

 

Listeria, which can cause fatal blood poisoning, miscarriages in pregnant women

and meningitis, is believed to spread through ready-to-eat foods such as hot

dogs, luncheon meats or cold cuts. According to the Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention, some 2,000 people in the U.S. come down with serious cases of

listeriosis each year, which is responsible for approximately 500 deaths.

 

 

The benefits of modern agricultural innovation are evident. The cost, however,

is that we are performing a massive global experiment with ourselves and our

children as the test subjects.

 

 

Sheldon Rampton edits PR Watch and is the co-author, with John Stauber, of " Mad

Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? " and " Trust Us, We're Experts: How

Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future. "