US-HEALTH: Could ‘Mad Cow Disease’ Strike the United States?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 31 1997 (IPS) - The same factors that gave rise to the mind-wasting ‘mad cow disease’, linked to 21 deaths in Europe over the past year, have been in practise for years in the United States — and variants of the disease may be present here as well, medical experts say.

Following last year’s ‘mad cow’ crisis in Britain, in which several people who ate meat by afflicted cows suffered from dementia and died, the U.S. government this summer banned feeding practises linked to bovine spongiform encephelopathy (BSE), the disease found in the cattle.

However, some analysts of the disease’s spread believe the government has moved too slowly, and done too little, to prevent health risks from other types of BSE or other transmissible spongiform encephelopathies (TSEs) from occurring in North America.

In a policy declared this June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided that “meat and bone meal from ruminant animals could not be fed to other ruminant animals,” ending the main practise of bovine and mammalian cannibalism most strongly linked to TSEs.

The move has not prevented other types of animal cannibalism, such as that among chickens, says John Stauber, founder of the Centre for Media and Democracy, which monitors public relations in the food industry.

“There’s been evidence since 1985 of a strain of BSE in U.S. cattle,” Stauber argues. “But U.S. regulators downplayed the dangers and decided to err on the side of the meat industry.”

A new book co-written by Stauber and journalist Sheldon Rampton, ‘Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?’, contends that, although the specific strain of BSE which was linked to the fatal new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans is specific to Europe, other strains — which may also prove to be fatal — can be found in North America.

In particular, Dr. Richard Marsh, in a series of studies conducted at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s, found a strain of TSE in mink which had been given feed containing meat from Downer dairy cows. After he injected the virus found in the mink into Holstein bull calves, Marsh discovered that the calves quickly caught the disease and died, according to Stauber and Rampton.

The spread of the disease that Marsh detected is similar to that which scientist Carleton Gajdusek found in New Guinea when he investigated the source of the ‘kuru’ disease found among that island’s cannibals. Gajdusek, according to Richard Rhodes’s book ‘Deadly Feasts’, determined that cannibalism sometimes allows for the transmission of a series of new diseases, which he called TSEs.

Marsh’s discovery shows an affliction which operates differently than the BSE found in Britain’s herds, which caused cows to behave in clearly disturbed and disoriented ways before they perished.

After people who died from CJD were discovered last year to have eaten BSE-afflicted meat, the government of then-Prime Minister John Major had to cull Britain’s herds before the European Union would accept the resumed sale of British beef.

No similiar political concerns have halted the sale of beef in the United States, nor — as Stauber admits — have there been any reported casualties from CJD here. But that doesn’t mean there is no danger from BSE here, he argues: “U.S. officials are in deep denial over risks here in this country.”

For one thing, Stauber says, the FDA was given warnings about TSEs as early as 1988, but only moved to end some practises of “animal cannibalism” this June. Before that time, he adds, “we’ve fed literally billions of cows to cows over the past decade alone.”

About 100,000 animals are rendered each year in the United States, Stauber estimates, with offal, gristle, hooves and other matter being evaporated and cooked into such products as livestock feed and pet food. “The United States has been feeding cows to cows, pigs to pigs and chickens to chickens,” he says.

If, in the process, afflicted animals are eaten by healthy ones, he adds, an amplification of TSE occurs — which may in turn spread further once people eat the meat from those animals.

Stauber warns that, if the U.S. strains of BSE prove over time to be as fatal as the British one has been, thousands of people could already be afflicted, and could fall ill or die in the later phases of the disease.

Alternately, he argues, one recent study has claimed that between one percent and 13 percent of the current diagnoses of Alzheimer’s Disease in the United States could actually be variants of CJD. If only 1 percent of Alzheimer’s cases in fact result from CJD, he says, that would still account for some 40,000 people at present.

Some scientists and analysts of medical trends have tried to ensure that such claims are taken seriously. “This looming disaster is no science-fiction scenario,” argues Nicols Fox, author of ‘Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire’.

Yet the claims have effectively been marginalised, particularly since the U.S. food lobby and its public-relations firms have called for “food disparagement laws” that would penalise any warnings that discourage people from eating meat.

Popular ABC-TV host Oprah Winfrey now faces one such suit after she aired a show last year about ‘mad cow’ disease in which she cast doubt on the safety of eating beef.

FDA statements released in June assert that the steps taken by the agency would help to ensure that U.S. herds remain ‘BSE-free’. Repeated calls to several of the agency’s offices were not returned by press time.