Mad Cow Anita Bartholomew

Mad Cow: Coming Soon To A Dinner Table Near You?

In 1993, 15-year-old British schoolgirl Victoria Rimmer was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a fatal illness that causes sponge-like holes to form in the brain.

Getting CJD at any age was rare — statistically, about a one-in-a-million risk. For those under 30, the risk was thought to be almost infinitesimal — roughly three-in-a-billion. Rimmer was the first teen diagnosed. But she wasn’t alone for long.

Here and there around England, reports trickled in of other youngsters stricken with this old person’s disease. Their symptoms mirrored those of Britain's mad cows - confusion, progressive inability to move or even to eat.

It appeared no coincidence that England was in the midst of a mad cow epidemic. British media had, for years, speculated that eating mad cow-tainted beef would cause a similar epidemic among humans. They seemed now to have the evidence.

But officials of the U.K. government, including then-Prime Minister John Major, condemned the suggestion as alarmist. The official line: there was no evidence that eating infected meat could cause a human to get a mad cow-like disease.

That wasn’t true of course.

Government scientists knew such diseases could be spread from the animal that had it to the animal — or human — that ate it. But, unwilling to cause panic, officials strategized about how to limit the risks while publicly denying that there were any.

Finally, three years after Victoria Rimmer fell ill, U.K. officials publicly acknowledged that mad cow was, indeed, the "most likely explanation" for CJD among the young.

But where had mad cow come from? Scientists had traced it back to a gruesome practice little-known outside the farming industry: Cow cannibalism. Farmers had been giving their cows feed that included meat and bone meal from other slaughtered cows.

The disease may have appeared spontaneously in a single animal. But one diseased cow, recycled into cannibal feed, could infect dozens. And each of those, recycled again, could infect dozens more. Hundreds of thousands of animals – and who knows how many people? -- were exposed before anyone understood the problem. The animals only got the parts considered unfit for human consumption. People got the choice cuts.

Could It Happen Here?

In May 2003, Canada reported its first known home-grown case of mad cow. Cows on Canadian farms and ranches — as well as those in the U.S. — were routinely fed cannibal feed until the late 1990s. Since it takes as long as eight years for an infected cow to exhibit symptoms, nobody knows yet if there will be more cases. So maybe you’re wondering: could mad cow be lurking in that cheerful bag of fast-food takeout? When you take a bite, do you risk coming down with the human version years later: nightmarish, brain-rotting, always fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? Might you already be walking around with a time bomb in your head?

Although I haven't eaten red meat since long before the words "mad" and "cow" were routinely used in the same sentence, I worry about my kid, my friends, my cats (contaminated cat food killed a number of them in England).

Which is why, a while back, I sat down with two scientists who hold opposite views on the topic, and asked each to assess the risks to the U.S. population.

George Gray of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis has studied mad cow disease - or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) as it's called in scientific circles - for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Michael Hansen of the Consumer Policy Institute, is one of the U.S.'s foremost authorities on BSE and other types of spongiform encephalopathy.

Gray says, don't worry. Mad cow almost certainly isn't here. And it's probably not coming either. The U.S. is on the alert. If an animal showed any hint of disease, we'd find it, quarantine it and destroy it.

So we're safe, right?

No, says Hansen. He says the disease or something like it, almost certainly is here already. The danger could be anything from small to catastrophic.

Gray dismisses this. "Significant steps have been taken in this country that reduce the risks a lot. A feed ban was put in place because of what we learned from Europe about how these diseases spread."

Hansen shakes his head. "I've looked into the actions - or I should say the inactions - taken by the FDA, the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control," says Hansen. "Nothing was removed from the market. The only thing (U.S. government agencies) did was to tell feed manufacturers to label anything with cow protein in it, 'Do not feed to ruminants' [cud-chewing animals]."

Yet, he says, a study by the FDA found that some feed manufacturers who process cud-chewing animal carcasses weren't labeling. Worse, the FDA found that some feed mills didn't even know the rule existed. The result: some farmers were unwittingly giving their cows cannibal feed years after the 1997 ban took effect. And might still be.

Gray doesn't think this matters much. Why not? "We don't have the disease, as far as we know."

Gray has a point. You can't spread a disease that isn't there.

But what if it is?

Next page: ...And This Little Piggy Went Mad

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