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By Root 1358 0

Europe ignored the interests of consumers while protecting those of agribusiness. A recent report by the French senate found that from 1988 to 2000 the agriculture ministry in that country minimized the danger of mad cow and “constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures.” Health officials were repeatedly ignored in order to block decisions that “might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri-foodstuffs industry.” Great Britain banned the feeding of ruminants to ruminants in 1988, but continued to export animal feed potentially contaminated with BSE for another eight years — shipping about 150 million pounds of the stuff to dozens of countries and thereby turning a local outbreak of mad cow into one with worldwide ramifications. Other countries in the European Union imported the cheap British feed and then exported it to North Africa and the Middle East.

The recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan was most likely caused by infected feed from Europe. Japanese agricultural officials displayed remarkable incompetence in responding to the threat of BSE. Five years after the British government acknowledged the link between BSE and serious illness in human beings, Japanese farmers were still feeding meat-and-bonemeal to their cattle, without violating any law. When the Scientific Steering Commission of the European Commission warned in June of 2001 that such practices created a high risk of a BSE outbreak, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) strongly denied the risk and blocked publication of the EU report. Three months later, a Japanese cow tested positive for BSE. A senior MAFF official assured the public that the animal’s carcass had been “disposed of.” In fact, MAFF had inadvertently allowed the tainted meat to be rendered into animal feed.

Today nations with BSE must not only confront the prospect of slaughtering millions of potentially infected cattle, but must also figure out what to do with their remains. In Great Britain, about a billion pounds of rendered cattle sit at waste sites, vast mounds of fine brown powder, awaiting incineration. In Japan, plans are being made to blend rendered cattle with concrete — and use the mixture as a building material. In Denmark, a company is now erecting the world’s first power plant that generates electricity by burning cattle.

Thanks to the McDonald’s Corporation, the FDA’s animal feed restrictions are most likely being obeyed in the United States. But those prohibitions may not be strict enough to prevent the spread of BSE. The feeding of all animal proteins to all farm animals has been banned throughout the European Union. Such a ban was justified as a means of preventing hog and poultry feed from winding up in cattle troughs. The ban will also, however, halt the transmission of mad cow through new and unexpected means. John Collinge — a professor at London’s Imperial College School of Medicine and a prominent member of the British government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee — believes that BSE may easily cross the species barrier and survive undetected in animals that outwardly show no symptoms of the disease. If pigs or poultry were to be found silently carrying mad cow, the FDA’s feed restrictions would prove futile. The continued use of cattle blood in cattle feed seems especially unwise. “All cannibalistic recycling is potentially dangerous,” Collinge warns, “and I have said that repeatedly.”

The USDA, the FDA, and the American Meat Institute oppose any additional prohibition on what can be fed to livestock. They argue that new restrictions are unnecessary, because mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States. Their argument on behalf of continuing to feed animal proteins to livestock is a risky form of denial, an exercise in wishful thinking. By the time Great Britain discovered its first two cows with BSE, at least 60,000 other cattle there were already infected. The claim that mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States is accurate,