Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [149]
This concluding chapter examines emerging food safety threats in these contexts. Some of the threats are diseases that affect farm animals and only rarely cause disease in humans. Even so, their effects on human welfare can be profound: massive destruction of food animals, loss of livelihoods and community, and restrictions on personal liberty. The outbreaks of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease that occurred in Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s, for example, were destructive, but they occurred as accidental results of production practices. In contrast, bioterrorism is deliberate—the purposeful use of biological or chemical materials to achieve political goals. Bioterrorism introduces a new and especially frightening political dimension to food safety risk: the intention to cause harm, regardless of who gets hurt.
In this chapter, we will see how bioterrorism brings up questions of food security and expands the common meaning of that term. In the United States, food security usually refers to the reliability of a family’s food supply; people who lack food security qualify for federal or private food assistance. Since the anthrax mailings, food security has also come to mean “food safe from bioterrorism.” We begin our discussion of this definitional transition with diseases of farm animals: mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, and anthrax. In recent years, these diseases did not exist or were rare veterinary problems posing relatively little risk to human health. Today, we are concerned about their potential to make us ill, create havoc in the food system, or become tools of bioterrorism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how we—as a society and as individuals—can take action to address the problems and politics of food safety, now and in the future.
THE POLITICS OF ANIMAL DISEASES
Because one consequence of globalization is the rapid transport of food across national borders and over long distances, a disease that affects the food supply can travel rapidly from one country to another. Animal diseases have trade implications; if a country harbors sick animals, no other country will accept its meat. Trade implications have political consequences.
As we will see, the British epidemics of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease occurred as inadvertent results of meat production practices. In contrast, the U.S. anthrax mailings were a deliberate act. All three risks, however, rank high in dread; they are involuntary, uncontrollable, and cause exotic disease. Just as important, they undermine trust in the food supply and in government and divert resources from more pressing matters of public health.
Mad Cow Disease: Prions and Species Jumps
Mad cow disease emerged as a highly publicized food safety crisis of the mid-1990s, largely confined to Great Britain. The story of this disease is relevant to our discussion for its interweaving of politics and science and its effect on public confidence. The manner in which British officials handled the mad cow crisis, for example, later contributed to public distrust of genetically modified foods. Prior to the early 1980s, hardly anyone had heard of the disease, but by 1999 it had affected at least 175,000 British cows. Its results were catastrophic: destruction of more than 4 million cattle, estimated costs of $7 billion, transmission to at least 18 countries, and worldwide rejection of British beef. By 2001, although “only” about 120 people had died of the human variant of mad cow disease, more deaths—perhaps as many as 100,000—were expected.2 Because this story reveals many aspects of the modern politics of food safety, it is well worth recounting.
The mad cow epidemic originated in the late 1970s when the political climate in Great Britain favored cost cutting and deregulation—in this case, of the meat-rendering industry. This industry converts the otherwise unusable (offal) parts of dead animals into “meat-and-bone meal”