Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [151]
By all accounts, British officials did not handle this new crisis any better and only grudgingly admitted the link between mad cow disease and the human variant. In what appeared to be an act of explicit manipulation, the agriculture minister, John Gummer, appeared on television to show his faith in British meat: he fed a hamburger to his four-year-old daughter. Overall, the government seemed to be acting on behalf of the cattle industry rather than protecting public health. Reinforcing a familiar theme in this book, the Lancet blamed the secret ways in which government and expert committees operate—and the lack of public accountability—for the failure of government to do something to stop mad cow disease and prevent its transmission to people. It pointed to “the weaknesses of separating agricultural and medical science, and of allowing one Government department to protect the interests of both the food consumers and the farming industry.”9
The appearance of the new variant disease in people caused a further crisis, this time in international trade. The European Union banned member countries from buying British beef, and McDonald’s and other such companies quickly removed it from sale. To protect the industry, the British government stopped permitting older cows (which are more likely to have developed BSE) to be used as food and began destroying them at a rate of 15,000 per week. By the end of 1998, the crisis subsided, and the European Union ended its ban. When that order took effect the next year, France continued to refuse to accept British beef. British officials threatened legal action: “We have science and the law on our side and it is regrettable that the French had ignored science and defied the law.”10 Soon after, BSE turned up in cows in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, most likely because the animals had been fed meat-and-bone meal exported from Great Britain. Human cases of vCJD also appeared outside of Britain, perhaps because people ate British beef before the offal ban took effect.
In the United States, federal agencies first took action against BSE in 1997, when the USDA banned imports of European cattle and sheep and the FDA banned the use of animal proteins as feed for ruminant animals. In 2000, the agencies banned imports of rendered animal products from 31 countries that had either reported BSE in their cattle or could not demonstrate that cattle were free of the disease. Food safety officials say the absence of mad cow disease and vCJD in the United States is due to such preventive actions. Others, however, are skeptical that the country can remain free of either disease. More than 30 shipments of animal byproducts from prohibited countries entered the United States after the ban, but regulatory agencies could not track what happened to at least half of them, perfectly illustrating the need for a system of food traceability. FDA officials said that most of the by-products ended up in pet food, but this fate cannot be confirmed (and would be unlikely to reassure pet owners, regardless). Inspections revealed that 20% of about 2,500 feed mills handling meat-and-bone meal took no precautions to prevent the meal from getting into animal feed. No federal agency tests for prohibited material in feed for cattle. Worse, the bans on use of meat-and-bone meal do not apply to other farm animals such as pigs or chickens because officials assume that feed for these animals never enters the food supply for cows or people. This assumption, as we learned from the