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Because evidence of BSE in U.S. cows would be catastrophic for the industry, the USDA commissioned a three-year study from the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, a group sponsored in part by industry. This study, based on a “probabilistic simulation model” (translation: assumptions and best guesses), said mad cow disease posed only minimal risk to American cattle or people: “Our analysis finds that the U.S. is highly resistant to any introduction of BSE or a similar disease. . . . Measures taken by the U.S. government and industry make the U.S. robust against the spread of BSE to animals or humans should it be introduced into this country.” The report did not say that BSE could never enter the country, just that “The new cases of BSE would come primarily from lack of compliance with the regulations enacted to protect animal feed. . . . Even if they existed, these hypothetical sources of BSE could give rise to only one to two cases per year.” Therefore, “the disease is virtually certain to be eliminated from the country within 20 years after its introduction.”12

These conclusions may reassure or not depending, as usual, on point of view. A spokesman for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association said they gave “consumers and cattle producers the assurance of the safety of the American beef supply,” and the president of the American Meat Institute agreed: “The U.S. is free of many animal diseases that plague other nations, testaments to the success of government-industry efforts.” British observers, however, thought such groups must be “in denial.” Other countries, they said, also claim not to have mad cow disease but find it as soon as they look for it; any failure to test for it in large numbers of cattle is a serious mistake. But, as a BSE researcher in Oregon explained, “let’s face it, no country wants to find the disease.”13

Early in 2002, the General Accounting Office (GAO) criticized the Harvard study as based on flawed assumptions, and identified glaring weaknesses in U.S. inspection, testing, and enforcement policies against animal (and, therefore, human) prion diseases: “While BSE has not been found in the United States, federal actions do not sufficiently ensure that all BSE-infected animals or products are kept out or that if BSE were found, it would be detected promptly and not spread to other cattle through animal feed or enter the human food supply.”14 A meat industry spokesman dismissed the GAO report as a “rehash” and complained that it failed to recognize that “the risk of BSE ever occurring in the United States is extremely low and getting lower every day.”15 As if to admit its unease with the current level of protection, however, the USDA announced that it was considering a variety of more stringent bans on use of brain, nervous tissue, and other offal from older and “downer” cows (those that died before slaughter), and that it had commissioned another report from the Harvard Center to evaluate such options.16

All in all, the experience with mad cow disease confirms that the British beef industry, like that in the United States, acts in its own self-interest regardless of consequences for public health. It also confirms that no government agency willingly makes decisions in the public interest if those decisions oppose industry interests. Finally, the mad cow experience reveals the international nature of diseases that affect the food supply. Two examples: in Japan, British meat-and-bone meal caused a case of mad cow disease, which, in turn, induced a scare responsible for a 50% drop in Japanese imports of U.S. beef, and the first case of vCJD in the United States occurred in a young British woman living in Florida. All borders are porous, food problems are global, and international strategies are required to ensure the safety of any country’s food supply.17

Foot-and-Mouth Disease: A Contagious and Virulent Virus

Such lessons were firmly reinforced in spring 2001 when an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease devastated cattle not only in Great Britain but also