COWABUNGLE
Profits and lobbying sidetrack food supply safety.
by Aria Seligmann
ad dogs, Englishmen and baby vampires. Sounds like a
bad sci-fi flick, but these and other characters are all
part of the drama unfolding in our nation’s food supply.
The first case of mad cow disease that is public knowledge in the
U.S. was discovered two weeks ago in a downer milk cow in
Washington state. Since then, serious questions concerning the
USDA’s regulations and implementation of those regulations have
been raised.
Downer animals are those literally not standing, either due to illness, injury
or disease, including but not limited to mad cow disease.
Just this week, tests revealed the Holstein came from a province in Alberta,
Canada, where a case of mad cow disease was discovered last spring. Cows
from that herd were shipped to a dairy farm in Washington state, and a massive
slaughter of other cows from that herd has now begun.
Because the diseased cow was tested in a lab back in Iowa, by the time the results
came back, the cow had already gone into the food chain all up and down I-5. The
meat couldn’t be held for the results to come in as it had to be shipped fresh.
PRECAUTIONS IGNORED
Mad cow disease or bovine spongiform
encephaly (BSE), is caused by a prion, or
protein, found in the brains of cattle. Prions
cannot be killed off in any sterilization
process. If a prion is consumed, it can cause
the disease, though symptoms may not show
up for years.
A chronic wasting disease similar to
scrapie in cattle, BSE causes the brain to
break down, literally taking on the appear-
ance of a sponge, and leads to dementia,
paralysis and death. The human variation is
called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
CJD normally only affects people over
the age of 50 and is often confused with
Alzheimer’s disease. When a group of
teenagers in Great Britain came down with
CJD in 1996, no one knew what caused it,
but one group of researchers suggested the
link to BSE.
Previously, researchers had studied the
link between scrapie and BSE. Sheep with
scrapie are unsalable as human food, so
when an outbreak occurred in England in the
’90s, farmers began slaughtering them and
using them as cattle feed. Cattle are herbi-
vores by nature, and when some contracted
BSE, so similar to scrapie, some cried, “It’s
not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
Scientists began researching the link.
According to Eugene molecular biologist
Tom Pringle, who has studied mad cow dis-
ease and the cattle industry extensively, it
takes 1/56 of an ounce of infected meat to
become infected.
Although the industry and British gov-
ernment dismissed the idea of the disease
coming from tainted feed, the facts couldn’t
be ignored: More cows became ill with BSE,
were slaughtered, chopped up and then fed
to other cows, forcing them to be cannibals.
Suddenly, BSE spread rapidly throughout
herds, and countries around the world
slammed their doors shut in Britains’ feed
face. But Canada continued, and continues,
to import British feed.
The mad cow was born in 1997, which is
of some import. During that year, a huge
problem occurred in northern Alberta with
millions of cattle exposed to contaminated
feed. After that, very few countries would
accept Canadian beef, but the U.S. continued
to import it, accepting 80 percent, or 1.7 mil-
which include testing.
Tests for BSE are now both accurate and
inexpensive. “Testing would add only 3
cents per pound for beef,” says Pringle,
adding that not running those tests makes lit-
tle sense. Meanwhile, in Asia and in Europe,
where mad cow has been found (in the U.K),
tests on cattle are routinely performed. In
Japan, every cow is tested, in results that are
conclusive in cows as young as 23 months.
lion live cattle per year to American farms.
In 2001 alone, 57,000 live dairy cattle
replacers were brought in.
Through the research shared by Pringle
and others (see www.mad-cow.org), recom-
mendations have been made to the cattle
industry and to governments throughout the
world concerning the best way to protect cat-
tle — and humans — from the illness. But
the U.S. government, under pressure from a
powerful meat lobby, has been negligent in
implementing those recommendations,
DOWNERS REJECTED
Bovine prion protein fragment
RUTGERS
MAD COW MAN, SCULPTURE BY RON HOWELL
M
In the U.S., the FDA has banned the prac-
tice of using cattle as feed for other cattle.
But in both 2000 and 2002, at the request of
Congressman Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the
General Accounting Office found serious
lapses in U.S. companies following that reg-
ulation, and until then, there had been no
enforcement of those regulations.
That’s not a huge surprise if you follow
the money. Using downer cattle as feed
saves a lot of money, and in 2000, the live-
stock industry contributed $3.7 million to
Republican campaigns.
Until just last week, there had been no
U.S. law prohibiting the sale of downer cattle
for human consumption. The USDA banned
the sale of such meat to the public school
lunch program several years ago, but it was
still allowed onto grocery store shelves.
“It’s as if we’re a starving, third-world
country, feeding ourselves the lowest quality
food,” says Pringle.
The Dec. 30 ban on the sale of downers
was announced by Agriculture Secretary
Ann M. Veneman as a move to restore pub-
lic confidence in the nation’s meat supply.
This was a big turnaround for the Bush
administration, which had blocked, along
with meat industry lobbyists, an identical
measure in Congress only weeks before. In
fact, for the past 12 years, the meat industry
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