In what was probably a footnote in the daily news April 4, 2001, representatives from the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the beef industry and consumer advocates convened to testify before the tongue-tiring Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, Foreign Commerce and Tourism.
The month before, the USDA seized a flock of sheep in Vermont after several had been diagnosed with scrapie, a disease similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy — mad cow disease.
In the 16 years before, since the symptoms of “Cow 133” (head tremors, loss of coordination and weight loss) were identified, the disease proved to be a constant bane to Britain, prompting other countries to ban beef imports from the nation. In May of 1995, 19-year-old Stephen Churchill died from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of BSE. (Both diseases are part of a group of so-called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, diseases that attack the brain, which also include deer and elk-afflicting chronic wasting diseases and kuru, a disease found in cannibals in Papua New Guinea.) Lawmakers were surely interested, then, in knowing whether American safeguards were enough to keep mad cow disease — which peaked at 100,000 confirmed infections in Britain — from crossing American borders.
Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of the food safety program for the Center of Science in the Public Interest, was justifiably concerned.
“The U.S. has had firewalls in place to protect the cattle population for getting infected with mad cow disease,” Smith DeWaal told CNN, “and there are some gaps in these firewalls.”
But those gaps were large ones: A General Accounting Office report issued in 2000 revealed that one-fifth of feed processing plants weren’t even aware of U.S. regulations designed to prevent American cattle from contracting BSE. But, government officials seem to have faulted.
Regardless, those firewalls failed last year, as Americans learned Dec. 23 that mad cow disease had been found in Washington state, and the nearly hysterical response to the single incidence of the disease here is already damaging. Several nations, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have banned imports of American beef. And the domestic beef industry is already making groaning adjustments not to become, well, dead meat. Fremont Beef in Fremont, Neb., laid off 49 of its 131 workers in response to the bans — most of the processor’s sales came from exports to Japan.
Caution is prudent, but given that there’s a very small chance contaminated material actually made it to the dinner plate, avoiding beef now if you didn’t before is probably unduly paranoid and only compounds the nation’s meat woes.
Still, the dark cloud of mad cow has a silver lining: The brouhaha is already prompting government agencies to install more effective safeguards and testing procedures.