There is a huge overreation to mad cow disease. I saw this article this morning that puts things into a rather interesting perspective.
With regard to animal waste, having come from a rural background, I can attest to the fact that most cattle are strictly grain fed. You really don't have anything to worry about. Beef is safer than either pork or chicken. And, as the article points out, taking a bath or walking downstairs are both far more dangerous than vCJD.
MAD COWS AND IRRATIONAL HYSTERICS
Pseudoscience on the Farm
By Sandy Szwarc, RN, BSN, CCP ([email protected])
Alfred Hitchcock knew a shadowy figure was far more terrifying than a
well-lit known villain. Of late, there's been an explosion of headlines and juicy
stories about the shadowy figure of mad cow disease that capture attention with
sensationalized "what-if?" scares of hidden dangers lurking in our beef. We
can be assured of one thing when it comes to the safety of our food: hysteria
will be inversely proportional to actual risks.
Cows Aren't People
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or "mad cow disease," is a fatal
disease in aged cows, according to the U.S. Dept of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and
Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).[1] Its victims are usually 3 to 6
years old--that's old for cows, as those raised for meat are slaughtered young
(under 24 months). BSE is one of several neurological degenerative diseases, like
chronic wasting disease that occurs sporadically and spontaneously in wild
ruminant animals. (Non-ruminant animals such as pigs and poultry don't get the
diseases).[2] Scrapies, the form endemic in sheep and goats, has been identified
in Europe since the mid-18th century.[3]
Despite news reports quick to place blame, scientific evidence is far from
conclusive. Since BSE was first identified in 1986 on a dairy farm in England,
the cause has not been pinpointed, according to the U. S. Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS).
What is known is that BSE is not contagious and cows cannot give it to each
other or other animals just by living together. Nor can they give it to people--
there's never been a single case. Despite that fact, 4.5 million innocent
healthy cows were destroyed in England during the peak of their mad cow hysteria,
devastating beef and dairy farms and creating an environmental disaster in
disposing of all those dead carcasses. Hopefully reason will prevail, as it has
in Canada since their BSE case last May, and the unnecessary mass slaughter of
healthy animals won't be repeated.
If other cows with BSE are discovered in North America, as they likely will,
it doesn't mean safeguards have failed or that an epidemic is upon us. Unlike
Englands despairing bout, the few cases of BSE in Canada, Japan, Spain, Italy
and scattered around the globe have remained contained and harmless.
England has had 90% of recorded BSE cases. Scientists believe it may have
spread there because of an unusual scenario that's since been corrected,
dramatically curtailing the number of cases. Learning from Britain's experience,
precautions put in place elsewhere make the likelihood of a similar spread remote.[4]
Most of Englands animal feed protein since the 1970s had been derived from
bone-and-meat from ruminant animals which, it's theorized, may have caused an
unnatural spread of the disease agent, possibly from scrapie-infected sheep,
into feed, or that it precipitated a deformity of prions (a natural protein in
brains). The risk of scrapie contamination was higher in England, with 3.4
sheep per cattle compared to 0.08 here, but is unlikely here because the U.S. has
had a scrapie control program in place since 1952. Unlike England, we've also
always primarily used plant-based protein, such as corn and soybean, for
cattle feed.
While the prion theory of transmission has not been firmly established by
scientists, according to the USDA the risk materials have been determined to be
the skull, brain, trigeminal ganglia, eyes, vertebral column, spinal cord and
dorsal root ganglia of cattle over 30 months of age and the small intestine of
all cattle.[5] Since 1997 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has prohibited
the use of most mammalian protein (which includes risk material) in animal
feeds given to all ruminants--making conventional and organic beef equally safe.[6]
The American Feed Industry Association, which represents nearly 700 feed
companies, called for the complete removal of ruminant-derived meat-and-bone meal
from facilities that make cattle feed to prevent even accidental mixing of feed
types, and established independent third-party certification programs to
verify compliance. The National Renderers Association has followed suit.
As an added precaution, the U.S. has banned the importation of any ruminant
animal or product from any country even suspected of being at risk for BSE,
according to the U.S. HHS, FDA, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
(CFSAN).[7] No beef has been imported into the U.S. from England since 1985.
According to the National Cattlemen's Association, a proactive, vigilant surveillance
system also tests all cows older than 30 months or that appear sick or
nonambulatory, and removes high risk materials, before processing. While some are
calling for the testing of every cow to reassure consumers, that would
conservatively cost hundreds of millions of dollars, crippling the low-margin $50
billion beef industry without giving much additional safety. As Dr. Ron DeHaven,
the Agriculture Department's chief veterinarian noted, the current surveillance
system is designed to detect the disease if it exists in one in a million
animals. The American Meat Institute (AMI) adds that existing BSE surveillance
already exceeds international standards by more than 40 times.[8]
More than five years ago the AMI also called upon its members to discontinue
the use of air injection stunning, to avoid the possible contamination of meat
with brain tissue. According to J. Patrick Boyle, AMI President and CEO, to
their knowledge no such equipment is in use in American processing plants, nor
is mechanically separated beef produced in the U.S., contrary to many fears
being raised by activists.
Finally, to bolster consumer confidence in beef safety, the last week of 2003
the USDA announced new measures to protect cattle herds that went well beyond
international standards. In addition to making mandatory changes in
processing and increasing BSE surveillance, they called for the establishment of a
national animal ID system. The USDA will also require that beef carcasses and beef
products from animals undergoing BSE testing be withheld from the food
supply, pending test results. This is a prudent measure, according to the AMI, and
is already routine practice at many of the nation's beef plants. All
nonambulatory livestock have also been banned from the food supply, although the AMI
notes that the majority, "if inspected and passed by a USDA veterinarian are safe
for human consumption."
Human Mad Cow?
Cows with BSE act like animals and people with other spongiform
encephalopathies--they lose muscle control, waste away and die. According to the World
Health Organization, Creutzfeld-Jacobs Disease (CJD), one of the human spongiform
encephalopathies, occurs spontaneously in about one in a million people.[9] It
appears to have a genetic basis 5 to 10% of the time, with a small percentage
iatrogenic. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the
APHIS, CJD is unrelated to mad cow, as evidenced by the fact it occurs in England
about the same frequency as the rest of the world. And according to Konrad
Eugster, MD, executive director of the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic
Laboratory at Texas A&M University, CJD has been around a long, long time long
before mad cow ever hit the news.[10]
In light of British panic over mad cow, their Spongiform Encephalopathy
Advisory Committee has been closely studying and monitoring these diseases since
1990. On March 20, 1996, it noted 10 cases of human CJD that occurred in younger
people and lasted longer than typically seen. Besides the fact that most
variant-CJD victims had eaten beef at some time--although no one had eaten brain
tissue and one of the ten patients had been a vegetarian since 1991--they could
find no scientific evidence linking BSE and vCJD. While a few studies
subsequently published in Nature reported an association between vCJD and BSE, it is
far from conclusive and other researchers question the theory.
That hasn't stopped vCJD from being labeled the human form of mad cow. A
popular orthodoxy has evolved, fueled by media frenzy, that meat contaminated with
the brain prions of mad cows could give people the disease. "It's all been
much ado about nothing," said Scott C. Ratzan, director of the Emerson
College/Tufts University School of Medicine Program in Health Communications and
editor of the Journal of Health Communications.[11] "Based on available scientific
evidence, we can be virtually certain that mad cow disease poses no threat to
humans."
No one has ever been able to establish that any vCJD victim has ever eaten
beef from a diseased animal or that infected prions can cross the species
barrier and cause disease in humans. In addition, there is no documented increase in
cases in cultures where brains are a favorite dish. And, while the vCJD cases
shortly after England's BSE outbreak are pointed to as proof of an
association, it's hard to ignore that the already small numbers of cases are dropping,
making groundless claims that the worst of the epidemic is yet to come. Other
exposures don't hold up, either, as there's no higher incidence among farmers,
slaughterhouse workers, butchers or others in greater contact with BSE or
animal products.
Rather than being some exotic new prion disease, Alan Ebringer, a professor
of immunology at King's College, London, believes vCJD is the result of the body's own immune response to a bacteria called Acinetobacter, making it another
autoimmune disease with mechanisms already well-understood by science.[12]
George A. Venter, a public health consultant from Hamilton, Scotland, noted in an
October issue of the British Medical Journal, that the evidence linking BSE and
vCJD is weak.[13] Even when mice with the human prion protein were injected
with BSE prions, they didn't get the disease.
The first case of CJD, diagnosed in the 1920s, was in a 23 year old, casting
doubt that vCJD is a new disease in younger people at all, but more a question
of degree and better ascertainment. Britain's CJD Surveillance Unit noted
that widespread concern about the potential infectiousness of BSE resulted in a
qualitative change in the type of patients referred to their unit. Clinical
features, spread and pathology of vCJD are more similar to Kuru, a disease found
in Papua New Guinea, he found. Venters also noted the number of cases are much
rarer than would be expected from a food source, making vCJD the "epidemic that never was."
What Are Our Chances of Contracting vCJD?
While scientists sort through the data, and government and industry take
every precaution warranted by available evidence, the bottom-line message for
consumers is this. Regardless of the cause, since first identified in the 1980s
CSFAN reports that as of May 2003 there have been in total approximately 139
cases of vCJD worldwide, with only 1 case in 2000. Diarrhea diseases, in
contrast, cause 2.2 million deaths every year.
Those fretting about mad cow probably think nothing of taking a bath (which
kills 320 Americans a year), walking downstairs (which kills 1,421 Americans
annually), or driving a car (which kills 42,000 Americans a year). By contrast,
the odds of getting vCJD from eating British beef, said the CDC, is about one
in ten billion.[14] By comparison, NASA's Near-Earth Object Search Report
determines there's a 1 in 400,000 chance of a major asteroid striking the earth.[15]
That translates to 99.99975% chance an asteroid will miss the Earth, but doesn't stop some from fearing Armageddon.
If it's biologically implausible for humans to get mad cow from beef, how did
it become conventional wisdom? "Because you don't let the facts get in the
way of a good story," said Venters.[16] "The mad cow disease story would be a
non-story in the U.S. if it were not for the propaganda efforts of vegetarian
groups," said the National Council Against Health Fraud. Such groups "have
seized upon the opportunity to frighten people into behaving in ways they find
ideologically delightful."[17]
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), renowned for its food
fears, warned in a Nutrition Action Healthletter article "What Could Happen
Here?" that "vCJD spares no one" and that the connection between it and mad cow
prions is "spreading fear and panic across the globe." In a Dec. 24th New
York Times article, Caroline Smith DeWaal, CSPI's director of food safety, wasted
no time telling consumers they should avoid eating any ground meat, or pizza,
tacos, hot dogs, salami, bologna and other foods that could contain ground
meat, or even T-bones that could have been cut from close to the spinal
column.[18] They neglected to report that no infective agent or prion has ever been
found in muscle tissue (meat) or milk, and that the brain, spinal column and lower
intestine of the infected cow had been removed and sent to the USDA's
National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa--meaning no risk material ever
entered the food supply.
But what if every fear being theorized by the fear mongerers[19] became a
reality? To find out, the USDA commissioned a study by the Harvard Center for Risk
Analysis to study worst case scenarios. Their report found that should BSE be
introduced in the U.S., measures taken during the last five years by the
government and industry, while not foolproof, will arrest and eradicate the
disease.[20] The risk isn't zero, said David Ropeik, director of risk communication,
but it's as close to zero as you can get.
About the author: Sandy Szwarc, RN, BSN, CCP is a food and health writer and
has been managing editor of national food and restaurant publications. She is
also a culinary professional and cookbook author; and a registered nurse with
over twenty years in critical-care nursing, emergency triage, and outreach
education with a focus on nutrition and preventative health. She is a member of
the National Council Against Health Fraud, American Council on Science and
Health, American Dietetic Association--Food and Culinary Professionals, and
International Association of Culinary Professionals. A regular contributor to Tech
Central Station, she is increasingly involved in debunking junk science as it
pertains to food and health.
