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© 2013 Cristian Lucisano Editore Lady&Mister Chef
Reading - Section 3
Fear on the Hoof
The evidence mounts: the human form of mad-cow disease may have spread far beyond Britain - and may be ready to strike.
by william underhill.
The danger’s true extent is
anybody’s guess, but the concern is spreading around the world.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that cattle in more than 100 countries may have been exposed to mad-cow disease: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
Since the mysterious degenerative brain illness was first identified in Britain in 1985, it has killed roughly 180000 cattle and been blamed for the deaths of more than 80 people.
The FAO expressed particular concern about the possible threat of lurking BSE in Eastern Europe, the Mideast and Asia, where Britain exported large quantities of
possibly contaminated animal feed after banning its use domestically in 1986.
Epidemiologists fear BSE’s final cost may be far higher. They say its incubation period seems to take decades in humans, and it is nearly impossible to detect until its terminal stages. Reputable scientists extrapolating from data on roughly similar outbreaks of illness, have suggested that the death count from BSE’s incurable human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), could eventually top 125000 in Britain alone. Meanwhile, health professionals around the world are debating the risks of infected blood donations and querying the past safety of every kind of cattle-derived product, from baby food and skin creams to polio vaccines and other medicines.
New warnings and worries emerge almost daily. London’s press reported that blood from a British donor, an undetected CJD victim, had been used to make a vital clotting agent used by hemophiliacs and that blood products from the same source were shipped to 10 countries around the world.
British health authorities insist that the risk is entirely conjecture: there is no evidence that the disease can be transmitted in blood. Nevertheless, at blood banks in Australia, the United States and several other countries, donors are automatically rejected if they spent six months or more in Britain during the ’80s or early ’90s.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, similarly nervous, has been urging pharmaceutical manufactures for the past decade to make sure their vaccines contained no cattle byproducts from anywhere BSE has been detected.
Still, the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention insist the danger from the vaccines is minimal.
The big risk is still from eating infected beef. The contagion raced across Britain in the 1980s, when farmers routinely fed their cows on the ground-up remains of cattle carcasses as a cheap protein supplement. Scientists now know that the BSE pathogen is highly infectious. Medical investigators estimate that a single gram of infected meat-and-bone meal (MBM) – a scrap no larger than a peppercorn – is enough to transit the disease to a healthy cow.
Back in the mid-‘80s, though, the disease was a mystery. While the epidemic raged among cattle, British grain dealers exported thousands of tons of potentially infected feed, mostly to Europe. As the Continent’s worries grew, the British exporters shifted to other markets.
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© 2013 Cristian Lucisano Editore Lady&Mister Chef The export didn’t end until 1996, when the government acknowledged that eating contaminated beef was likely cause of CJD. Britain has some hard questions to answer. Why did the government let the exports continue, despite warnings from the chief medical officer, Sir Donald Acheson?
The government’s defenders argue that MBM feed poses no known threat to chickens, pigs, rabbits or anything else except ruminants and people.
No one has yet measured BSE’s damage outside the EU. Britain’s export statisticians never knew how much of the MBM feed went to poultry and pigs which seem to be immune to the BSE infection.
The disease was assumed to be almost nonexistent across most of Europe – until last year, when the European Union ordered a rigorous BSE testing program. Since then, more and more cases have been detected. This year alone, 23 have been found in France, 20 in Germany and 15 in Spain.
Britain has spent some $6 billion on efforts to eradicate BSE, including the wholesale slaughter of more than 4 million cattle. But such a blow could devastate the economies of many Third World countries. “ I hope the disease will be completely restricted to the wealthy countries of Europe”, says Maura Ricketts, a mad-cow specialist at WHO. “But we just don’t know”. That’s the scariest part of the BSE epidemic: not knowing.
Taken from: Newsweek, Feb. 2001
