Home   Uninsured   Racism    Medicare    Medicaid/Medi-Cal    Mental Health    Healthcare Reform    War    Economics    All Articles   Search


2004-01-05 -- Mad Cow Disease A Byproduct Of Beef Industry Profits

The (Madison Wisconsin) Capital Times,  Monday, January 5, 2004

Editorial by JOHN STAUBER


When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our 1997 book, "Mad Cow USA: Could
the Nightmare Happen Here?," it received favorable reviews from some
interesting publications such as the Journal of the American Medical
Association, New Scientist, and Chemical & Engineering News. Yet
although the book was released just before the infamous Texas trial of
Oprah Winfrey and her guest Howard Lyman, for the alleged crime of
"food disparagement," the book was ignored by the mainstream media,
and even most left and alternative publications failed to review it.

Apparently many people who never read it at the time bought the
official government and industry spin that mad cow disease was just
some hysterical European food scare, not a deadly human and animal
disease that could emerge in America. In March 1996, when the British
government reversed itself after 10 years of denial and announced that
young people were dying from the fatal dementia called variant CJD --
mad cow disease in humans -- the media in the United States dutifully
echoed reassurances from government and livestock industry officials
that all necessary precautions had been taken long ago to guard
against the disease.

Those who did read "Mad Cow USA" when it was published in November
1997, however, realized that the U.S. assurances of safety were based
on public relations and public deception, not science or adequate
regulatory safeguards. We revealed that the U.S. Department of
Agriculture knew more than a decade ago that to prevent mad cow
disease in America would require a strict ban on "animal cannibalism,"
the feeding of rendered slaughterhouse waste from cattle to cattle as
protein and fat supplements, but refused to support the ban because it
would cost the meat industry money.

It was the livestock feed industry that led the effort in the early
1990s to lobby into law the Texas food disparagement act, and when an
uppity Oprah hosted a program in April 1996 featuring rancher-turned
vegan activist Howard Lyman, she and her guest became the first people
sued for the crime of sullying the good name of beef. Oprah eventually
won her lawsuit, but it cost her years of legal battling and millions
of dollars.

In reality, the public lost, because mainstream media stopped covering
the issue of mad cow disease. As one TV network producer told me at
the time, his orders were to keep his network from being sued the way
Oprah had been.

In the six years since the publication of "Mad Cow USA," Sheldon
Rampton and I have spoken out in media interviews, at conferences of
American families who had lost relatives to CJD, and we saw our book
published in both South Korea and Japan. Our activism won us some
interesting enemies, such as Richard Berman, a Republican lobbyist who
runs an industry-funded front group that calls itself the Center for
Consumer Freedom. Berman is a darling of the tobacco, booze, biotech
and food industries, and with their funding he issued an online report
depicting us as the ring leaders of a dangerous conspiracy of
vegetarian food terrorists out to destroy the U.S. food system. Last
week alone he issued two national news releases attempting to smear
us.

Of course, he had an easier time attacking us before the emergence of
mad cow disease in America. I was saddened but not surprised when mad
cow disease was finally discovered in the United States. When the
first North American cow with the disease was found last May in
Canada, I told interviewers that if the disease was in Canada, it
would also be found in the United States and Mexico, since all three
NAFTA nations are one big free trade zone and all three countries feed
their cattle slaughterhouse waste in the form of blood, fat and
rendered meat and bone meal. In fact, calves in North America are
literally weaned on milk formula containing "raw spray dried cattle
blood plasma," even though scientists have known for many years that
blood can transmit mad cow type diseases.

(This is why if you try to donate your blood to the Red Cross, you
will be rejected if you spent significant time in Britain during the
height of its mad cow epidemic. Britain is afraid that humans with mad
cow disease may have contaminated the British blood supply, and they
do not use its own blood plasma since as yet no test can adequately
screen blood for mad cow disease.)

* The United States has spent millions of dollars on PR convincing
Americans that mad cow could never happen here, and now the USDA is
engaged in a crisis management plan that has federal and state
officials, livestock industry flacks, scientists and other trusted
experts assuring the public that this is no big deal. Their litany of
falsehoods include statements that a "firewall" feed ban has been in
place in the United States since 1997, that muscle meat is not
infective, that no slaughterhouse waste is fed to cows, that the
United States tests adequate numbers of cattle for mad cow disease,
that quarantines and meat recalls are just an added measure of safety,
that the risks of this mysterious killer are minuscule, that no one in
the United States has ever died of any such disease, and on and on.

The latest spin is to blame the United States mad cow crisis on
Canada. On Dec. 27, with no conclusive proof whatsoever, the USDA
announced that the mad cow in Washington state had actually entered
the United States years ago from Canada. This set off an
understandable howl from the Canadian government, and by Sunday the
United States was forced to back off somewhat, but clearly the PR ploy
is to get Americans thinking that this is Canada's problem, not ours.

Even if Canada does turn out to be the source of America's first case
of mad cow disease, numerous questions remain: How many other infected
cows have crossed our porous borders and been processed into human and
animal food? Why are America's slaughterhouse regulations so lax that
a visibly sick cow was sent into the human food chain weeks before
tests came back with the mad cow findings? Where did the infected
byproduct feed that this animal ate come from, and how many thousands
of other animals have eaten similar feed?

* Since the announcement of mad cow disease in the United States our
phones have rung off the hook with interview requests. The New York
Times noted that "The 1997 book Mad Cow USA,' by Sheldon Rampton and
John C. Stauber, made the case that the disease could enter the United
States from Europe in contaminated feed." Articles in the New York
Times also cited other warnings from Consumer Union's Michael Hansen,
and Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel Prize-winning researcher who this week
called the current United States practice of weaning calves on cattle
blood protein "stupid." All of this would be very vindicating, except
for one problem: the millions of dollars that the government and
industry are spending on PR to pull the wool over the public's eyes
might just succeed in forestalling the necessary steps that now, at
this late date, must still be taken to adequately deal with this
crisis.

The good news is that those steps are rather simple and
understandable. We should ship Ann Veneman and her smartest advisers
to Britain, where they can copy the successful feed and testing
regulations that have solved the mad cow problem in Europe. Veneman
and her advisers should institute a ban on feeding any slaughterhouse
waste to livestock. You may think this is already the case because
that's what industry and government said they did back in the summer
of 1997. But besides the cattle blood being legally fed back to
cattle, billions of pounds of rendered fat, blood meal, meat and bone
meal from pigs and poultry are rendered and fed to cattle, and cattle
are rendered and fed to other food species, a perfect environment for
spreading and amplifying mad cow disease and even for creating new
strains of the disease.

The feed rules that the United States must adopt can be summarized
this way: You might not be a vegetarian, but the animals you eat must
be. The United States must also institute an immediate testing regime
that will test millions of cattle, not the 20,000 tested out of 35
million slaughtered in the past year in the United States. Japan now
tests all cattle before consumption, and disease experts like Prusiner
recommend this goal for the United States.

And of course, no sick "downer" cows, barely able to move, should be
fed to any human. These are the type of animals most likely to be
infected with mad cow and other ailments -- although mad cows can also
seem completely healthy at the time of slaughter, which is why testing
all animals must be the goal.

Veneman and the Bush administration, unfortunately, currently have no
plans to do the right thing. The U.S. meat industry still believes
that the millions of dollars in campaign contributions over the years
will continue to forestall the necessary regulations, and that
soothing PR assurances will convince the consuming public that this is
just some vegetarian fear-mongering conspiracy concocted by the media
to sell organic food.

Will the American public buy this bull? It has in the past. Much
depends on journalists and what they are willing to swallow. It looks
to me as if papers such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times
are finally putting some good investigative reporting teams onto this
issue, and that may undercut and expose PR ruses such as the "blame
Canada campaign."

What I can predict is that the international boycott of U.S. beef,
rendered byproducts, animals and animal products will continue, and
this will apply a major economic hurt to meat producers big and small
across the country. Will their anger turn against the National
Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Animal Feed Industry Association and
other lobbies that have prevented the United States from doing the
right thing in the past? Or will this become some sort of
nationalistic food culture issue, with confused consumers and family
farmers blaming everyone but the real culprits in industry and
government?

* We must continue to advocate for the United States to do the right
thing: Follow the lead of the European Union nations, ban all "animal
cannibalism," and test more or all animals. In the meantime, if you
want safe American beef, search out products that are certified
organic and guaranteed not to be fed slaughterhouse waste such as calf
formula made from cattle blood. An excellent source of information is
the Web site of the Organic Consumers Association.

"Mad Cow USA" is temporarily unavailable until a paperback copy is
released later in 2004. However, you can get the book in its entirety
for free through the Web site of our Center for Media and Democracy.
Simply go to www.prwatch.org and click on the cover of "Mad Cow USA."
You'll be taken to www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf, where you can
download for free the entire book -- and read the warnings that went
unheeded then, and are still being ignored by government regulators
and industry.