by Larry DeWitt

April 13, 2004

Well, just when we thought we must have seen it all in the story of Mad Cow Disease, the tale just keeps getting weirder and weirder. I swear, I am not making this up.

When last we checked-in with this madness in our meat supply America was shamed (and some of us were worried) by the fact that we currently check a fraction of 1% of our cattle going to slaughter for this disease, which is fatal to humans. In Europe, remember, they test about one-third of their animals; in Japan they test 100% of their beef before allowing it into the food supply. So when a case of mad cow was discovered in the meat from one cow (out of 20,000 randomly tested) we were unsure if this was really a single case, or an indicator of as many as 2,000 infected animals passing undetected into America's hamburgers each year.

Well, now an American beef company has decided to do the right thing. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef of Arkansas, Kansas recently announced they have voluntarily decided to start testing 100% of their beef for traces of mad cow disease. Not, probably, out of a sense of civic responsibility--it may not be that they worry so much about poisoning their customers. No, the problem is that Japan has stopped importing their beef. And Creekstone has decided that the easiest solution here is to do the right thing. The ban is costing Creekstone an estimated $200,000 a day in lost business. They estimate it will cost them less than $6 million to test all 300,000 cows in their herd. So in the long-run, it's about the money.

But guess what happened? On April 9th the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a ruling prohibiting Creekstone from testing its cattle! It turns out that under the Virus Serum Toxin Act of 1913 the Department of Agriculture decides whose cattle can be tested and for what and how. Cattle growers have to get the Department's permission to test their own herds. And the Department of Agriculture concluded that such perfect testing was "not scientifically warranted." So the Department of Agriculture approved the rapid-test protocol, and they want the industry to use it, but only to test no more than the fraction of 1% we now test. Huh? What is going on here? Well, surprise, surprise, it's about the money.

Since Japan issued its ban following the mad cow scare last December, the Department of Agriculture has been trying to pressure Japan to lift the ban. In January Department officials met with Japanese trade officials and tried to jaw-bone them into submission. Late last month, the Department formally notified Japan and our European trading partners that it has determined American beef is safe. This is the formal step required before trade sanctions or tariffs or other punitive trade actions can be undertaken.

In the meantime, has the U.S. changed its meat-inspection protocols? Is that how we can now certify our beef to be disease-free? Well, no. But we have promised to do a one-time testing of about 201,000 cows with obvious neurological illnesses (i.e., they are too sick to walk, for example), and another 20,000 healthy cows for good measure--out of an annual total of about 40 million cows slaughtered each year. (Under present procedures, remember, the industry still slaughters and we still eat those 201,000 obviously diseased cows.) This one-time test will take place in June. But, apparently, Department of Agriculture officials know the outcome in advance since the certification that our herds are disease-free was made in March!

Does this make any kind of sense to anyone? Well, yes, actually. Just keep repeating: it's about the money. The Department of Agriculture insists it cannot conduct this one-time test for less than $327 per cow! The problem is that the rest of the industry does not want to foot this kind of a bill for testing their massive herds. Creekstone sells a premium class of beef to Japan--richly marbled Black Angus--at a high price and so the expense of testing is just a minor cost of doing business. Other producers sell lesser cuts, and they worry the testing might eat into their profits.

So the meat-processing industry has been calling-in its political favors--and in an irony only a hypocrite Republican could love--the Bush Administration has decided the rights of a capitalist like Creekstone Farms Premium Beef need to be usurped by the heavy hand of government regulation. Not to protect consumers of course, only to protect bigger capitalists with the right ties to the right political friends.

The spokesman for the cattleman's association--one Gary Weber--said that 100% testing would be "misleading" to consumers because "it would create a false impression that untested beef was not safe." It might indeed. Asked if beef producers were lobbying against allowing Creekstone to test its own cattle because they did not want to pay for testing theirs, Weber insisted it was "absolutely not about the money." From which we can be fairly certain, it is about the money. Or maybe Weber is telling the truth. Maybe it isn't about the $18 per cow for the testing. Maybe the industry just dosen't want to know what they might discover in a 100% inspection. Or more precisely, maybe they don't want us to know.

Creekstone has announced that they are going to protest the Department of Agriculture ruling--perhaps even filing a lawsuit if necessary. Bravo for good old-fashioned greed! And shame on the Bush administration which in its hypocrisy wants to appear to be keeping us safe by keeping us ignorant.

Bon appétit, and good luck.

And shame on the Bush administration which in its hypocrisy wants to appear to be keeping us safe by keeping us ignorant.

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Afterword: The Dreadful Math of Death By Hamburger

Beef tainted with Mad Cow disease when eaten by humans causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE). This is a brain-disease. It causes the human brain to turn into a sponge--hence the name. BSE is fatal; there is no treatment and no cure; and death usually takes 1-3 years, during which time the symptoms are those of Alzheimer's disease. The incubation period for the disease in humans can be as long as ten years. So thousands of Americans may already have BSE and not yet know it. Cooking the meat cannot kill the proteins which cause the disease. Once the meat is tainted, nothing can be done to make it safe. It must be destroyed. If humans eat it, nothing can prevent them from getting BSE, other than luck.

Last year America tested 20,000 cows for Mad Cow disease and found one case--which potentially translates into 2,000 cases in the American beef supply. In France each year they test about one-half of the cattle they slaughter. Since they began this testing about 10 years ago, France has found 891 cases of Mad Cow in their meat. Which likely means that another 891 diseased cows made it through their system because they only inspect half the cattle going to slaughter. (And in France they only slaughter about 6 million cows per year, compared with the nearly 40 million we render in the U.S.) Since the incubation time for the disease in humans can be up to ten years, this probably means there are nearly 900 people in France who will some horrible day explode onto the scene with full-blown BSE disease. (There is presently in the United States one confirmed case of BSE disease--a teenage girl in Florida who apparently ate tainted beef as a child and whose disease burst forth last year.)

So there are probably at least 900 cases waiting to appear in France, and--if our pitifully small sample from last year is any indication--another 2,000 cases in the U.S. in just the last year alone. But it is even worse than that. The way beef is processed in modern packing plants is that the waste meat from 50-60 cows is mingled together when making meat products like hamburger (the form of beef most likely to be infected with Mad Cow). So one infected cow can infect 50-60 others. So the 2,000 hidden cases in America last year might well become 100,000 cases. But it is worse still. Even though the meat from a single diseased cow may be mixed with that of 50 healthy ones--making them all poisonous--the equipment used to process that infected cow is itself infected in the process--the knives and saws and hooks, etc. get tainted along with the beef. So any cow processed on the same day could become infected. This is why, although we only knew about a single case of Mad Cow in the U.S. last December, the meat of all the cattle processed in that plant on that day--more than 10,000 pounds of beef--was recalled by the Department of Agriculture. So our hidden 2,000 cases of diseased cows each year may well translate into even more than 100,000 cases.

Be afraid, be very afraid.