Mad Cow U.S.A

Mad Cow U.S.A. Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Sheldon Rampton AND John Stauber Common Courage Press MONROE, MAINE First edition, second printing Copyright ©1997 by the Center for Media & Democracy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor- mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Common Courage Press Box 702 Monroe, Maine 04951 Phone: (207) 525-0900 Fax: (207) 525-3068 Typeset by Strong Silent Type, Madison, Wisconsin Cover by Matt Wuerker Cover photo by John Rizzo, Photo Disk Inc., 2013 4th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121 Printed on chlorine-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Rampton, Sheldon M., 1957– Mad cow U.S.A.: Could the nightmare happen here? / by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-56751-111-2. (cloth) 1. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—United States. 2. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy— United States. 3. Beef industry—United States. I. Stauber, John C. (John Clyde), 1953– II. Title. RA644.C74R35 1997 616.8'3—dc21 97–22500 CIP Contents Acknowledgments vi Foreword 1 1. THE BURDEN OF PROOF The Girl Who Wouldn’t Go Away 9 Food Fight 17 2. THE THING THAT EATS YOUR BRAIN First Tremors 27 Kuru 37 The Virus that Wasn’t There 53 3. THE INTERESTS OF INDUSTRY Cannibal Meat 61 Acceptable Risks 73 4. DANGER SIGNS Outbreak in America’s Dairyland 85 Mad Cows and Englishmen 91 5. CRISIS CONTAINMENT Scrapie, American-Style 103 Bent Proteins 115 Worst-Case Scenario 123 One Bad Apple 137 We See Nothing 147 Counting Sheep 157 6. MELTDOWN Apocalypse Cow 167 Who Will Tell the People? 175 Feeding Frenzy 185 7. RECKONING Truth and Consequences 201 Could the Nightmare Happen Here? 209 Glossary of Terms 221 Notes 225 Index 239 This book is dedicated with gratitude to Richard F. Marsh (1939–1997), a scientist who understood the precautionary principle. Acknowledgments Thank you to the staffs and boards of the following nonprofit foundations: CS Fund, Foundation for Deep Ecology, Rockwood Fund, Florence and John Schumann Foundation, Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation. Thanks also to the following individuals for their support, ideas, encour- agement, criticism and inspiration: Grant Abert, Greg Bates, Laura Berger, Peter Cox, Linda Crawford, Ronnie Cummins, Carol Bernstein Ferry, Daniel Carle- ton Gajdusek, Clarence J. Gibbs, Wade Greene, Michael Greger, Christine Gri- mando, Michael Hansen, Linda Jameson, Liz Keith, Howard Lyman, Joe Mendelson, David Merritt, Alida Messinger, Doris Olander, Tom Pringle, Renee Rampton, Scott Robbe, Debra Schwarze, Flic Shooter, Louis Slesin, Gar Smith, John H. Stauber, Courtlandt Thomas VanVechten, Nancy Ward, Virginia Wad- dick, and Walda Wood. Foreword “The good news is that people may not be contracting Alzheimer’s as often as we think,” anchorman Peter Jennings told his TV audience on the May 12, 1997 edition of ABC World News Tonight. “The bad news is that they may be getting something worse instead. We agree that’s pretty harsh language to describe a situation that has not been getting much public attention, but it is fairly accurate,” Jennings continued. “This is about something called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. It is fatal. It destroys your brain, and what is worse, it is infectious.” Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) may not yet have gotten much public attention in the United States, but in England this obscure but terrifying illness has become a household word because of its association with that country’s epidemic of mad cow disease. On March 20, 1996, the news that ten young people had contracted CJD from eating infected beef shook England and all of Europe. Now ABC was reporting that undiagnosed cases of CJD could already be much more widespread in the United States than anyone had pre- viously realized. “Health officials have maintained there are only about 250 new cases of CJD in this country each year, but several autopsy studies suggest this disease has been under-diagnosed,” explained ABC’s John McKenzie. “The studies show that when pathologists actually did autopsies and examined brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders, they uncovered hidden cases of CJD, anywhere from about 1% to 13%. These preliminary find- ings suggest a public health problem is being overlooked. If larger autopsy studies at more hospitals in this country confirmed that even 1% of Alzheimer’s patients had CJD, that would mean 40,000 cases, and each undetected case is significant because, unlike Alzheimer’s, CJD is infectious.” The math is obvious, and the potential ramifications are disturbing. If the true number of CJD cases in the United States turns out to be 40,000 instead of 250, the implications for human health would be severe. It could mean that a deadly infectious dementia akin to Britain’s problem has already entered the U.S. population. And since CJD has an invisible latency period of up to 40 years in humans, 40,000 cases could be just the beginning of something much larger. Mad cow disease and CJD are related “transmissible spongiform encephalopathies” or TSEs. (The technical name for mad cow disease is “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” or BSE.) Of all the scary “emerging diseases” that 2 MAD COW U.S.A. have been spotlighted in the past few years, TSEs may be the most bizarre and least understood. They are sometimes called “cannibal diseases.” Although diffi- cult to transmit naturally, they can be spread through unnatural feeding practices such as cannibalism, or through 20th-century medical innovations that a Nobel-winning TSE researcher describes as “high-tech cannibalism” because they transplant tissues from one person’s body into the body of another. If a TSE has established a beachhead within the human population, it could spread not only through the food supply but through organ transplants, con- taminated medical instruments, the blood supply, or pharmaceuticals made from animal products. As disturbing as these facts may be, the ABC report also seemed to be carefully edited with the interests of the U.S. food industry in mind. Michael Hansen, one of the scientists interviewed by ABC’s news crew, has been warn- ing for years about the danger that a BSE-like disease could be silently spread- ing in U.S. livestock, with potentially disastrous consequences for both animal and human health. But the ABC report downplayed Hansen’s warnings about potential dangers in the U.S. food supply. “Interestingly, no mention was made of BSE or the British problem,” commented industry consultant Robert LaBudde with some satisfaction. Even so, he worried that “the honeymoon is over in the U.S. Look for recurring and increasingly provocative news shorts on these subjects.”1 The “honeymoon” is ending because dangers that were once dismissed as miniscule and unimportant are now looming larger. “Bovine spongiform encephalopathy”—the scientific name for the epidemic of mad cow disease which has been killing British cattle since at least 1985—began generating garish headlines in London tabloids in the late 1980s. Some British doctors and scientists warned early on that the strange deadly epidemic claiming British bovines could pass into humans eating meat from infected animals. After nearly a decade of denial, the British government itself admitted that this possibil- ity—once dismissed as “ridiculous” and “far-fetched”—was indeed “the most likely explanation” for the emergence of what scientists have labeled “new vari- ant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease” or nvCJD. The number of deaths so far is small, and it is certainly possible that it may stay small, but it is by no means certain. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, BSE and the other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies often take years, even decades to incubate, during which time there is no practical way of testing to determine if a person has become infected. Existing evidence cannot predict the future course of such a disease, and some scientists worry that the handful of deaths to date may be only the tip of an epidemic iceberg that could eventually claim hundreds of thousands of British beef eaters. Most Americans first heard of mad cow disease on March 20, 1996, when the British government reluctantly announced that the disease appeared to be passing into humans. Amid the unbelievable spectacle of the collapse of the British beef market and the pending extermination of millions of British cattle, an opinion survey showed that while people in the United States were con- cerned about the issue, most believed that the U.S. government and the meat Foreword 3 industry had taken measures to prevent such a disaster from happening here. Unfortunately, as this book demonstrates, the necessary precautions have not all been taken. We were initially drawn to this story as writers who specialize in investi- gating the propaganda techniques used by governments and major industries to protect vested interests. We edit a quarterly newsletter, PR Watch, which focuses on manipulative and misleading practices of the public relations industry. Shortly before the British mad cow news made world headlines, we pub- lished our first book together, an occasionally humorous exposé of the PR industry titled Toxic Sludge Is Good For You. We had already been following the evolution of the mad cow crisis, fascinated by the British government’s efforts at what the PR industry calls “crisis management,” and equally fascinated as we watched those efforts unravel. Toxic Sludge even made a brief passing reference to mad cow disease, in a section discussing the Monsanto Company’s PR campaign for recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a controversial, genetically-engineered drug which forces dairy cows to produce more milk.

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