Mad Cow Facts

From Reuters - October 12, 2001

Mad cow disease and the illness thought to be its human equivalent may not be linked after all.

George Venters, an expert in public health medicine in Hamilton, Scotland, believes the rogue prion brain protein that causes mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), does not cause new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) — a degenerative brain disease found in humans.

Venters said he does not believe that the evidence now available casts serious doubts on the case for a causal link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and that the epidemiological evidence just doesn’t stack up.
The link between the animal and human brain-wasting diseases is open to question, he added, because it does not meet criteria used by scientists to assess a link between cause and effect for disease.

When you apply them to the case of BSE causing vCJD, the evidence is weak. A telling point is the number and pattern of cases detected is different from what you usually find in epidemics caused by eating contaminated food.

British scientists first identified vCJD in 1996 and suggested eating meat infected with BSE was the cause. The condition causes degeneration of the victim’s brain tissue and eventual death.

But Venters said there is no direct evidence that the prion responsible for BSE and other animal diseases is infectious in humans.

Prions in animals and humans are different, he argues, and humans do not get other animal prion diseases such as scrapie — found in sheep — from eating lamb.

Also, ingestion is an inefficient route of transmission of prions other than by cannibalism. Infection of humans from eating the bovine spongiform encephalopathy prion is therefore unlikely.

In a report in the British Medical Journal, Venters listed other inconsistencies including the relatively small number of cases of vCJD, lack of details about exposure to the infectious agent and the pattern of infection, which does not fit in with other food-borne diseases.
If vCJD is caused by eating beef contaminated with BSE, Venters said the number of cases should be much higher than the 100 or so confirmed cases reported so far.

May 4, 2001 by David Martosko
Wasington Legal Foundation

Legal Backgrounder

Many experts believe that we have managed to prevent [mad cow disease] from coming here. However, there are others who are most concerned and believe that, no, it’s just a matter of time before it turns up here. It really depends on who you ask.

Dr. Emily Senay, CBS medical reporter, on “The Early Show,” December 7, 2000

Mad cow disease is very real, and represents a serious public health problem in Europe. Dr. Senay is suggesting it could happen in America, though, and she is not alone. More than ten years after American schools pulled apples off of lunch menus in response to unfounded Alar fears, the same old cast of characters is at it again. This group of highly organized individuals, representing a handful of zealous anti-product groups, is orchestrating yet another scare campaign. Whether it is about mad cow disease, genetically improved foods, pesticides, organic farming, sugar, caffeine, “sustainable” agriculture, or animal “rights” (just to name a few), the players are often the same.

This time our sirloin, prime rib, hot dogs, and cheeseburgers have their attention. In order to further their ideological agendas (and to drum up interest in their “sustainable food” and “organic” commercial ventures), these activists will press onward, seeking to convince the American public that mad cow disease poses a threat here at home. Effective junk-science smear campaigns like the current mad cow scare don’t appear out of thin air; there is evidence to suggest that this particular one is the result of a carefully coordinated public relations effort.

Nothing Scares Like a Deer

The primary basis for the current American mad cow scare campaign is a supposed connection between mad cow disease and wild deer. In early 1999, two men (one each in Utah and Oklahoma) died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) at an unusually young age. CJD is a debilitating, incurable brain- wasting disorder that strikes about one person in a million. D’Arcy Kemnitz, a Center for Food Safety lawyer (and, not coincidentally, a lobbyist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), soon claimed in several news stories that a “mad deer disease” had caused the CJD cases. Since both victims were avid hunters and younger-than-average CJD victims, several willing reporters believed the story that infected game was responsible.

Certain deer and elk do suffer from something called “chronic wasting disease” (CWD), whose symptoms are similar in some ways to European mad cow disease, but scientists have concluded that the two diseases are not linked. On March 27, 1999, The Calgary Herald ran a story about one of these victims, Doug McEwen. The very first “expert” commentary came from anti-meat activist John Stauber, who complained that U.S. agencies were not doing enough to learn whether CWD was crossing over into humans. “By the time we see people confirmed as dying of CWD,” he said, “those deaths are just going to be the tip of the iceberg.”

(more…)

January 8, 2001 by Geoff Winestock
Wall Street Journal

Abstract: Two summers ago, a German doctor named Ingo Malm decided to set up a private laboratory to test cattle for mad-cow disease. By last March, Bovinia GmbH was offering its services to slaughterhouses and retailers across southern Germany… The 45-year-old general practitioner soon received a written warning from the Health Ministry of Bavaria, Germany’s biggest cattle region. It said that the test kit his eight-employee outfit was using hadn’t been certified by Germany’s federal government and that, in any case, only the government had the right to test for BSE. The kit was licensed from Switzerland’s Prionics AG, which had developed one of the first reasonably effective tests for BSE. Dr. Malm kept using the kit, which had been approved by the European Union’s top scientific panel, and drew a blunter warning in June… A spokesman for the Bavarian Health Ministry, Bernhard
Seidenath, says the state government blocked the use of Prionics’ tests because it feared they might be unreliable; Prionics says its test is the most reliable available. Mr. Seidenath called the threat to effectively shut down Bovinia “history from a long time ago.”

Bovinia’s fate helps explain why it is only now, nearly five years after Britain acknowledged a link between BSE and a similar brain-wasting disease in humans, that much of continental Europe is accepting that it, too, faces a “mad-cow” problem. A form of BSE, having jumped the species barrier, has killed more than 80 people, almost all in Britain. The first cases of BSE in Denmark, Germany and Spain were recorded only recently — last spring in Denmark, November in Germany and Spain. The incidence in France quintupled last year. Before that, the cattle disease almost certainly existed, but most European Union countries weren’t seriously looking for it and, in some cases, thwarted those who were.

Germany began massive BSE testing only in December, after the first recorded case of German BSE rattled consumers and shook the government. All across the Continent, as interviews with independent scientists, members of EU inspection teams, local veterinarians and government regulators suggest, measures for tracking mad-cow disease have been haphazard, poorly executed and, in many countries, nearly absent altogether…

“We cannot say if this is a new peak in the incidence of BSE or if the upsurge in cases this [past] year is only because surveillance wasn’t sufficient before,” says Gerard Pascal, chairman of the European Commission’s standing scientific committee on BSE and a leading authority on the subject.

A stepped-up testing program for mad-cow disease that the EU launched last week to calm consumers has stirred more fear and confusion, especially in Germany and Spain, where BSE cases are up sharply. After the first week of compulsory testing, Spain cited three new BSE cases Friday, taking its total to five. The same day, Germany announced plans to broaden its testing to cover younger animals after a private company found a case of BSE in a 28-month-old cow. ..

The discovery of BSE in Germany was especially embarrassing because it had nothing to do with the government. The first case was uncovered because Ulrich Spengler, the director of a small private testing laboratory in Hamburg, Artus AG, made a useful business contact through his Spanish teacher. In 1998, Dr. Spengler, 33, quit a doctoral program at the Institute for Tropical Diseases in Hamburg to set up a three-person lab for Germany’s organic-food market, offering testing for diseases such as salmonella, which the German government doesn’t check systematically. He decided early this year to add BSE tests to his list of services and, like Dr. Malm, flew to Zurich to stitch up a contract with Prionics.

The Hamburg Health Inspection Ministry didn’t threaten to shut him down, though he says local politicians went around telling potential customers that testing was a waste of time. Then, last autumn, his Spanish teacher told him about a small slaughterhouse in Galenburg, in Lower Saxony, that was trying to establish a niche market for organic beef. Dr. Spengler traveled to Galenburg to try to sell his salmonella testing service. As an afterthought, he threw in BSE testing. “It was my first customer, so I made them a special cheap offer for the two types of tests,” Dr. Spengler says. Within a month, tests at Galenburg uncovered Germany’s first confirmed case of BSE.