Mad Cow Facts

Center for Consumer Freedom
May 1, 2006

Like most food scares before it (remember Alar?), mad-cow fear seems to be slowly dying out. Last month a widely run Canadian Press story reported on the lack of public panic after the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE — that is, mad cow) in another Canadian cow. We last reported on this (non-)phenomenon in March, when an American mad cow discovery merited front-page attention on only one out of six major newspapers.
Why so little hoopla? It seems like the public is finally catching on to the concept of risk, including the fact that the size of a threat is modified by its likelihood. So what’s the threat? Last week Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told reporters that “the prevalence of BSE in the United States is less than one case per 1 million adult cattle.” As The Vancouver Sun said of Canada’s recent discovery:

[T]he world has become more mature in its attitude toward the disease, and for good reason. After all, while we can’t entirely eradicate all diseases in cows, we do know how to prevent the beef from those cows from going to market.

With infinitesimal risks made even tinier by safeguards much more advanced than when the disease was discovered a decade ago, mad cow is finally reaching its proper place in the public consciousness. Activists with a variety of agendas are still trying to inflate the threat (both Reuters and the Canadian Press used Michael Hansen to provide the obligatory “scare quote” in the articles referred to above), but the public seems to have realized that the risk is mostly nonexistent.

We’re still in the frenzy stage with bird flu (be sure to check out next Sunday’s hysterical TV movie on the subject), but the science suggests it’ll end up like mad cow. Once the public understands how over-hyped the problem is, activists will have to find something else to scare us about.

By Shawn Hanrahan, The Battalion
The Battalion via U-Wire; Texas A&M
April 6, 2006

Excerpt…

COLLEGE STATION, Texas

Mad cow disease has been making the news recently, worrying Americans about a possible spread of the disease’s human version, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). Realistically, the consumer has a small possibility of ever contracting the disease.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) was first recognized in 1986 by the British. BSE is unlike most other diseases because a protein created by the host organism, rather than an invasive microbe, causes the disease, according to Madcow.com. The infection is caused when a prion, or infectious, misfolded protein, enters the nervous system of a mammal. From there it catalyzes another protein, turning it into a prion. This results in a chain reaction of the normal protein being converted, or refolded into more disease causing prions. These prions then simply collect and clog the brain’s normal functions, killing cells in the process. Currently, there is no known function for the benign protein, which occurs naturally in all mammals.

Little is known of the methods of contraction, but current indications are that one must eat nerve tissue such as the spine or brain of a cow in order to become infected. Even then, the probability of contraction is incredibly low. According to Madcow.com, a watchgroup for the disease, there have been no reported cases of human contraction of CJD in the United States and 161 globally. In cattle, there have been three confirmed cases of BSE in the United States and 188,506 cases globally (183,000 cases from the United Kingdom). This may seem like an incredibly high number, but the number is relatively low in comparison to slaughter rates. For example, the United States alone slaughtered 35 million cattle in 2003.

According to Dr. Luis Tedeschi, professor at A&M’s Department of Animal Science, CJD does not pose a significant threat to the American public. He contends that fear of the disease propagated by the media is a more pressing problem. The cattle in the United States are no longer fed animal byproducts, and any cow that arouses suspicion is tested. These fears have led to drastic measures by the United States, however in 2003, a case of BSE was detected in a U.S. cow that originated from Canada…

…One critique is that it is safer to ensure that no human gets the disease. This is quite a noble goal, but when there are only 161 global cases of BSE and zero in the United States, it becomes abundantly clear that priorities can be placed elsewhere in terms of saving human lives. That priority could, for example, be placed on removing the current ban on blood donations. In May of 2002, the USDA instituted a policy that people who lived in areas with a high-risk for BSE in Europe from 1980 to the mid 1990s are banned from donating blood. The policy is rather detrimental because of the large number of American troops who resided on bases stationed in parts of Europe and it was expected that more than seven percent of willing donors would be turned away due to the new policy.

The threat of health risks mad cow disease poses to humans is simply unwarranted. While there have been cases of people in other parts of the world contracting mad cow disease, numbers prove to be the best rebuttal to fear. Statistical evidence does not support the claim that the disease could become an epidemic or that beef consumers should be alarmed. American citizens and the government should turn attention to more pressing matters.

Thu Mar 23, 8:27 AM ET
Reuters

Excerpt…

ROME (Reuters) - Cases of mad cow disease have halved each year wordlwide over the past three years, showing farmers were beating the deadly malady, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said on Thursday.

“Amid the current international alarm over avian flu, it is good news that the battle against another worrying disease is being won,” the FAO said in a statement that gave the latest statistics on animal and human deaths from mad cow.

“In 2005, just 474 animals died of BSE around the world, compared with 878 in 2004 and 1,646 in 2003, and against a peak of several tens of thousands in 1992,” it said, quoting data gathered by the World Animal Health Organization (OIE).

Five humans died in 2005 from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, believed to be the human form of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), all of them in Britain. In 2004 nine deaths were reported, down from 18 in 2003…

…But the Rome-based food agency said that while the world’s attention was on bird flu, governments should not think the battle against BSE was fully over.

“It is quite clear that BSE is declining and that the measures introduced to stop the disease are effective. But further success depends on our continuing to apply those measures worldwide,” said FAO animal production expert Andrew Speedy.

The FAO is pushing countries to adopt a tracking system that allows animals to be identified from birth to consumption, a system in place in the European Union but which has yet to be fully implemented elsewhere.

Public release date: 22-Mar-2006

Contact: Keith Randall kr@univrel.tamu.edu
979-845-4644
Texas A&M University

Successful Cell Engineering May Lead To Mad Cow Prevention, Say Researchers

Excerpt…

Researchers at Texas A&M University have successfully “knocked down” the expression of possible disease-causing genes in a cloned goat fetus, perhaps paving the way for breeding disease resistance in other animals, even those genes that might cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.

Researchers Mark Westhusin and Charles Long in Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, working with fellow scientists Greg Hannon, Michael Golding and Michelle Carmell at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, successfully utilized genetic engineering to produce a goat cell line in which the gene encoding for prion protein (PrP) was targeted for silencing by a process known as RNA interference. They then utilized these cells for nuclear transfer to produce a cloned, transgenic goat fetus which exhibited a greater than 90 percent knock down of PrP. Previous studies involving mice in which the PrP gene has been silenced have demonstrated the animals to be resistant to prion-mediated diseases such as BSE.

Their work is published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their success raises the possibility of introducing the same technology into cattle to prevent numerous diseases. “The exciting part is that we may be able to use this technology to prevent other diseases from ever starting,” Westhusin explains.

“We were able to knock down the genes that are involved with diseases in goats. In cattle, the disease that would most likely be targeted would be BSE, although there are numerous other genes that could be targeted to produce animals resistant to a variety of diseases. Moreover, the success raises possibilities to develop similar disease resistance strategies in other animal species,” Westhusin adds.

BSE, or Mad Cow Disease, is a fatal brain-wasting disease first identified in the United Kingdom in 1986. BSE affects a cow’s nervous system and causes the animal to lose much of its movement before it eventually dies.

More than 180,000 cases of BSE have been confirmed worldwide, including recent cases in the United States. The disease can be passed to humans, and more than 100 such cases have been confirmed, most of those in England.

“The next step is to try and avoid the cloning process - to skip that step if possible in developing the disease resistant animals,” Westhusin says. “That’s where more research is going to be needed and where the process goes from here…”

###

The team’s project was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Contact: Mark Westhusin at (979) 845-5885 or (979) 777-5472 or email at mwesthusin@cvm.tamu.edu or Keith Randall at (979) 845-4644 or email at kr@univrel.tamu.edu.

21 March 2006

Excerpt…

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–South Korea is certain to accept U.S. assurances that the latest case of mad-cow disease in the U.S. isn’t a result of weak cattle-feed safety measures, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials said Tuesday.

The USDA, responding to concerns laid out by South Korea, has sent a report with photographs to Seoul, detailing dental exams of an Alabama cow that tested positive for mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, last week.

South Korea was in the final stages of a process to resume beef imports from the U.S. when the USDA reported finding the third U.S. BSE case on an Alabama farm…

…It’s very clear the animal was over 10 years old, said the official, who spoke on terms of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of trade talks between the U.S. and South Korea. That would mean the cow was born and possibly infected before the U.S. cattle feed safety rules were implemented in 1997.

If the animal was young enough to have been born after U.S. cattle feed safety rules were in place, that could cast doubt on the effectiveness of a key U.S. safeguard against the spread of BSE.

South Korea banned U.S. beef in December 2003 after the USDA announced finding the first BSE case in the U.S. Before the ban, the U.S. exported $815 million worth of beef to South Korea in 2003, according to USDA data.

A South Korean delegation was scheduled to arrive in the U.S. this week to inspect the safety of beef-packing plants - part of the country’s process to resume trade, but that has been delayed in order for South Korea to scrutinize new information on the age of the BSE-infected cow, U.S. government and beef industry officials said.

Source: Bill Tomson; Dow Jones Newswires; 202-646-0088; bill.tomson@dowjones.com