Europe’s mad cows Nov 28th 2000

Europe is gripped by concern over the spread of mad cow disease from Britain, and the possibility that its human equivalent could also be about to spread. Other countries would do well to prepare themselves by learning from Europe’s mistakes

SCIENTISTS from the European Union met in Brussels on Tuesday, November 28th, to discuss the growing alarm across Europe over the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. The scientists will advise a special meeting of European farm ministers to be held on Monday, December 4th, to decide what EU-wide measures need to be taken to reduce the risk of infection. BSE is a brain-wasting condition that was first detected in 1986 in Britain, where a human variant of the disease has killed more than 80 people.

Germany and Spain are the latest among a dozen European countries to report finding BSE in their cattle. Several countries have already taken unilateral action, banning meat-and-bone meal animal feed and restricting imports of beef from France, where supermarkets unknowingly put on sale meat from an infected herd that was supposed to have been destroyed. Consumer confidence has collapsed across the continent, and with it beef sales.

In Britain, BSE has led to more than 177,000 confirmed cases, with 4.7m cows being destroyed as a precaution, costing the government £140m ($196m) in compensation. The number of new cases in Europe is small by comparison—two each in Germany and Spain—but BSE, like any epidemic, starts small. Largely as a result of more rigorous testing, France has already seen its number of documented cases grow to more than 70 so far this year.

What makes the disease even more worrying is the uncertainty over how it will translate into new cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), its human counterpart. Although the number of new cases of BSE has fallen steadily in Britain, due to bans on certain feeds and the mandatory culling of infected animals, vCJD has a long incubation period, which could be 20 years or more. This means that it is only now that the number of human patients is rising. So far, France only has two confirmed cases of vCJD; Germany has reported two suspected cases. In all likelihood, Europe is on the threshhold of its own mad cow crisis. No one knows whether that, in turn, will lead to a rise in the number of vCJD cases, or even an epidemic.

David Byrne, the European Health Commissioner, has warned that “BSE doesn’t recognise national boundaries.” Does this mean that the disease could spread to other parts of the world, if it is not already there? That remains a possibility. In July, the European Commission conducted a study which classified countries according to their risk of having cattle infected with BSE. The safest beef, according to the report, was from Latin American producers, such as Argentina, as well as Australia, New Zealand and Norway. America and Canada, two of the world’s leading beef producers, were considered only marginally riskier in terms of BSE-infection. In practice, however, the EU imports little beef from North America, not because of fears about mad cow disease, but because of EU objections to the use of hormones to fatten cattle.

There has only been one documented case of BSE in North American cattle since 1990, and that was in a British cow exported to Canada (although a couple of Belgian sheep brought to America developed BSE-like symptoms earlier this year). America maintains a close watch on all its herds, keeping out any cow or part of a carcass from countries where BSE has been detected. America also has had a ban on meat-and-bone meal animal feed for cattle, which has been in place since 1997. America’s agriculture department is confident that the country is BSE-free, but nevertheless it has had a plan for emergency action ready since 1990 should the disease appear.

Panicking about the menu

Unfortunately, much of the crisis in Europe can be blamed on politicians and bureaucrats. Even while some European countries were clamouring for bans on British beef, they were ignoring warnings from the European Commission about how to avoid the spread of BSE in their own herds. One of the key recommendations was a ban on the traditional practice of feeding meat-and-bone meal (effectively the processed bits of other farmyard animals) to cows and other livestock. This is now widely thought to be the main route of transmission for the disease. France and Germany did ban such feed for cattle in the mid-1990s, but they failed to apply it to other animals, partly because of the cost to farmers. The result may have been cross-contamination of, say, tainted chicken meal and cattle feed, which might account for the new cases.

Lives at steak? Many European consumers are angry that the more rigorous action now being taken may be too late. The drama certainly seems to be an echo of what happened in Britain, where an official inquiry into BSE, published in October, seems not to have been heeded by its neighbours. For example, the report of the British inquiry takes government officials to task for downplaying the risk that the disease could be transmitted to humans when scientific evidence suggested otherwise. Yet Karl-Heinz Funke, Germany’s agriculture minister, breezily reassured the public in a newspaper article published in early November that the risk to his country from BSE was “very small”, something he could not possibly know for sure. More honesty in communicating the risk of BSE to consumers, and faith in their ability to react responsibly, is one of the important lessons for any government that faces a mad cow crisis, or any other food scare.

There also needs to be a better way to establish safe practices and common food-safety regulations. Plans recently approved by the EU’s agriculture ministers to introduce community-wide testing for BSE are a welcome move towards better co-ordination. A new European food authority, proposed by the Commission earlier this year, would also help restore public confidence—provided that its independent scientific assessments can be translated into union-wide policies. But that is no easy task. As in other parts of the world, agriculture has long been manipulated by national governments and powerful farm lobbies. And there are plenty of other food-safety issues that also need to be tackled, such as genetically-modified produce. For a European food-safety agency to work, it would have to transcend national boundaries—just like the diseases it would be dedicated to fighting.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), November 28, 2000