by Sheldon Rampton, E Magazine
http://www.emagazine.com
As infections go, mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth
disease don't have much in common. Mad cow disease is hard to transmit,
takes years to incubate in an infected animal and is almost impossible
to detect until symptoms emerge late in the course of the infection.
Foot-and-mouth, by comparison, is one of the most
contagious animal diseases known. Unlike mad cow disease, which is hard
to spread but always fatal, foot-and-mouth disease spreads quickly but
rarely even kills animals and is considered harmless to human beings.
The fact that both diseases have emerged in the United
Kingdom is mostly a matter of British bad luck. But both have something
to teach us about the virtues of precaution. Diseases of livestock and
people lurk in hidden crevices of the world, and the very technologies
that we celebrate as emblems of modern progress can also serve as
vehicles for transforming those diseases into epidemics. Just as AIDS
spread throughout the world thanks in part to the speed and ease of
modern travel, other diseases are cropping up with increasing frequency
as a result of factors including increasing urbanization of wildlife
habitats and intensive livestock farming practices.
Origins of an Epidemic
The recent British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease began in early
February on a farm in Northumberland, England's most northerly county.
By February 25, most of the country had been declared a contaminated
area. Its spread was assisted on February 13 when 40 sheep were
purchased in Northumberland and shipped to Devon, a county on England's
southwest peninsula. By the time the outbreak was identified as
foot-and-mouth disease, consignments of sheep and pigs had already been
shipped from infected areas throughout the country and to other parts of
Europe. By March 1, the number of detected cases had reached 30, with
new outbreaks occurring in Ireland and Scotland. Europe started
slaughtering animals imported from Britain as soon as the epidemic
became apparent, but by then, antibodies to foot-and-mouth were already
being found in Germany. By March 21, nearly 400 cases had been detected,
and the army had been called in to help with the disposal of carcasses
as thousands of animals were slaughtered in an effort to eradicate the
disease.
Europe will spend billions of dollars bringing this
particular outbreak under control. But outbreaks of foot-and-mouth have
risen throughout the world, due to activities that spread the disease,
such as illegal smuggling of animals, international tourism and the
globalization of trade. "The last two years have been among the worst on
record, with more than 60 countries experiencing outbreaks, including
many which have not had one in generations," reports the Guardian of
London. Examples include Taiwan, Korea, Brazil and South Africa, as well
as an outbreak last year in Japan that was traced back to diseased straw
imported from China via Russia.
Unlike foot-and-mouth disease, which has vexed farmers
for centuries, mad cow disease is a recent phenomenon created by
technical innovations in agricultural production itself. The innovation
that caused it was actually quite simple. In order to dispose of
slaughtered animal parts that have no commercial value, the meat
industry put them through a "rendering" process that consisted of
grinding them up and cooking them in large vats to produce a product
called "meat and bone meal" that was then fed back to other animals.
This created what was essentially a cannibalistic feeding loop, as cows
consumed the remains of other cows, sheep were fed to sheep, pigs to
pigs, chickens to chickens and so forth.
Common sense might dictate that this practice is a bad
idea, but the scientists and farmers who used this material genuinely
believed it would be safe. What they didn't realize was that this
feeding loop was also an amplification loop through which mad cow
disease -- something that had never even been detected prior to the
1980s -- would become a devastating epidemic that has so far killed more
than 170,000 cattle and began to kill human beings in 1996. To date,
nearly 100 people have died, presumably from eating infected beef, and
scientific projections for the eventual death toll in Europe range from
a few hundred to 100,000. Renderers like to point out that they deserve
credit for helping to dispose of large quantities of animal waste that
would otherwise putrefy and create a massive disposal problem. But
modern large-scale agribusiness has created a problem that it only
partially manages to solve.
Even today, notwithstanding the nightmare that mad cow
disease has meant for Europe, the U.S. meat industry and regulatory
agencies have failed to take all the precautions needed to protect
animal and human health. Europe has adopted tough regulations that ban
the use of animal meat and blood in livestock
feed.
Inadequate Protection
The U.S. has adopted regulations too, but with glaring holes. In March,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confiscated two flocks of
sheep imported from Europe, which they believe may have been exposed to
mad cow disease. Unfortunately, U.S. agencies continue to rely heavily
on attempts to interdict foreign imports that may carry the disease,
while winking and nodding at practices that could cause equally
devastating homegrown equivalents to emerge. It is still legal in the
U.S., for example, to feed rendered cows to pigs, whose remains are fed
in turn back to cows. And it is still perfectly legal to use cow blood
in cattle feed, a practice banned in Europe. The regulations that do
exist are limply enforced. Bovine meat and bone meal is supposed to be
labeled, "Do not feed to cows," but a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
investigation found that hundreds of feed makers are violating the law.
Modern feedlot farming, which force-feeds animals
"scientifically blended rations" designed to maximize growth and
minimize costs, has also introduced a variety of other practices that
threaten to spread diseases. In addition to the rendered remains of
their cousins, livestock today consume a variety of substances that are
quite different from the grass and hay on which they conventionally have
been nurtured, including industrial wastes, such as sawdust, wood chips,
twigs, ground-up newspapers, cement dust from kilns and even treated
manure and sewage sludge from municipal composting plants. This may not
make particularly appetizing reading as you are about to sit down to
dinner, but from industry's perspective, there is no harm in it. These
materials help cut down on costs, dispose of wastes and translate into
benefits for the consumer in the form of lower prices for your Chicken
McNuggets.
As far as industry is concerned, there is no proof that
these practices are dangerous, so why should they hesitate? But
scientific research is still lacking in regard to the risks associated
with these practices. No one knows how the recent outbreak of
foot-and-mouth disease arrived in England, but it got there anyway. No
one knew in advance that feeding livestock rendered meat and bone meal
would cause an epidemic of mad cow disease, but it did. And no one knows
today whether the introduction of genetically modified organisms into
our food supply will create previously unknown allergies or other health
problems in the people who consume them.
An International Problem
What we do know is that illnesses stemming from modern agriculture seem
to be a growing problem worldwide. In October of last year, the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization warned that increasing
movements of people, animals and animal products for trade are leading
to a greater spread of animal diseases across national borders. It noted
that a number of livestock diseases have been diagnosed for the first
time outside their "normal" areas of origin -- sometimes thousands of
miles away. In Yemen, close to the Saudia Arabian border, some 100
people have died from the first known outbreak of Rift Valley fever
outside Africa. Outbreaks of blue tongue disease, a viral disease of
sheep, have been reported in Bulgaria and Sardinia, locations where the
disease was previously unknown. In addition to mad cow disease and
foot-and-mouth disease, the United Kingdom saw an outbreak of classical
swine fever, a disease believed to have been eradicated in the UK many
years ago. The recent infection is thought to have been introduced
through imported meat products. Foodborne diseases among people also
appear to be rising. In 1990, the Food and Nutrition Board of the
National Academy of Sciences attributed the increase to "automated food
processing, increased reliance on fast foods, greater use of prepackaged
foods and microwave ovens, urbanization, public naivete about food
production and slaughter methods and lack of knowledge about the
hygienic precautions required at all stages of food handling."
The foodborne nature of many illnesses often goes
unrecognized by the victims, but government agencies have estimated that
as many as 81 million cases of foodborne illness occur in this country
each year, accounting for approximately 9,000 deaths. The most common
killers are not exotic diseases like mad cow disease, which the USDA has
yet to detect in the U.S. They include E.coli O157:H7, Salmonella
typhimurium and Listeria monocytogenes -- bacteria that have become
ubiquitous in the human food supply. Severe forms of E. coli food
poisoning, often originating from fast food, kill 500 people a year.
Salmonella, which causes an intense flu-like illness
that can be fatal, has been linked to the consumption of eggs, poultry,
milk and dairy products and a variety of other foods. The FDA's Center
for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition estimates that two to four million
cases of salmonellosis occur every year in the U.S. The Center says,
"[Salmonella] isolations from humans have shown a dramatic rise in the
past decade, particularly in the northeast United States (six-fold or
more)."
Listeria, which can cause fatal blood poisoning,
miscarriages in pregnant women and meningitis, is believed to spread
through ready-to-eat foods such as hot dogs, luncheon meats or cold
cuts. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some
2,000 people in the U.S. come down with serious cases of listeriosis
each year, which is responsible for approximately 500 deaths.
The benefits of modern agricultural innovation are
evident. The cost, however, is that we are performing a massive global
experiment with ourselves and our children as the test subjects.
Sheldon Rampton edits PR Watch and is the co-author,
with John Stauber, of "Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?"
and "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and
Gambles With Your Future."
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