Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Begins

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17466

 

 

Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Begins

 

By John Stauber, AlterNet

December 30, 2003

 

When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our 1997 book, " Mad Cow USA: Could the

Nightmare Happen Here? " , it received favorable reviews from some interesting

publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, New

Scientist, and Chemical & Engineering News. Yet although the book was released

just before the infamous Texas trial of Oprah Winfrey and her guest Howard

Lyman, for the alleged crime of " food disparagement, " the book was ignored by

the mainstream media, and even most left and alternative publications failed to

review it.

 

 

 

Apparently many people who never read it at the time bought the official

government and industry spin that mad cow disease was just some hysterical

European food scare, not a deadly human and animal disease that could emerge in

America. In March, 1996, when the British government reversed itself after ten

years of denial and announced that young people were dying from the fatal

dementia called variant CJD – mad cow disease in humans – the United States

media dutifully echoed reassurances from government and livestock industry

officials that all necessary precautions had been take long ago to guard against

the disease.

 

 

 

Those who did read " Mad Cow USA " when it was published in November, 1997,

however, realized that the United States assurances of safety were based on

public relations and public deception, not science or adequate regulatory

safeguards. We revealed that the United States Department of Agriculture knew

more than a decade ago that to prevent mad cow disease in America would require

a strict ban on " animal cannibalism, " the feeding of rendered slaughterhouse

waste from cattle to cattle as protein and fat supplements, but refused to

support the ban because it would cost the meat industry money.

 

 

 

It was the livestock feed industry that led the effort in the early 1990s to

lobby into law the Texas food disparagement act, and when an uppity Oprah hosted

an April 1996, program featuring rancher-turned vegan activist Howard Lyman, she

and her guest became the first people sued for the crime of sullying the good

name of beef. Oprah eventually won her lawsuit, but it cost her years of legal

battling and millions of dollars. In reality, the public lost, because

mainstream media stopped covering the issue of mad cow disease. As one TV

network producer told me at the time, his orders were to keep his network from

being sued the way Oprah had been.

 

 

 

In the six years since the publication of " Mad Cow USA, " Sheldon Rampton and I

have spoken out in media interviews, at conferences of United States families

who had lost relatives to CJD, and we saw our book published in both South Korea

and Japan. Our activism won us some interesting enemies, such as Richard Berman,

a Republican lobbyist who runs an industry-funded front group that calls itself

The Center for Consumer Freedom. Berman is a darling of the tobacco, booze,

biotech and food industries, and with their funding he issued an online report

depicting us as the ring leaders of a dangerous conspiracy of vegetarian food

terrorists out to destroy the United States food system. Last week alone he

issued two national news releases attempting to smear us.

 

 

 

Of course, he had an easier time attacking us before the emergence of mad cow

disease in America. I was saddened but not surprised when mad cow disease was

finally discovered in the United States. When the first North American cow with

the disease was found last May in Canada, I told interviewers that if the

disease was in Canada, it would also be found in the United States and Mexico,

since all three NAFTA nations are one big free trade zone and all three

countries feed their cattle slaughterhouse waste in the form of blood, fat and

rendered meat and bone meal. In fact, in North America calves are literally

weaned on milk formula containing " raw spray dried cattle blood plasma, " even

though scientists have known for many years that blood can transmit mad cow type

diseases.

 

 

 

(This is why if you try to donate your blood to the Red Cross, you will be

rejected if you spent significant time in Britain during the height of its mad

cow epidemic. Britain is afraid that humans with mad cow disease may have

contaminated the British blood supply, and they do not use its own blood plasma

since as yet no test can adequately screen blood for mad cow disease.)

 

 

 

The United States has spent millions of dollars on PR convincing Americans that

mad cow could never happen here, and now the USDA is engaged in a crisis

management plan that has federal and state officials, livestock industry flacks,

scientists and other trusted experts assuring the public that this is no big

deal. Their litany of falsehoods include statements that a " firewall " feed ban

has been in place in the United States since 1997, that muscle meat is not

infective, that no slaughterhouse waste is fed to cows, that the United States

tests adequate numbers of cattle for mad cow disease, that quarantines and meat

recalls are just an added measure of safety, that the risks of this mysterious

killer are miniscule, that no one in the United States has ever died of any such

disease, and on and on.

 

 

 

The latest spin is to blame the United States mad cow crisis on Canada. On

Saturday, December 27, with no conclusive proof whatsoever, the United States

Department of Agriculture announced that the mad cow in Washington state had

actually entered the United States years ago from Canada. This set off an

understandable howl from the Canadian government, and by Sunday the United

States was forced to back off somewhat, but clearly the PR ploy is to get

Americans thinking that this is Canada's problem, not ours.

 

 

 

Even if Canada does turn out to be the source of America's first case of mad cow

disease, numerous questions remain: How many other infected cows have crossed

our porous borders and been processed into human and animal food? Why are United

States slaughterhouse regulations so lax that a visibly sick cow was sent into

the human food chain weeks before tests came back with the mad cow findings?

Where did the infected byproduct feed that this animal ate come from, and how

many thousands of other animals have eaten similar feed?

 

 

 

Since the announcement of United States mad cow disease our phones have rung off

the hook with interview requests. The New York Times noted that " The 1997 book

'Mad Cow USA', by Sheldon Rampton and John C. Stauber, made the case that the

disease could enter the United States from Europe in contaminated feed. "

Articles in the New York Times also cited other warnings from Consumer Union's

Michael Hansen, and Dr. Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel Prize-winning researcher who

this week called the current United States practice of weaning calves on cattle

blood protein " stupid. " All of this would be very vindicating, except for one

problem: the millions of dollars that the government and industry are spending

on PR to pull the wool over the public's eyes might just succeed in forestalling

the necessary steps that now, at this late date, must still be taken to

adequately deal with this crisis.

 

 

 

The good news is that those steps are rather simple and understandable. We

should ship Ann Veneman and her smartest advisors to Britain where they can copy

the successful feed and testing regulations that have solved the mad cow problem

in Europe. Veneman and her advisors should institute a complete and total ban on

feeding any slaughterhouse waste to livestock. You may think this is already the

case because that's what industry and government said they did back in the

summer of 1997. But beside the cattle blood being legally fed back to cattle,

billions of pounds of rendered fat, blood meal, meat and bone meal from pigs and

poultry are rendered and fed to cattle, and cattle are rendered and fed to other

food species, a perfect environment for spreading and amplifying mad cow disease

and even for creating new strains of the disease.

 

 

 

The feed rules that the United States must adopt can be summarized this way: you

might not be a vegetarian, but the animals you eat must be. The United States

must also institute an immediate testing regime that will test millions of

cattle, not the 20,000 tested out of 35 million slaughtered in the past year in

the United States. Japan now tests all cattle before consumption, and disease

experts like Dr. Prusiner recommend this goal for the United States. And of

course, no sick " downer " cows, barely able to move, should be fed to any humans.

These are the type of animals most likely to be infected with mad cow and other

ailments – although mad cows can also seem completely healthy at the time of

slaughter, which is why testing all animals must be the goal.

 

 

 

Ann Veneman and the Bush administration, unfortunately, currently have no plans

to do the right thing. The United States meat industry still believes that the

millions of dollars in campaign contributions doled out over the years will

continue to forestall the necessary regulations, and that soothing PR assurances

will convince the consuming public that this is just some vegetarian

fear-mongering conspiracy concocted by the media to sell organic food. Will the

American public buy this bull? It has in the past. Much depends on journalists

and what they are willing to swallow. It looks to me as if papers such as the

Wall Street Journal and New York Times are finally putting some good

investigative reporting teams onto this issue, and that may undercut and expose

PR ruses such as the " blame Canada campaign. "

 

 

 

What I can predict is that the international boycott of United States beef,

rendered byproducts, animals and animal products will continue, and this will

apply a major economic hurt to meat producers big and small across the country.

Will their anger turn against the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the

Animal Feed Industry Association and other lobbies that have prevented the

United States from doing the right thing in the past? Or will this become some

sort of nationalistic food culture issue, with confused consumers and family

farmers blaming everyone but the real culprits in industry and government?

 

 

 

We must continue to advocate for the United States to do the right thing: Follow

the lead of the European Union nations, ban all " animal cannibalism, " and test

more or all animals. In the meantime, if you want safe American beef, search out

products that are certified organic and guaranteed not to be fed slaughterhouse

waste such as calf formula made from cattle blood. An excellent source of

information on the web is the site of the Organic Consumers Association.

 

 

 

Our book, " Mad Cow USA, " is temporarily unavailable until a paperback copy is

released later in 2004. However, you can get the book in its entirety for free

through the website of our Center for Media & Democracy. Simply go to

www.prwatch.org and click on the cover of " Mad Cow USA. " You'll be taken to

www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf where you can download for free the entire book

– and read the warnings that went unheeded then, and are still being ignored by

government regulators and industry.

 

 

 

 

 

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