Approaching pandemic is Britain's shame

The world faces a pandemic of mad cow disease that may rival HIV. And argues Lynette Dumble, the British must accept the blame for spreading the disease - perhaps as far as Australia.

The recent mad cow disease precautions taken by the Australian and New Zealand authorities are in stark contrast to those of their counterparts in Europe where the disease, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), has spread to cattle in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

It was in 1996 that Britain announced that meat products from BSE-infected cattle were linked to a new form of incurable human spongiform encephalopathy - new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). Even as that link was made public, British policies were spreading BSE across the globe, resulting in a man-made disaster which has the potential to put the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the shade.

The human death toll is approaching 100, with 88 of them being nvCJD fatalities in Britain. Predictions vary on whether BSE-contaminated cattle produce will eventually claim a thousand, tens of thousands, or even millions of human lives.

BSE emerged from a post-World War II British strategy to increase the milk yield of dairy herds by feeding the cows protein-rich pellets made from the meat and bones extracted from animal waste accumulated at abattoirs and boning plants, and also from the leftovers discarded by butchers, restaurants and knackeries. Aided by deregulation of the meat-rendering industry in the late 1970s, the strategy transformed Britain's cattle from BSE-free herbivores into BSE-infected carnivores. From 1985, when a mystery disease now known as BSE emerged in Daisy, a dairy cow from Kent, the annual number of BSE-infected cattle rose to 731 within the space of three years. A year later, in 1989, 400 new cases appeared each week, and by 1992, 100 new cases appeared each day.

British authorities began reassuring national and international audiences in 1989 that mad cow disease was under control. In the same year, they also gathered scientists from the world's major laboratories engaged in human and animal spongiform disease research, together with a number of respected neurovirologists, to seek advice.

The solutions put forward by the experts shaped the events which have effectively spread mad cow disease across the globe. The experts were sworn to secrecy, notably regarding the export of cows and contaminated feed worldwide. One, Dr Laura Manuelidis, physician and professor of neuroscience at Yale University, proposed that the epidemic could swiftly be brought to a close with the immediate cull of infected herds. Britain's attitude to the Manuelidis solution was, in her words, penny-wise, pound-foolish, and her idea was dismissed on the grounds that compensation for the owners of the herds was financially out of the question.

From then onwards, the global spread of mad cow disease went into full swing. Britons were placed at risk of nvCJD when an estimated 700,000 BSE-infected cattle entered their food chain, chiefly because the animals' slaughter age, usually three years, was below the age at which they would show signs of BSE infection.

Next, the duplicity of the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, known as MAFF, exposed mainland Europeans to an unknown quantity of BSE-contaminated veal among the 2 million calves transported to European saleyards between 1990 and 1995.

MAFF sabotaged a 1990 Brussels ruling designed to prevent the spread of BSE outside Britain when it issued civil servants with secret orders to skip the computer vetting of calves designed to exclude BSE-infected animals.

The globalisation story gets worse. For eight years, debt-burdened Third World countries were lured to buy attractively low-priced BSE-suspect meat and the same protein-rich animal pellets believed responsible for Britain's BSE problems.

Ultimately, the dumping of BSE-implicated produce, considered unfit for sale in Britain, will be recorded as another shameful chapter of British imperialism. The French Minister for Agriculture, Jean Glavany, sees it exactly in those terms, and recently commented that "morally, they should be judged for that one day. They even allowed themselves the luxury of banning the use of such feed [in Britain] while allowing it to be exported."

Already there are reports of nvCJD-like illnesses in South Africa, Pakistan, and India. The United Arab Emirates has banned the importation of beef from Pakistan because of the BSE threat. One thing is certain, as the World Health Organisation and Professor Manuelidis have recently underlined, the social and environmental costs of a BSE-contaminated food chain in developing regions will far outweigh the multibillion-dollar estimates of Europe's present BSE-related crises.

Nor did the globalisation story stop with Europe and Third World countries. In the thirst for greater and greater market profits through hybrid strains, more than 2,000 British cattle were exported post-1992 to the four corners of the world, including to Australia, for breeding purposes. Cattle from British BSE-suspect herds can be found on stud farms close to Bowral in NSW and close to Ballarat in Victoria. To the naked eye, the Scottish longhorns appear magnificently healthy, but the fact remains that they made their way to Australia after 1990 when the Federal Government banned the importation of British cattle.

That the animals arrived in Australia from Britain by way of Argentina in 1992 does not in any way alter their threat to the Australian meat industry, and ultimately the nation's food security. Nor does it exclude Australia's potential contribution to the globalisation of mad cow disease when the offspring of these truly illegal immigrants are exported elsewhere for breeding.

At the dawn of 2001, the world faces an unprecedented catastrophe due to Britain's man-made BSE disaster. The message from Canberra, like the messages from Europe over the past decade, is that the situation is in hand.

Supposedly, Australia farming practice has never exposed cattle to the BSE perils of cattle protein-enriched pellets, but some States do permit cattle to be turned into carnivores via pellets made from the powdered remains of chicken, kangaroo, pig, horse, poultry and fish. Until we bite the bullet to address the perils of human interference with nature and bring about absolute compliance with import regulations, Australians too risk the myoclonic jerks of nvCJD.

This cruel disease silently eats away at the brain over years to rob humans of their every means of communication; the ability to hear, see, and speak. Gone, too, is the understanding of written and spoken native language, and with it every scrap of dignity.

Tradition places women in every region of the world at the greatest risk of nvCJD, because their kitchens and associated knife injuries are a far more efficient means of transmitting the disease than exposure to suspect meat or animal-based beauty creams.

Animals and humans have paid an unacceptable price for the man-made BSE pandemic. Now it is time to end the mentality which has placed profit ahead of public welfare and animal integrity, and which has spread the terrible repercussions around the globe.

Dr. Lynette J. Dumble, medical scientist and international co-ordinator of the Global Sisterhood Network, is a former senior research fellow in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/17/features/features4.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 16, 2001

Answers

Martin, what a horrifying article. I've been watching this nightmare unfold for a long time, wondering when the disease will be exposed in North America. The article indicates the story has just begun.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), January 16, 2001.

nvCJD is reportedly here. But any lab that finds it will not publicize it because the lab cannot be cleansed. The prion is only destroyed by 800 degrees.

A scrapie-like disease (similar to that in mad sheep) has been reported in deer and elk in sevral states.

-- John Littmann (littmannj@aol.com), January 16, 2001.

The analogy to HIV is perhaps deeper than those using realize.

HIV is not a "cause" of AIDS, as a growing body of dissidents and growing body of research demonstrate convincingly. Just so, a growing body of research is beginning to suggest that mad cow disease is not a disease at all, and is not spread as suggested, through ingestion of animal parts thru feed, but rather, is some kind of reaction to pesticides sprayed over cows' skins.

Keep your minds open, folks. There is a lot of money at stake with both AIDS and mad cow diease. Finding the truth may be a matter of following the money trailm, rather than more research.

-- Neil Ruggles (nmruggles@earthlink.net), January 16, 2001.

I agree, Mr. Ruggles. I note also in the article a sensationalist tone -- is this to cover the fact that not quite 100 people have died? Even if all of them, not just 88, were British, that would still qualify this disease as extremely rare even in Britain's small population. According to the CDC, ~23,000 people died of Alzheimer's in the US in 1998 alone -- one per cent of all deaths that year. In light of such numbers, why is BSE such a sensation? Who benefits from a panic?

I should like to look at any research you can point to, on this disease. I am familiar with the failings of the HIV hypothesis; I should be interested in BSE studies. Do you have any links?

-- L. Hunter Cassells (mellyrn@nist.gov), January 17, 2001.

http://www.mercola.com/2000/apr/9/soy_research_update.htm

Go here and enter the words: mad cow bse in the search box for a good start.

-- fair use act quotation: for educational and reserach purposes (perry@ofuzzy1.com), January 18, 2001.