Andrew Nikiforuk
By ANDREW NIKIFORUK
From The Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 12:15 AM EST
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004
One mad cow is
messy; two are messier. And in the next few months, if and when North
American regulators actually begin to gather some real science by
testing thousands of cows, the picture will likely get even dirtier.
Many experts on bovine spongiform encephalopathy now suspect that
BSE/mad cow has been in North America for at least a decade, that
the beef industry and regulators have fought proper regulation from
day one, that the current surveillance system is a don't-look-don't-find
model and that the public-health risk from contaminated meat could
be greater than most are prepared to admit.
"We have to take some serious actions," notes Yale University
pathologist and mad-cow expert Laura Manuelidis. "It's here now,
and we have to do something about it."
Let's begin with what's known. Mad cow is just one of many transmissible
spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) that put holes in the brains of
mammals, including elk and deer. The human disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease (CJD) and it bears so many similarities to Alzheimer's disease
that doctors commonly misdiagnose it (more on that alarming connection
later).
The infectious agent responsible for the current mayhem may be an
abnormal protein or prion (the dominant view) or an unconventional
virus. Environmental pollutants capable of altering the amount of
key trace metals in animals may also play an unexplained role in the
progress of this enigmatic disease. Scientists generally agree that
TSEs are spread by bone, blood and nerve tissue in contaminated feed.
Or by inoculation, which explains why the Canadian government has
banned U.S. animal vaccines derived from rendered cows. More than
one strain exists, and not every strain looks like classic British
BSE.
The first North American case of mad cow probably appeared in 1985,
on a Wisconsin mink farm. That's when Richard Marsh, a veterinary
pathologist at the University of Wisconsin, discovered that mink fed
"downer cattle" (technically any cow that has difficulty
walking) from local dairy farms, went crazy and died. Prof. Marsh
took samples of these mink brains and inoculated and fed them to bull
calves. Each bull developed holes in the brain. He then fed infected
cattle-bits back to mink, which developed more spongy brains.
His conclusion: "There must be an unrecognized scrapie-like disease
(BSE-like agent) in cattle in the United States."
This peculiar strain of BSE didn't have the same clinical symptoms
of classic British BSE. Instead of acting aggressively, these infected
cows behaved sleepily, like downer cattle. Inspectors looking for
drooling or rabid cows as a sign of mad-cow infection would miss this
disease.
Even the brain pathologies were different. Canada's two detected cases
of mad cow last year showed no symptoms of madness at all.
Before Prof. Marsh died in 1997, he pressed for a ban on feeding cattle-bits
to cattle, and he warned that waiting for the first case of mad cow
was like closing the barn door after the proverbial horse had run
off. "With a disease having a three-to-eight-year incubation
period, thousands of animals would be exposed before we recognized
the problem and, if that happens, we will be in a decade of turmoil,"
he wrote.
Prof. Marsh was vilified and denigrated by the U.S. cattle industry
for his work. His grant proposals to test more cattle were routinely
turned down by government. When a consumer's group sued the U.S. government
last year for not banning downer cows from the food chain, the U.S.
government, like the industry, retorted: "BSE has never been
found in the country's livestock," and said that the threat was
"not real or immediate." It was as if Richard Marsh's work
never existed. Speaking to U.S. journalist John Stauber, co-author
of Mad Cow USA, Prof. Marsh once confessed: "By issuing warnings
to industry, I thought industry would do the right thing. How could
I have been so wrong?"
Many BSE experts now regard Prof. Marsh's work as prescient. "It
was good work. It was ignored unfairly, and it was years ahead of
its time," notes David Westaway, a molecular biologist and prion
specialist at the Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases
at the University of Toronto. Dr. Westaway, a cautious conservative
scientist like Prof. Marsh, says the current system is anything but
science-based. He notes that U.S. Cattlemen's Association has been
"virulently" against testing, and that they have influenced
Canadian policy.
The tests aren't perfect, and are mostly designed to pick up the tail
end of an infection. "But tests are better than no testing,"
adds Prof. Westaway. "We have to get the prevalence. It's unlikely
we have an enormous epidemic — but we don't know what's out
there."
Prof. Westaway's plea for more testing has gone unanswered for three
years. No one from the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency has ever
called him about the issue. Nor has anyone investigated why Alberta's
animal-disease surveillance system, one of the best in North America,
was drastically downsized after an imported cow from England with
BSE was discovered in 1993.
There may be a bigger public-health concern out there. In 1989, Laura
Manuelidis and colleagues at Yale University performed autopsies on
the brains of Alzheimer's patients and found that 13 per cent of the
patients actually suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease —
the human form of mad cow.
A University of Pittsburg study made similar findings. Until then,
most scientists assumed that CJD only occurred in one in a million
people. What the results could well mean is that "at least some
people diagnosed with Alzheimer's have CJD," says Ms. Manuelidis.
Instead of the official caseload of approximately 30 CJD cases a year,
Canada, which has 364,000 cases of Alzheimer's and related dementias,
just might already have much higher numbers of CJD.
So things are about to get messy. That is not to say that a higher
incidence of CJD is necessarily connected to BSE; there could be more
sporadic CJD than previously thought, or an infectious prion could
be responsible. What we do know is that we have mad cows; we have
enigmatic brain-wasting diseases in people; and we don't have much
science in between.
Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary journalist, has been writing about the
beef industry for a decade. Last year his book Saboteurs won the Governor-General's
award for non-fiction.
© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Globe and
Mail May 29, 2003
Our Beef is with Bureaucrats
For years, our food industry regulators relaxed amid lax
monitoring and the mantra that mad-cow couldn’t happen here, says
author ANDREW NIKIFORUK
Alberta’s mad-cow story is one infuriating tale. But most of the
madness can be found in lax regulations and an industrial system of
food production that is rapidly taking the culture out of agriculture.
Although a long parade of federal and provincial agriculture types have
tried to reassure consumers and beef farmers that "the system is
working," and "it is only one cow," don’t believe
a word of it. They are merely taking a page out of Goebbels’s
old script: The best lies are those repeated over and over again.
The truth, however, is deeply disturbing. From the beginning, the Canadian
government hasn’t taken bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)
or related brain-wasting agents seriously. Even though this "curious
toxicity" rewrote the United Kingdom’s rural economy, ate
the brains of more than 100 Britons and resulted in the killing of 4.5
million cattle, the Canadian response has consistently been that of
an arrogant Johnny-come-lately.
Canada, for example, didn’t start a surveillance program for BSE
until 1992: that is, two years after the United States did. Although
this nation slaughters 3.6 million cattle every year, the feds only
check about 3,000 animals for disease every year. Canadian professional
inspectors argue that they are on guard for drooling and staggering
cows, but the scientists have repeatedly warned that infected animals
won’t all look mad, but may simply fall over -- as Alberta’s
mad cow did. Consequently, Canada’s feeble .03-per-cent surveillance
rate is not only inadequate, but too small to detect a growing problem.
The French, who raise only a quarter of the cattle we do, test 20,000
animals a week.
And consider this cow-kicker: Every country that has pretended to not
have a BSE problem (which is like pretending you’re not part of
the global disease exchange), quickly found it had one when it beefed
up its testing.
Canada was also tardy in banning the feeding of cattle bits (meat and
bone meal) to cattle. Very early in the course of the U.K.’s BSE
outbreak, scientists identified "hi-tech cannabalism" as the
central culprit. The industrial practice of feeding cattle bits to dairy
cattle not only produced more milk, but also put big holes in their
brains. Nevertheless, Canada didn’t ban animal feed made from
sick cattle until 1997, or one year after the United States did. (At
the time, the United States fed 13 per cent of its rendered cattle parts
to cattle, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes,
in Deadly Feasts.)
Our ban, like the U.S. ban, is still full of mad loopholes. Feed made
from rendered pigs and chickens in BSE countries can be sold and fed
to Canadian livestock. And sick domestic cows can be fed to pigs and
chickens, whose rendered bits can, in turn, be fed back to cattle. As
many scientists have noted, "cannibalistic feeding pathways"
are still as wide open as a feedlot.
The people now investigating Canada’s single case of mad-cow are
the same folks who adamantly insisted that it couldn’t happen
here. Despite our strong trade links to the U.K., and the documented
importation of feed in the 1990s, officials with the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency have ridiculed reporters worried about mad cows. "It’s
a European disease and that’s about it," said Claude Lavigne,
the agency’s associate executive director of animal products,
and the guy in charge of protecting consumers from BSE.
Didn’t our professionals read a 2001 Health Canada study that
concluded that BSE was alive and well in Canadian cattle in small numbers?
Given the murky global trade in livestock products and BSE’s eight-year
incubation period, the report concluded that "animals could be
harbouring the infective agent without reaching the stage of disease
at which clinical signs or infectivity in brain tissues could have developed."
Nor have CFIA officials ever acknowledged the brilliant work of a Wisconsin
BSE expert, Richard Marsh. He directly traced back several epidemics
of transmissible mink encephalopathy or "madmink disease"
in Ontario and Wisconsin to feed made from sick dairy cattle. Several
strains of BSE, in other words, have probably been in North America
for decades.
Another case of madness has been the government’s promotion of
game ranching -- a development that spread chronic wasting disease (CWD),
another brain-eater. Nearly a decade ago, the governments of Alberta,
Saskatchewan and Ottawa endorsed the penning of wild elk and deer as
a grand diversification scheme to revive rural economies already battered
by Canada’s careless industrial food policies. Scientists warned
that putting wild game in feedlots could serve as a disease bridge to
wildlife and Canada’s $30-billion cattle industry (possibly spread
via urine). The scientists also warned that current disease tests for
CWD and tuberculosis were unreliable.
Ralph Klein and his game-ranching buddies ignored this data and embraced
the elk-and-deer trade. So did Saskatchewan. With this new trade came
a $30-million TB epidemic that affected cattle, wildlife and people
-- and now a $30-million CWD epidemic.
Despite the slaughter of thousands of elk and deer, the Canadian Food
Inspection Agency remains a cheerful promoter of this fraudulent enterprise.
It has even allowed the Canadian Cervid Council, an industry promoter,
to triumphantly announce more cases of CWD with the familiar refrain
"the system is working." (It is noteworthy that the mad cow
found in Alberta may have been born in a region of Saskatchewan "hot"
with CWD.)
Beef-eaters and farmers alike should now be asking how much more government-sponsored
madness Canadians can afford -- and just how much more vulnerability
Canadians want built into their food economy by the professionals.
Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary journalist, eats grass-fed beef and is the
author of The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Plagues, Scourges
and Emerging Viruses. |
