- WASHINGTON (AFP) - While
the United States has yet to record a case of mad cow disease or its human
variant, meat eaters and producers alike are nonetheless expressing doubts
about the effectiveness of US food testing procedures.
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- "Nobody could rule out the possibility" that
the disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), might eventually
threaten the country, said Len Condon, vice president of the American Meat
Association.
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- "Of course we are nervous about it ... There has
been a very high level of alert in the United States," he said. "No
cases have been found but everyone is looking for it."
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- For the moment, Condon said, the general public has not
displayed any mad cow anxiety, seeing it as essentially "a European
problem."
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- BSE has been linked to a fatal brain-wasting disorder
in humans known as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.
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- US beef consumption is expected to increase seven percent
in value this year to reach 53 billion dollars, according to the Cattlemen's
Beef Board.
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- But the US Department of Agriculture (USD) insists that
it has imposed rigorous protective measures since the first case of disease
was reported in Britain in 1986.
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- In 1997 the department banned imports of beef and live
animal imports from Europe and stepped up its monitoring of livestock population,
each year analyzing the brains of hundreds of animals that had exhibited
suspect symptoms.
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- In 1996 the government banned meat and bone meal from
animal feed offered to cattle on fears that it could contain prion, the
agent that transmits BSE.
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- But according to Joseph Mendelson, legal director for
the consumer group Center for Food Safety, "the USDA is not looking
adequately at the herds."
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- The USDA between May 1990 and the end of last October
carried out 11,700 tests on animal brains, according to official statistics.
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- But that figure, says Mendelson, is "ridiculously"
low, considering that the US cattle herd numbers 98 million and that 30
million animals are slaughtered each year.
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- Even if the number of tests in the past 12 months has
doubled to more than 2,000 this year, it pales when compared to the 200,000
tests conducted in Britain since 1986 on a vastly smaller herd.
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- Of the 200,000 animals tested in Britain, 80 percent,
or 180,000, showed signs of BSE, according to a European diplomatic source.
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- Mendelson maintained that the USDA and other federal
agencies had come under pressure from the meat industry "because they
don't want to have an economic problem."
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- For John Stauber, author of a book entitled Mad Cow Disease:
Could The Nightmare Happen Here?, "the situation in the United States
is very dangerous because while we have not identified the strain of BSE
known as mad cow disease and the variant in people, we do have many other
strains of BSE in deer, elk and mink and sheep."
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- "There are probably 100 different strains of BSE
and there is evidence they are transmissible."
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- In addition there are no regulations preventing the use
of elk, sheep and even cow carcasses in the manufacture of meat and bone
meal.
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- While such feed cannot be given to cattle, it is still
authorized for chickens and pigs and for fish farms.
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- The number of deaths from Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in
the United States from strains not linked to the consumption of beef --
and most prevalent in people over 50 -- came to 4,751 between 1979 and
1998, according to Dr. Lawrence Schonberger of the Center for Disease Control
in Atlanta, Georgia.
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- He stressed that there have been no detected instances
of the disease that could be related to infected beef.
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- But, warned Stauber, "it's simply a question of
time."
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- "It's inevitable because of the weakness of the
controls ... and because the incubation period could take years,"
he said.
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