Meating of the minds

Doctors, activists and beef industry officials get in a froth over mad cow

By Newt Briggs

This year, the average American will consume about 65 pounds of beef. Sliced into steaks, pressed into patties, squeezed into casings and inevitably slathered with a rainbow of sauces and condiments, it will grace dinner tables from the manor house to the clubhouse and will net the U.S. cattle industry more than $44 billion. Most people will feast greedily--blissfully ignorant of the cholesterol, saturated fat and other potential hazards lurking in each juicy bite. But a few will chew cautiously, silently fretting over a fatal brain-wasting disease known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy--or, more commonly, mad cow disease.

The biology of mad cow disease is unique and complicated--a mouthful even for scientists--but basically, it is caused by a defective protein, called a prion, that instructs brain cells to shut down and die. Generally speaking, it cannot be transmitted through animal-to-animal or animal-to-human contact, but can only be transmitted through the ingestion of infected nervous tissue. In humans, the illness manifests itself as a form of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease--a rare and fatal neuro-degenerative condition that is said to have a frequency rate of about one in 1 million people.

To date, the largest outbreak of mad cow occurred in the United Kingdom, where millions of cows were slaughtered and burned in the '90s to prevent a potential worldwide BSE epidemic. Attributed to barbaric feed practices within the British cattle industry and a government-led initiative to obscure the scope of the disease, mad cow has been linked to more than 150 human deaths from mad cow-related CJD in Europe and Asia. The United States has thus far been spared a single human victim, but after a Washington state dairy cow was diagnosed with BSE last December, more and more people are wondering if beef really is what's for dinner. And if it is, should we be concerned that our next cheeseburger might turn us into a vegetable? We asked a scientist, a veterinarian, an industry lobbyist and a concerned mother--all of whom have a vested interest in the safety of the American beef supply.

The scientist

Maybe Colm Kelleher--a Las Vegas-based protein biochemist who, until recently, was employed by stargazing local billionaire Bob Bigelow--is a manic street preacher shouting doom and gloom from a pulpit made of innuendo and speculation. Then again, maybe the Dublin-born scientist is an unlikely prophet preaching the gospel in a temple full of carnivorous Pharisees.

Author of Brain Trust, a lengthy treatise on the potential connection between mad cow and misdiagnosed Alzheimer's disease, Kelleher speculates that BSE has already taken root in the U.S. population and may be responsible for an unexplained series of CJD deaths around the country. The current medical consensus is that diseased cattle can only transmit a variant form of CJD--fittingly titled vCJD--to humans, but Kelleher and a small band of colleagues argue that BSE-infected meat can give rise to multiple forms of CJD. Drawing from research conducted by Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh, Kelleher further suggests that many deaths previously attributed to Alzheimer's and dementia may in fact be the fault of this misunderstood killer.

As proof, Kelleher points to a 9,000 percent increase in the domestic diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease since 1979. That year, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 653 people died of Alzheimer's disease in the United States. Twenty-three years later, in 2002, 58,785 people died of Alzheimer's. To him, it's an increase that cannot be explained simply by an aging population and advanced diagnosis techniques.

"I'm not suggesting that there is a connection between Alzheimer's and BSE, but it is absolutely mind-boggling that more people have not considered the potential connection between tainted meat and brain-wasting disease," Kelleher says. "Current research simply does not support the statement that eating beef is 100 percent safe."

Part of the problem is that, barring an autopsy, the symptoms of CJD can look suspiciously like those of Alzheimer's. "It starts off pretty mild," says Kelleher. "You forget where you left your keys, you forget your wife's anniversary. You forget simple things, and then it gets more and more intense. Eventually, you lose motor coordination, experience violent seizures and forget who you are. By all accounts, it's a horrible way to die."

The other, more significant part of the problem--at least according to Kelleher--is that the meat industry seems dead set against taking responsibility for anything but successful barbecues. Even after clusters of CJD appeared in Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon, Texas, New York and New Jersey--a statistical improbability considering the supposedly sporadic nature of the disease--the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the CDC continue to insist that everything is fine with the nation's beef.

"There's a sense of complacency here, as if it could never happen in our back yard," Kelleher says. "If you look back into the early 1990s, that's exactly what they were saying in the U.K. It's like a terrifying version of Groundhog Day."

The veterinarian

For animal lovers (or even animal well-wishers), the language of the cattle industry can be downright disturbing--particularly the language used to describe sick cattle. "Downers," for instance, are non-ambulatory cows that are too sick to walk to slaughter. Until December 2003, these cows were hauled up the ramp and cast into the food supply, but after the discovery of America's first mad cow, the USDA officially banned the use of downers for human consumption.

It is one of several measures implemented by the USDA and Food and Drug Administration to protect the public from exposure to specified risk materials such as brains, eyes, skulls and spinal cords. The agencies also imposed restrictions on the use of advanced meat recovery--a process in which machinery is used to strip the remaining meat off cow skeletons. According to Nevada state Veterinarian Dr. David Thain, these are more than adequate precautions to protect the country's 96 million beef cows, including the 500,000 head in Nevada.

"The majority of us think the whole BSE issue has been terribly overblown," Thain says. "I don't know who coined the phrase `mad cow,' but it seems to have taken on a life of its own."

Nevertheless, critics have taken issue with what they consider major loopholes in the government's regulatory agenda. "The alleged `firewall' unfortunately has so many loopholes it looks like Swiss cheese," Kelleher says. For example, the feed bans do not prevent restaurant waste, which contains beef, from being fed back to cattle. The feed bans also do not prevent the common practice of force-feeding cattle blood to young calves as a "milk replacer." Both practices, says Kelleher, could potentially transmit BSE.

Thain, however, says these are only mild concerns. "The blood meal, which is a significant protein feed source for a lot of dairies and other cattle-raising operations, has not been directly linked to the spread of BSE in cattle," he says. "Honestly, the plate waste isn't much of an issue either. Rarely do you have specified risk material in plate waste, and typically, it isn't fed to cattle. Plate waste is fed to pigs, and pigs do not appear to be susceptible to BSE."

The real risk, Thain suggests, is ranchers who fail to follow the government's feed ban. Although Nevada has had a BSE inspection program for two years, no one monitors the day-to-day operations on the state's many ranches and small farms.

"There's nobody there looking over their shoulders," says Thain. "But all of the operations we've done inspections on are very aware of the feed ban and they've been following the regulations carefully. And in talking to my colleagues in other states, it seems like there's a really good compliance with the feed bans nationwide. The FDA inspects the big feed elevators, and I think they only discovered one violation last year out of 1,900 inspections."

Thain's figures contrast sharply with a July 2004 MSNBC story that claimed to have "turned up about 100 recent violations" in domestic feed mills, but for him, it's enough to give Grandma's country pot roast his gold-star seal of approval. "Is there a risk for the public to be eating beef products?" he says. "No, absolutely not. I can say that categorically."

The lobbyist

Oprah Winfrey may be big--so big, in fact, that she can dole out houses, scholarships and new cars to her fawning audiences--but her influence pales in comparison to that of the U.S. beef industry. According to the USDA, cash receipts for the U.S. livestock market totaled more than $56 billion in 2003, 80 percent of which was generated by cattle and calves. The sum represented nearly half of the gross receipts taken in by the agriculture industry as a whole. In other words, the American beef industry is truly a cash cow.

So when Winfrey suggested on her daytime talk show in 1996 that she might give up hamburgers for fear of mad cow disease, the beef lobby locked onto her head and rode her to the ground like a feisty steer. Citing Texas' so-called "veggie libel" law--little-known legislation that forbids false or disparaging remarks about agricultural products--a group of Texas cattlemen filed a pair of multimillion-dollar lawsuits against Winfrey. Although she was ultimately vindicated in both suits, the costly trial dragged out over six years and nearly exhausted her resolve. The industry's message was clear: You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

"In the U.S., we're at record high levels of consumer confidence about the safety of beef," says National Cattlemen's Beef Association spokesman Gary Weber, who appeared on an episode of "Oprah" immediately after the mad cow fracas. "Our latest surveys show that 91 percent of consumers are confident that U.S. beef is free of BSE."

Weber attributes this consumer confidence to what he describes as a "very open, transparent, aggressive campaign" to protect both beef-sellers and beef-eaters. The centerpiece of this effort is an intensive USDA surveillance program intended to identify high-risk cows older than 30 months and test them for BSE. The culmination of a mad cow containment program that began as early as 1990, Weber insists these "targeted" measures will protect the American public from the panic that seized the British Isles almost a decade ago.

"People in the United Kingdom believed that their government had failed them," Weber says. "And in the absence of government, who but yourself will protect you? So a lot of people decided, `I have to protect myself. I'm not eating beef.' Here in the United States, consumers have very high confidence in the FDA, the USDA and cattle producers to do the right thing to not only have healthy cattle but to protect the safety of the food supply."

Here, again, Kelleher demurs, arguing that the USDA's limited focus will not give a complete picture of the distribution of mad cow within the entire cattle population. In Brain Trust, he insists that the government montioring program "is largely a smokescreen designed to hide their current policy of `don't look, don't tell.'" He adds that effective testing procedures have led to identification of a high number of BSE-positive cases in Great Britian (182,547), Ireland (1,417), France (919), Portugal (879), Switzerland (453) and Japan (11).

"It's laughable to think there has only been one instance of BSE in the United States," Kelleher says. "Before the mad cow outbreak last December, 20,000 animals per year were tested out of a total of 35 million slaughtered. Now, they've made so much brouhaha and flag-waving about the fact that they're testing 200,000 out of 35 million. Look across at Japan or even Ireland, and they're testing 100 percent of the beef that reaches the supermarkets. That's the gold standard. Everything else simply falls short."

The mother

It was a Tuesday afternoon in 1993 in Chicago when Nancy Donley's 6-year-old son, Alex, came down with a normal--if somewhat severe--stomachache. Less than a week later, after a struggle that literally liquefied his internal organs, Alex was dead. The culprit was E. Coli 0157:H7, a bacterium found in cattle feces. Alex had consumed it, along with a tainted hamburger, at a family cookout just a few days earlier. Like Sherman through Georgia, the microbe stormed through his body, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.

According to the CDC, foodborne pathogens cause 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. The USDA estimates the annual economic loss from these illnesses totals somewhere between $7 billion and $37 billion. Yet according to Donley--the acting president of Safe Tables Our Priority, a Vermont-based meat industry watchdog group--these serious food-related infections do not garner nearly the publicity that has been showered on BSE.

"Frankly, mad cow is one of those issues that has so much drama surrounding it," Donley says. "The visuals of the staggering animals were so grisly and graphic that it seemed to capture the public's imagination in a way that other illnesses have not."

At least partially, Donley attributes this to the widespread public failure to recognize the potential danger of popular food items. "People today just cannot associate the possibility of significant illness or death with something that they can purchase at their grocery stores or eat at a restaurant." But she also blames the domestic meat industry, which she calls "complacent" and "indifferent to the welfare of consumers."

"The organisms that make people sick are found in the intestinal tracks of animals," Donley says. "Unfortunately--and this is going to sound rather cynical--they don't make the animals sick. As a result, the industry and the ranchers don't take responsibility for the problem because they don't view it as their own."

In contrast, Donley points to the foot-and-mouth disease scare of 2001, which was swiftly contained by decisive federal intervention. "The government was all over that immediately because it threatened to affect the herd and to affect industry profits. It's a very sad example of how we as a country are more concerned about business interests than we are about the public well-being."

Echoing a recommendation made by the U.S. General Accounting Office earlier this year, Donley and her group are lobbying for the formation of unified food-safety authority completely outside the industry-friendly auspices of the USDA. "There are three things that I think government has a responsibility to protect--the food that we eat, the air that we breathe and the water that we drink," she says. "I don't think that's too much to ask."

The verdict

Whatever the truth about the dangers of BSE contamination, the question remains: Why not just test every cow that comes to market? One answer, according to Thain, is that the process is prohibitively expensive--not only because of the actual cost of individual testing but because the nation is not even close to equipped to process that many samples.

"We've kicked around a lot of different figures, but if we went to test every cow that was slaughtered, we'd probably be looking at anywhere from $30 to $50 a head," Thain says. "Multiply that by 35 to 40 million, and you're looking at a significant expenditure that would eventually be passed on to the consumer in one way or another."

The logic of conventional epidemiology states that a sample of 268,500 cows would yield a BSE detection rate of one in 10 million adult cattle at a certainty level of 99 percent. But Kelleher does not believe mad cow necessarily conforms to traditional statistical models. "My contention is that there is not enough known about these prion diseases to make these cast-iron assumptions," he says. "So if you're making these large, population-based, epidemiological predictions, some of them are going to be based on very faulty science.

"What I'm advocating in this whole thing is a dramatic testing increase, so that we can actually see what the BSE baseline is," he adds. "I'm not suggesting that we have the same kind of massive epidemic in the U.S. that occurred in the U.K., but we should at least find out where it's at."

Kelleher also endorses the standardization of CJD tracking and a dramatic increase in the number of autopsies performed on people who have died of Alzheimer's, dementia and other neurological disorders. Only then will doctors understand the real--if any--connection between BSE and misdiagnosed Alzheimer's disease.

Another problem with spongiform encephelopathies like BSE and CJD is that they have lengthy incubation periods, so if a confirmed case of mad cow-related CJD appears in the human population, it can be assumed that the disease has been active in the population for at least 18 months. This is an issue not only because the disease has proved to be as hearty as anthrax spores, but because it has been shown that CJD can be transferred from human to human through blood transfusions. It all adds up to a potential outbreak--not necessarily one on par with 28 Days Later, but certainly one worth taking every possible precaution to prevent. As Kelleher says at the conclusion of Brain Trust, "If our government acts now to discover the scope of the prion catastrophe within our midst, we may still have cause for hope. It is not too late."