Corporations blamed for mad cow disease

Todd Tollefson

SEATTLE: By now, pretty much everyone in the United States has 
heard of the Holstein from Mabton, Washington State, found to be 
infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better 
known as "mad cow disease". What people may not know is how this 
disease that devastated the British beef industry in the '90s has 
been allowed to spread to Washington State.

After all, don't we have governmental agencies set up to protect 
our food, such as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the 
Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Yes, we do have these 
agencies, but anyone who has wondered what ill-effects the push 
for "less government" has gotten us need look no further.

Along with the defunding of these government departments, 
corporate greed in the US$180 billion US beef industry has helped 
create a mad cow crisis in our country. The practice of feeding a 
species its own dead — forced "cow cannibalism" if you will — 
has been shown to be one of the root causes of BSE.

The government has no basis for claiming that the 1997 FDA ban on 
feeding cow slaughterhouse remains to other cows, the most common 
transmission path, will prevent spread of the disease. The 
agency's own survey found 25 percent of feed plants out of 
compliance. In fact, the Mabton Holstein was born after the ban.

The Bush administration should bear much of the responsibility 
for this outbreak. As of yet, it has not acted with any 
significant corrective measures. "The Bush administration had an 
opportunity to avoid this situation, and to save millions and 
millions of dollars for the beef industry in this country", said 
presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Presidential contender, Democrat Rep Dennis Kucinich, who, 
incidentally, is a vegetarian, has devoted a web page to mad cow 
disease which states, "Last year, the USDA tested only 19,990 
cattle believed to be at risk for mad cow disease, out of a 
population of about 96 million or one out of every 5000 cattle. 
By contrast, in Europe every single animal above a given age gets 
tested for this fatal brain-wasting disease (one out of every 
four cattle)."

Kucinich proposes seven new steps to help make meat safer. All of 
these measures would enhance public health but would also cut 
into the meatpacking industry's fat corporate profits. Hence the 
resistance.

Back in 1998, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote a book 
titled, Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? In an 
interview shortly thereafter, Stauber said, "While the USDA and 
FDA are supposed to be protecting US consumers from the sorts of 
dangers we've been discussing, a central function of theirs is to 
promote sales for the meat and dairy industries."

The Senate approved language last November that would have banned 
the slaughtering of downed animals for human food, but House 
Republican leaders dropped it from a final spending bill. On the 
last day of 2003, the USDA put a ban on specified risk materials 
in the human food supply, but this applies to animals 30 months 
or older, despite the fact that several cattle found to harbor 
the disease were younger than 24 months of age.

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People's Weekly World Newspaper (Abridged)
Full text at http://www.pww.org