On December 9, a single cow at the Sunny< Dene Ranch in Mabton, Washington State was unwilling to stand on her legs. The cow was declared a "downer", slaughtered, butchered, her meat commercialized, and as if an afterthought, some brain tissues sent to a lab for checking the reason for her strange behavior.

The samples reached the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab at Ames, Iowa, on December 11, were prepared for analysis only December 16 or 17, and the initial results became available Monday December 21, showing positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) — the commonly named Mad Cow disease which was shown to cause in humans a related form called the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease.

The finding of a single Mad Cow in America became public knowledge on Tuesday, December 23 and by Wednesday, December 24, eleven countries that import about $4 billion/year worth of beef from the U.S. announced that they are immediately forbidding imports from the U.S. The shares of Tyson Foods (beef) fell by 7.7% and of McDonald’s Restaurants fell by 5.6%, while the shares of Pilgrim’s Pride (chicken) went up by 11.9%. In May of 2003, a similar single cow occurrence devastated the Canadian beef industry which has lost $1.2 billion. The U.S. cattle industry is thus out for very rough times. The subject nearly filled three pages in the New York Times today, December 25th. I for one went to our pantry and found a can from Finland marked “Suoraan poromlehelta” (Straight from the reindeer herder) and we thought it fair game for Christmas to substitute Rudolph for the planned beef.

Ann M. Veneman, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, came out declaring that “the risk to human health from this situation is extremely low, and people should continue to feel very confident in our meat supply.” But then the NewYork Times carried a large article with information from the Nobel Prize winning scientist that discovered the “prions” which were shown to explain the disease. What he said, when compared with what the Secretary said, reminded me of what the official US delegation, including the supporting team of Senators and Congressmen, said at the Milan Conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Sure, we are looking here at two completely different topics but the treatment these subjects get from official Washington and from the respective industry lobbies is exactly the same, and that is were the dog lies buried. Let me explain:

The poor Washington cow, that by nature is a herbivore animal, for reasons of industry greed, was fed with animal remains. Albeit, since the European disaster with BSE, she was not fed possibly with remains of cows, this is now officially forbidden, but with remains of chicken, pigs, and other meats and bones whose originators were fed with cows — and that is the source of this scourge. It is even possible that her feed included also litter, swept from poultry factory farms, consisting largely of food the birds have not eaten, and included directly cow nerve tissue back into the cow food chain.

According to Secretary Veneman, out of a herd of 100 million cattle of which 35 million were slaughtered during the year, 20,526 cattle have been inspected for BSE and none was found diseased until this single case.

Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California in San Francisco, the man who discovered the “prions,” points his finger at this paucity of information and says that the Japanese who slaughter 1.2 million cattle/year and inspect all of them, have found cases were no symptoms existed at all — even in cattle younger then the 30 months which is the testing norm in Europe. On the other hand, from USDA information we learn that in 1999 there were 195,000 “downers” on ranches, feedlots, and slaughterhouses and only a few hundred were tested. The procedure is to sell the muscle meat for human consumption, the spinal cord for food for pigs, poultry, and pets, without waiting for any test results; sometimes brain tissue, like in this case, is sent for testing — this begs the question: why then test at all? In effect, it seems that in the last nine years, from a total of 300 million cattle slaughtered, only fewer then 30.000 animals had any post-slaughter tests.

In Europe, when a diseased animal is found, the carcass is boiled down, dried into powder, and then incinerated. Further, a funny coincidence, the Washington state cow was actually harmed at the time she gave birth to a large calf. Possibly this was just a case of a “downer” believed to have been caused by a different reason, and safe to test if you really do not intend to find any Mad Cow disease as the reason for a cow’s troubles

Prions are proteins that can “misfold” or fold themselves into shape that become lethal when causing runaway chain reactions in nervous tissues. Boiling does not destroy them and when ingested by the animal they proceed to destroy tissues. He says that it is not known if the meat beyond the nervous system can also pass the disease to humans, but “it is a risk that greatly worries me… the problem is we just don’t know the size of the problem… we don’t know the prevalence or incidence of the disease.” He thinks we should aim at emulating the Japanese example at “a cost increase of three cents per pound of meat.

When the case of Mad Cow disease appeared in May in Canada, Dr. Prusiner asked to speak to the Secretary but was “rebuffed.” He felt that it was just a matter of time that the disease will appear also in the US. The fact that we did not find it yet, he said, was simply because we did not seriously look for it. Dr. Prusiner did not give up and eventually told what he thought to Mr. Karl Rove, senior adviser to the President, who then made sure Ms. Veneman would see him. So “six weeks ago,” tells the Nobel Prize winner for finding the prions, he entered the office of Ms. Veneman with the message “what happened in Canada was going to happen in the United States.”

“The department had been willfully blind to the threat. The only reason mad cow had not been found here is that the department’s animal inspection agency was testing too few animals. Once more cows are tested, we’ll be able to understand the magnitude of our problem.”

I am writing this in order to exonerate the poor cow that caused all of this. If one feeds the cow remains of other cows, and one refuses to hear of what science has to say about this, then one simply destroys the industry one is supposed to care for. This at least in terms of business management that Ms. Veneman is supposed to understand. Why I write about this is because it is exactly the same shortsightedness we experienced in Milan with Senator Inhofe, the other members of his delegation from both Houses of Congress, and members of the Administration: They are ready to hear what real scientists have to say. The low point in Milan was when the Senator expressed his lack of understanding of the simple fact that science is based on uncertainty. Waiting to be 100% sure of anything is impossible, counterproductive, and non-scientific. All what we heard was that climate change scientists are not yet sure of the human effect on climate. Could the human effect on cattle feeding have anything to do with the deadly Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease?

Which government office is in charge of making it safe that when we purchase meat in the market, or eat a hamburger at McDonald’s, we can be reasonably sure that the meat is not infected?

The dangers from not immediately taking care of the runaway global warming phenomenon are too great to ignore. To really do something means to take action now, with whatever technology we have, while continuing to investigate for better understanding and ways to deal with the problem in the future.

In the meat case, we have to test the maximum number of cattle for those prions, while we continue at the same time to investigate the effects of the misfolding and of the way these molecules get transferred from animal to animal.

This is in order to guard us from the effects of the industry greed that led to cattle — being ruminants — being trained to become carnivores. To put it simply, nature has not built cows to consume the food we give them. Beyond that, it would be important to rethink the process that created carnivorous cattle, perhaps also the effects of genetic modification that is beyond our understanding of their potential effects. Then we could rethink our eating habits, perhaps we finally realize that we are killing ourselves by eating too much meat. This speaks to our need for adjusting to a less energy intensive existence to enjoy a healthier and happier life.

The meat packers, the oil refiners, the car manufacturers … are not the folks that will try to help us achieve a better life — all what they seek is how to make a few more bucks. Even spending three cents more per pound of meat, with the obvious possibility of reducing the cost to less then one cent after a relatively short time, is considered too much. These industries, in their shortsightedness, will cause multi billion dollar losses to the economy, and the taxpayers will be called to pay for these losses. The insurance companies will be well positioned in the middle and we all will suffer.

(This article was first posted on CultureChange.org)