by Danny Postel
11.01.98

See Also the December 2003 feature on Alternet, "The Nightmare Begins," which picks up where this 1998 LiP interview leaves off.

Mad Cow, U.S.A. is temporarily out of print, but has been made available through the PR Watch web site, at: www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf.

First, what exactly is the nightmare in your subtitle?

Sheldon Rampton: It's a nightmare on two levels. First, it's a nightmare in terms of human and animal health; animals in large numbers have died in Europe, particularly England, and now humans are dying. But secondly it's an economic nightmare for farmers and, ultimately, for everyone. The British beef market collapsed like a house of cards once the news came out that this disease was spreading from cows to humans. Both of those are real nightmares that we should be concerned about.

Let's talk about how the two of you got onto this story in the first place, which I think is interesting in and of itself. You've said that the reporting on this subject was absolutely abysmal when you began to investigate it yourselves.

John Stauber: Right, and now it's gone from abysmal to just really bad [laughter]. Our book has already had a major impact on the public debate surrounding this issue. I got involved with this issue through my work fighting alongside farmers and consumers who were opposed to Monsanto's genetically-engineered cow hormone (rBGH), which is injected into cows to force them to produce more milk. The interesting thing is that in order to get more milk out of these cows you have to give them fat and protein supplements, and it was discovered in the early '90s that the cheapest source of fat and protein supplements for dairy cows in Wisconsin was dairy cows. In other words, the meat unfit for human consumption—the stuff that doesn't make it onto the dinner plate—being rendered and fed back to dairy cows.

This practice had been banned in Britain because it was proven that this is how Mad Cow Disease (MCD) was spread. And there was a great deal of concern, even half a decade ago, that this disease could move from the "mad cows" of Britain into people, which it now has. So it was looking into a modern technological wonder, the genetically-engineered Bovine Growth Hormone, which first drew my attention to the risks of this disease in the U.S.

So, in terms of the connection between cow consumption patterns and their effect on the human population, walk us through what precisely happened in England. How widespread a phenomenon are we talking about?

SR: One of the interesting things about this disease is that it's caused by a very unique disease agent. They've never been able to characterize it entirely, but the working theory right now is that it's caused by an infectious protein. This protein can come into existence through something like mutation, so there's no population in the world that is immune from the possibility of developing the disease at low levels. Mutations just "happen." Kind of like "shit happens." What we've got to be concerned about is what causes it to spread. In England, the practice of what amounts to animal cannibalism created a closed loop that enabled the disease to amplify and multiply There are now [as of 1998] 160,000 British cows that have been identified and diagnosed post-mortem as having had the disease, and their epidemiological analyses suggest that something like another 1.5 million cows have gone on to be consumed by humans, because they were never diagnosed.

So rather than a cow infected with this disease simply dying off, and the disease dying off with that cow, the dead bodies of diseased cows are being consumed by other cows, and then consumed again by humans.

SR: Right. And that could create a closed amplification loop for all kinds of diseases, ranging from anthrax to...you name it. Most diseases, however, get stopped at the border, so to speak, when they go into the rendering plants, because they dump in chemicals and heat it all up, which disinfects the stuff. But one of the unique characteristics, again, of this particular disease agent is that it's very resistant to sterilization procedures, and so it escapes the preventative protective measures that they think they've put in place.

You've emphasized what you call the "completely unique nature" of this disease. Besides its resistance to sterilization processes, what else makes it unique?

JS: One thing that's important to understand about the disease agent is that it's best generically referred to as a TSE, or a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy. The meaning of "Transmissible" is obvious. "Spongiform" refers to the sponge-like holes that are eaten into the brain as dementia develops. "Encephalopathy" simply refers to the disease of the brain. A TSE is essentially a transmissible Alzheimer's-like disease. Sheldon mentioned that the disease agent, an infectious protein which has been called a "prion" by Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner, is virtually indestructible by heat. It's also impervious to irradiation. And most chemicals don't touch it. So when you take the dead of a species and feed it back to itself, you amplify this disease within that species.

The first time anyone ever saw this in cows was in England in 1985, and now it's already jumped from those mad cows into a variety of species, including human beings. So far, there are 22 confirmed deaths in Britain and continental Europe from this disease. And people might say, "Oh well, that's a tiny number. Nine thousand people a year die from food poisoning in the United States alone, so what's 22 deaths?" The problem is that because in humans this disease is thought to have an incubation period of decades, we won't know for probably another half decade how that death toll is going to grow. And it's been growing. So far it's been doubling each year, and there are some scientists who are afraid that we could be looking at thousands, tens of thousands, or potentially even hundreds of thousands of deaths. These are people who already ate meat from infected mad cows, but because of the long and invisible incubation period, won't die for ten or twenty years, when suddenly this horrible, fatal dementia strikes.

We had a very difficult time in the 1980s getting a handle on AIDS, which shares some of these characteristics. AIDS has an incubation period that's measured in years. This disease is much mere invisible than AIDS, and much more insidious. It's spread through contaminated meat, and it has an incubation period we measure in decades. So it's going to take a really different type of thinking and effort to get a handle on this disease. The good news is that it's rather easy to prevent—the first step is stopping the practice of feeding a species its own dead. The bad news is that we're continuing to do this in the United States, more so than in any other country. Even though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has finally come up with some restrictions, we still feed cow's blood back to calves, the fat from cows to calves, pigs to pigs, chickens to chickens, and then those animals back to cows. So there are all sorts of avenues through which this disease could amplify in livestock and potentially spread into people in the U.S.

In Britain, although industry resisted tooth and nail the attempts of activists first to call this to the attention of the public and then to impose restrictions on these practices, eventually the British government did step in and ban this economy of cannibalism. How did that come about and why is it that nothing of the sort is going on in this country?

SR: If you look at the behavior of the British government, some people would say they actually responded pretty quickly. Once cows were identified with the disease, they acted pretty quickly to ban the practice of animal cannibalism. There are some other practices that they did not ban, such as the use of certain animal parts in food that have been consumed by humans that they should have. They're now regretting that quite a bit. But the fact is that at the time that they banned the practice of feeding rendered cows back to cows, they had only identified about 200 cases of MCD in the entire country. And now some of the scientists who have come under criticism for not taking more drastic measures are saying, "Well, we had no idea this was going to get this far out of hand." This is a disease where, because of the long incubation period, it's very easy to remain in denial, or to remain completely oblivious to the fact that it exists.

The FDA, in its own assessment of what would happen in this country, said that by the time we find the first case in the US, we'll already be expecting another 300,000 more. So they would have a disease roughly twice the size of the epidemic in all of England by the time they even found the first case here. So the English can legitimately claim that they acted pretty quickly in dealing with this. The problem is that with a disease this unique, you need a really severe precautionary principle, and you need to take preventative measures before you even see the first case.

JS: And that's one thing that's so disturbing about what the US. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have and have not done. We have documents that we obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which show that as early as 1990 and 1991, regulators with the USDA were saying, "Well, if we want to be safe here in the United States, we should stop this widespread practice of cow cannibalism, but that would be hard on the meat industry." Very early on, the British, through good science, confirmed that the Mad Cow infection was spreading through cow cannibalism, and they began acting in 1988 to shut it down. But the U.S. failed to act at all, even though they knew they should have. Why? Because we have a real problem in this country with the USDA and the FDA being more concerned with protecting the meat industry they're theoretically regulating than with protecting consumers and livestock.

So 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. How does this double function play out?

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