The specter of mad cow disease continues to haunt beef eaters on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain is still trying to persuade the European Union to lift its ban on British beef, and last month in the U.S., commodity prices for beef sank after a 62 year-old Indiana man died of a rare neuro logical disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Last year the British government issued a report suggesting that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the technical term for mad cow disease, could be transmissible to humans, who would then develop CJD. The ensuing media frenzy led to the greatest animal slaughter in history, crippling the British beef industry and further calling into question the safety of the food supply throughout the world. European Commissioner for Agriculture Franz Fischler called mad cow disease "the biggest crisis the European Union had ever had." All told, the beef crisis has cost more $10 billion world-wide.
It has all been much ado about nothing. Based on available scientific evidence, we can be virtually certain that mad cow disease poses no threat to humans.
The British crisis began after 16 people under age 40 came down with CJD. The disease, which mostly afflicts people over 50, is believed to be caused by a prion, an infectious protein-like particle. A similar prion is believed to cause mad cow disease. CJD is a rare disease, affecting about one in a million people world-wide. It often leads to dementia; 90% of sufferers die within one year.
The British government report suggested that the variant form of CJD that struck young Britons, dubbed v-CJD, was contracted by eating beef from cows suffering from mad cow disease, then preva lent in British cattle. There was no evidence that any of the victims had eaten such beef, but it still seemed a plausible inference, since the brains of those who had died from v-CJD exhibited abnormalities similar to those of cattle that died from mad cow disease.
But the CJD-mad cow hypothesis turned out to be wrong. We still don't know how humans contract CJD. But what is clear is that people don't get it by eating meat from cows or lamb. The mad cow prion has only been found in the brains of -cattle afflicted with the disease, not in muscle tissue.
Yet the scare continues, fed by the press. Last Aug. 9, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that there was there was no evidence of v-CJD present in the U.S. The New York Times reported the story this way: "There is no evidence that anyone in the United States has died of the 'mad cow' disease that has killed eight people in Britain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today." [emphasis mine] The Times thus confused the two diseases: Even in the United Kingdom, mad cow disease kills only cattle.
What's more, there have been no reported cases of mad cow disease in U.S. cattle. Yet last month, after Indiana farmer Joseph Gabor died of CJD, commodity prices of cattle, corn and soybeans went into a tailspin. A local newspaper reported that the man was "suspected" to have contracted the disease from infected bonemeal fertilizer in his garden. The newspaper's source? The man's widow, who remarked, "I have no idea how he got it, unless it was something in the bone meal."
Mad cow disease now joins the Dalkon Shield, electromagnetic fields, Alar, breast implants and other spurious health hazards. In each episode, the principal victims were the related industries and the public, which is scared for no good reason. Unfortunately for those whose livelihoods depend on such industries, the nature of science is such that breakthroughs do not occur overnight in a way that fits into succinct stories or sound bites.
While scientific discovery takes time, today's marketplace of business, media and politics has limited patience. "They say that beef can kill you" has become reality to many. Researchers, educators and writers involved in the business of health must work harder to communicate to the public what we really know. After all, mass hysteria over imagined fears is its own form of madness.
Dr. Ratzan is director of the Emerson College/Tufts University School of Medicine Program in Health Communication, Boston. He also is editor of the Journal of Health Communication.
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