What Was the Disease in Beef in Britain
Fear of Mad-Cow Disease Spoils Britain's Appetite
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January 12, 1996
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For centuries, beef has held pride of place at the British table. Whether it's served with Yorkshire pudding in a roadside cafeteria or trotted out on a silver-domed trolley at a quiet club on Pall Mall, the meat seems quintessentially British, so much so that the French call people on this side of the Channel "les rosbifs."
All that may change. Despite pledges by Government ministers that British beef is safe, consumers by the droves are giving it up for fear that meat from diseased cattle could cause a degenerative brain disease.
The Government emphasizes that no link has been established between bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad-cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a rare brain disease fatal to humans.
The causes of the two diseases, which are assumed to be related because they have the same pathology, are not known. An early theory held that they were caused by a slow-acting virus-like agent, but a newer theory that is gaining more adherents relates the diseases to an abnormal protein in the cell membrane that can be transmitted through consumption of affected tissue, and can then set off a chain reaction, damaging proteins nearby.
Since November, when the scare erupted, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has trotted out scientists and reports suggesting that it is unlikely for a disease to cross the "species barrier," and that even if it did, regulations are in place to keep the diseased portions of cow carcasses out of the human food chain.
But the scare refuses to go away. For every scientist who says beef is safe, there is one who says it may not be. The debate over a possible link rages in British medical journals.
The public is voting with its fork. According to Nielsen, a research organization in Oxford, 1.4 million households have stopped buying beef. The decline began in November and by mid-December, sales were down 25 percent from the similar period a year ago. Most affected were hamburgers, with sales at the end of December off 40 percent.
The Government has undertaken a public relations campaign to try to calm the public and help the $7.5 billion-a-year beef industry. A similar scare broke out five years ago, and to counteract it then, the Minister of Agriculture posed for the television cameras with his 4-year-old daughter -- both eating hamburgers.
This time around the Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, has asserted that beef eaters run "no conceivable risk" of developing CreutzfeldtJakob Disease. And the new Agriculture Minister, Douglas Hogg, has done the same under questioning in Parliament. But others disagree.
"We know in general that most of these infectious agents can go from one animal to another," said Robert Lacey, professor of microbiology at Leeds University, who was among the first to raise the alarm six years ago. "The exception is when they don't." Referring to an increase in reported cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in England, he added, "Now there are signs we are seeing the beginning of a human epidemic."
What was especially worrisome, he added, was that Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease has an incubation period of between 10 to 50 years, so that if the danger is real, by the time everyone recognizes it there may be little that can be done about it.
The beef industry, which hotly contests the link between the two diseases, puts the scare down to sensationalist journalism. It took a full year for beef sales to recover five years ago, but Phil Saunders, spokesman for the Meat and Livestock Commission, said he believes he is seeing "early signs" of a recovery in January.
Many scientists believe that the infectious agent involved in mad-cow disease exists only in certain organs of the cows and that eating steaks would pose no risk in any case. The Government has tightened regulations in place since 1988 that require slaughterhouses to destroy the suspected offal -- the brains, spine, tonsils, spleen and intestine -- of all cattle, diseased or not. A cow that walks unsteadily -- a symptom of mad-cow disease -- is supposed to be killed even before it gets to the slaughterhouse.
But the system does not always work very well. Cows at the slaughterhouse get only a quick visual inspection. The Government has so far refused to do sample testing for mad-cow disease. And surprise inspections show the regulations are not always scrupulously followed; in September, visits to 193 abattoirs found that 92 of them were not fully compliant, and that in 17 of them small pieces of the spinal cord remained after dressing the carcasses.
Another point disturbing to epidemiologists is that the incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, though still small, is increasing. It almost doubled between 1990 and 1994, reaching 55 cases two years ago. Dr. Robert Will, head of the nationwide C.J.D. Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, puts much of the rise down to better detection, especially of the 10 percent of the cases in which the disease is inherited.
But he and others are perplexed by other trends. For one thing, four dairy farmers have died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the past three years, a cluster that defies statistical probability. For another, several teen-agers have recently died, which is troubling because it is extremely rare for the disease to strike young people.
Mad-cow disease was identified only in 1986, and one theory is that it came from a disease in sheep called scrapie. Britain is the only country in Europe where mad-cow disease is a problem, which is usually explained by a combination of factors: a large sheep population, the high incidence of scrapie in sheep, and the fact that for years bone and meat remnants -- including sheep brains -- were ground up and fed to cows as a protein supplement.
The fact that the disease may have leapt the barrier once, from sheep to cattle, is cited by those who raise the alarm about eating beef. But those who say beef is safe point out that even if that is true, the leap from cattle to humans is much larger.
Martin Zeidler, research registrar for the C.J.D. Surveillance Unit, points out that some 50 cats in Britain are reported to have come down with a version of the disease, which he takes as proof that it can jump from one species to another.
Early indications from studies with mice that were genetically altered to mimic human reaction to exposure to the disease seems to back up the view that humans are not susceptible. But the results are too preliminary to be conclusive.
The rate of mad-cow disease has fallen recently, to between 280 and 300 cases a week, from a peak of 900 to 1,000 cases in 1992-93. There are 11.8 million cattle in the United Kingdom. The drop is attributed to regulations that keep the potentially infected offal out of animal feed.
Oddly enough, the incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease here is roughly comparable to the incidence in other countries in Europe, where mad-cow disease is minimal or non-existent. British beef is sold throughout Europe, despite an effort by Germany to get it banned.
The question of whether beef is safe, said Chris Bostock, head of the division of molecular biology of the Institute for Animal Health, comes down to two issues: "Is there any infectious material in the food chain? And if so, will it cause an infection in man? It would seem that the procedures were sufficient to keep it out of the human food chain. But the question of whether a human would get it, if exposed to it, is harder to answer."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/12/world/fear-of-mad-cow-disease-spoils-britain-s-appetite.html
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