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To: Mad Cow USA <madcow@lists.iatp.org>
From: mritchie@iatp.org
Date: 2003-05-25 16:06:58
Subject: Complacency is real killer in mad cow
Complacency is real killer in mad cow In a big country with too few people to fill it, we Canadians have long
been a source of food to the world. First, to our colonial masters. Next,
to our trading partners. It's been good business for us, and as a country
capable of producing more food than we could ever eat, our responsibility. It's never been an easy role to play. Abundance of production is no
guarantee of customers or sales.
But agriculture hasn't been our second largest industry - after cars - just
because we produce a lot of food. It has happened because our farmers have
been able to compete with the best in the world. It has also meant competing with the cheapest in the world - a world where
the rules may not always be as stringent as ours, a world where other
countries' farmers may not have as many regulators looking over their
shoulders. And that has meant compromises to keep our farmers competitive while
ensuring the safety of the food supply, and food safety measures that in
the end amounted to little more than public relations campaigns and fed a
dangerous complacency about the safety of our food. One such compromise was on whether to feed animals to animals. With the
announcement of a case of mad cow disease in Alberta last week, that
compromise needs rethinking. In Canada, like the United States, we do not allow feeding ground-up cows
to other cows. We do, however, allow feeding ground-up cows to chickens and
pigs, and feeding those chickens and pigs back to cows. It's a reckless compromise. All it would take is for chickens or pigs to do
what was once thought impossible - become the latest species to develop its
own form of mad cow disease - and Canada could be thrown into a full-blown
mad cow crisis. A study in the journal Nature in 1998 suggested that
poultry and pigs could be carriers of mad cow disease, without developing
the disease. In Britain, the regulations are much more strict, banning the feeding of
any animals to other animals.
This eliminates the risks Canada's feed ban allows, as well as the risk
that feed meant for chickens or pigs might end up going to cows. This is one possibility investigators are exploring over the weekend as
they track the fallout from Canada's case of bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease. Brian Evans, chief veterinarian for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
(CFIA), told reporters Friday that the extent of any country's feed ban is
based on the level of risk perceived in that country. Britain knew it had a
problem, so it put in a strict ban. We did not believe we had a problem, so
we put in a less-strict feed ban. "We will re-examine the rules," he said. It's about time. >From the beginning, Canada's efforts to keep the country
free of mad cow disease had a disconcerting hint of public relations about
them, put in place to placate the public without putting too much of a
strain on the industry. Britain made the same mistake in the early days of its mad cow disease crisis.
Claude Lavigne, CFIA's man in charge of keeping mad cow out of Canada, has
long defended Canada's more lax animal feed ban by saying that mad cow was
a "European disease." In an interview three years ago, he said: "This has
been found in Europe. It's a European disease, and that's about it ...
We're free of this disease." According to what has been discovered so far, Alberta's mad cow likely
already had BSE by the time Lavigne was making reassuring comments about
Canada being "free of this disease." Such complacency is dangerous. It lowers our guard, allows mistakes to
happen and problems to slip through the cracks.
It's what allows a cow literally falling down with mad cow disease to be
presumed by slaughterhouse inspectors to have nothing worse than pneumonia,
and for nearly four months to pass before the cow's head is tested for mad
cow disease. It is such complacency, as much as tainted feed and twisted proteins called
prions (which scientists believe causes mad cow disease), that allows mad
cow to spread and beef industries to be destroyed. Mike McMorris of the Ontario Cattlemen's Association said the risk of mad
cow had to be balanced against the economic cost of strict feed bans, and
the potential for lost markets if costs became too high. "We need to be
competitive in the world market," he said. The thing is, we are no longer in the world market. Every day brings news
of more farms under quarantine and countries refusing to buy our beef.
Europe has been one of the holdouts in the banned-because-of-BSE group, but
the Europeans have refused to buy our beef for years, anyway, because we
inject our cattle with hormones. Getting back into the world market after this outbreak could prove expensive.
Yesterday, Alberta Agriculture Minister Shirley McClellan told a news
conference McMorris expects that we may have to adopt the strict feed ban
in place in Britain if we hope to rebuild our credibility. McMorris doesn't think tougher feed controls are needed from a scientific
point of view, but may be needed as a public relations exercise. Lavigne,
at a news conference Thursday, gave one more reason for toughening our feed
ban. "The law says you shall not feed prohibited materials to a cow but
mistakes can happen." We'll also likely need to start putting more money back into inspectors and
testing labs. In the U.S., North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan wants the
border kept closed to Canadian beef until our inspection and testing
systems are upgraded. "Allowing the head of a diseased cow to sit on a shelf for four months
because they are short-staffed is not an excuse our country should accept,"
he wrote in a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman. While we're at it, we should consider dropping hormones, and eliminating
bovine blood, gelatin, lard and tallow from the diet of our cattle. We'll
need every customer we can get once this crisis is under control. There's
no reason any longer to do anything that might keep us out of a market. Stuart Laidlaw is a member of the Star's editorial board and author of
Secret Ingredients: the Brave New World of Industrial Farming. The excerpt that ran on April 19, 2003: Toronto Star April 19, 2003
Page: F3
Section:National Report Edition:
Tiny holes in brain a clue to mad cow disease
Bizarre affliction first seen in cattle on British farm Cow 133 was losing
weight and stumbling about
By Stuart Laidlaw, Toronto Star Three days before Christmas, 1984, British
veterinarian David Bee got a call at his practice in Petersfield,
Hampshire. Peter Stent, owner of Pitsham Farm near Midhurst in
West Sussex, needed a hand. One of his 300 dairy cattle had been
acting strangely, and Stent needed Bee to take a look at her. The
cow, known only as Cow 133, had been losing weight, Stent said.
Her back was arched and she was staggering about the field. Bee
had been to Pitsham Farm many times during his nine years of
practice. He knew Stent was a good farmer who took care of his
animals and never hesitated to call Bee if there was a problem.
"He is a proud farmer is Peter," Bee later told a
government inquiry. "He likes to see his cattle looking
good. Indeed, they do look good. He is not a greedy farmer. He
likes to make a good income, but he is not out to maximize every
penny."
Neither man, however, had ever seen anything like what was
afflicting Cow 133. Her temperature had changed, Stent said. Bee
had no idea what the problem was and gave the cow a shot of
antibiotics for a suspected kidney infection - thinking that
perhaps toxins had got into the feed. It didn't work. In the
following days, she grew worse, developing head tremors and
increasing unco-ordination - symptoms that would soon become
familiar to farmers and consumers, first in Britain and then
around the world. Bee returned to the farm six days later, after
the Christmas holiday, and again four days into the new year. The
cow just kept getting worse. Her fourth stomach, the abomasum,
had become displaced. Bee treated her for that, made note of the
tremors and lack of co-ordination and consulted veterinarians
from the Ministry of Agriculture to figure out what was wrong. He
called in his partner, Michael Teale, for a second opinion on
Feb. 8, 1985.
So many symptoms were pointing to so many possible ailments that
Bee's real job was to eliminate possibilities, drawing on
his own knowledge and experience, his partner's and the
government vets'. When Stent told Bee, on his third visit,
that he had mistakenly applied mercury to his corn seeds before
planting, Bee tested to see if the cow had been accidentally
poisoned. Head tremors had been linked to poisons in feed before.
By this time, three other cows on the farm had died. Other cows
were also sick and acting very strangely. One, unable to get up,
chased Stent across the barn on her knees.
The test for mercury poisoning came back negative. It had to be
something else. Bee and the ministry kept their focus on toxins
in the feed. Stent had a small brickworks on the farm, and Bee
speculated that lead, used to make bricks, might have made its
way into the feed. The tests were negative. He conducted more
tests for mercury. Still nothing. The discovery of a dead magpie
on the farm made them suspect deliberate poisoning, but again the
tests were negative. They noticed fungus in the feed and wondered
if the cows had simply been given rotten food, but the tests came
back negative, just like the rest.
On Feb. 11, Cow 133 died, seven weeks after Bee's first
visit. There was still no diagnosis. A post-mortem showed
internal bleeding. Segments of nematode parasites, or worms, were
found in the kidney, seemingly confirming that the cow had been
suffering some sort of kidney problems, possibly due to toxic
poisoning. Bee's focus in the coming months shifted to two
other animals, cows 142 and 139, the only two showing the same
strange symptoms that were still alive; by the end of April, six
others had died. They, too, were tested for toxic poisoning,
liver and kidney problems and parasites. Nothing. Cow 133 was
sent for slaughter and samples of her organs were given to the
Ministry of Agriculture for testing. The most important sample,
however, proved unusable. "The brain was of no diagnostic
value as the animal had been shot twice (in the head)," Bee
told the British government's BSE inquiry.
On Sept. 2, 1985, an unusually sunny day in southern England,
Cow 142, the last surviving animal showing the bizarre symptoms
that had by then killed nine cows at Pitsham Farm, was
slaughtered and sent to the ministry labs for testing. After 10
months and still no answers, Stent was willing to sacrifice the
cow to find out what was going on at his farm. This time, the
brain was kept intact. A week later, Carol Richardson, a vet at
the ministry's Central Veterinary Laboratory in Weybridge,
Surrey, looked at a section of Cow 142's brain under a
microscope and saw something no vet had ever believed possible -
tiny holes like those caused by scrapie, a common disease among
British sheep for more than 200 years. "What was exciting
was that this was in a cow," she told the BBC years later.
"This was the first time I had seen these lesions in a
cow."
The task became one of figuring out what had caused the holes.
The instincts of the vets were right - they blamed the feed. But
they were wrong, as it turned out, thinking that toxins were the
problem, with Richardson suggesting bacterial infections of the
feed. "I recall my disbelief at this statement at the time.
I believed the problem had been associated with fungal
contamination of feed and mycotoxin production," Bee wrote
later for the inquiry that followed. A month after sending Cow
142 away for testing, Bee received a positive toxin test from
Stent's farm. His earlier suspicions seemed to have been
confirmed and he closed the case.
"By this time, new cases had ceased to be developed. I
imagined that the problem had run its course," he told the
inquiry.
Back in Weybridge, Richardson went on maternity leave. While she
was gone, one of her colleagues at the lab, senior
neuropathologist Dr. Gerald Wells, began to come across similar
cases. He had seen a few cases before Richardson made her
discovery and he saw more afterwards. Like her, he believed Cow
142 had suffered some form of toxic infection that caused holes
to develop in her brain.
Two years later, however, on Halloween Day, 1987, Wells made
history by publishing an article in the Veterinary Record about
"a novel spongiform encephalopathy in cattle" he had
found in a cow from Kent County, miles from Pitsham Farm. He
dubbed the new disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.
The press called it mad cow disease and told stories of a new
"incurable disease wiping out dairy cows."
Richardson approached Wells at a Christmas party and reminded
him of Cow 142 and the nine others at Pitsham Farm. Like vets
across the country, the two began to wonder about other cases
they had previously blamed on toxins or infections and speculated
whether they had confronted mad cow disease before without
realizing it. It had been three years since Bee's trip to
Pitsham Farm to see Cow 133, and the disease that he thought had
run its course was showing up again, two counties over.
The mad cow crisis had begun and modern agriculture would never
be the same.
Excerpted from Secret Ingredients: The Brave New World Of
Industrial Farming, by Toronto Star editorial board member Stuart
Laidlaw, published by McClelland & Stewart.
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