December 28, 2003 - In September 1998 Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Atlantic article began. “The recent British epidemic of mad-cow disease, and the twenty-seven cases of fatal human disease associated with it, have led to the slaughter of 3.7 million cattle and the near destruction of Great Britain's cattle industry. Observers have suggested that the outbreak was a factor in the toppling of John Major's Tory government. Mad-cow disease continues to haunt Britain and Europe in general, even though the European Community, having made extraordinary efforts, appears to have contained the outbreak.” http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98sep/madcow.htm

You may remember that the Major Ministry of Agriculture reacted to the early evidence of the British epidemic by telling the public that it was just an isolated incident; that their was no danger that the disease had entered the human food chain; that despite the epidemic British beef was safe. The ‘Just One Cow” syndrome we might recognize because it is so understandable. The Major government was reluctant to take the aggressive measures to control and eliminate the disease because the economic impact promised to be devastating to a core Tory constituency. It was politically expedient to minimize the problem and hope it would just naturally go away. The problem was that nature did not create the problem. Cattle are not carnivorous. It was the practice of feeding animal based feed supplements to cattle that created the conditions that broke out in the British epidemic.

In the five years since Ms. Shell wrote both the Clinton and Bush administrations have assured us that the American beef industry is safe. But neither administration was willing to ban animal based feed supplements. Now the cat is out of the bag with the discovery of “just one cow” in the Northwest. First we were told that meat from the animal had not entered the food chain ( it had) ; that the risk to humans was low; and that only tissue from the brain and spinal cord would pose a health risk. All of those reassurances ring hollow in the light of the scientific facts laid out in Ms. Shell’s article of 5 years ago.

Will the Bush administration take instruction from the Tory inaction; will it learn the lesson that the Clinton administration did not? Just look at the map of “Red States” and it is clear that the beef industry is a core Republican constituency. The economic impact of aggressive action will ripple far beyond the beef producers and impact feed grain farmers as well. We might take comfort that this “just one cow” was detected were it not for the fact that detection came only after slaughter and distribution of the meat and meat by-products. We might take comfort except for the fact that the cow was tested as a random sample.

The Bush Administration’s reaction to the challenge of America’s own Mad Cow disease will tell us just where their priorities lie, with the long term public health or the short term economic health of their beef producing constituents.