British Beef Crisis: a Menu for Despair

By WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO

March 31, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BURES, England —

Rural England is grieving this spring, victim of a disease with a funny name and a savage kick. Life on the farm may never be the same.

“It’s easy for concerned consumers to play safe. But confidence is ebbing among us farmers as well. We don’t know what to do,” Tony Evans said.

Evans, who raises beef cattle here in the enchanting Suffolk countryside, is one of more than 50,000 farmers and 57 million Britons reeling from national panic triggered by “mad cow disease.”

Alarm has grown exponentially since the British government acknowledged on March 20 that the fatal affliction may have jumped the species barrier from cattle to humans as a new variety of an incurable brain illness called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD.

Now the crisis is straining the social, economic and political fabric of the nation. One supermarket chain reported lively demand Saturday after halving the prices of beef with expiring “sell by” dates.

But little moved in the countryside, where slaughterhouses killed a national total of four cows one day last week.

“It is a problem of confidence, not of health, I emphasize again,” Prime Minister John Major told a European Union summit meeting blown off course by the crisis.

Embarrassed Britain is now asking its EU partners for money to help solve the “mad cow” disaster.

Word of a presumed--but not scientifically proven--link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, and 10 young people who contracted the new variety of CJD came from a government-created panel of scientists.

Last week, British newspapers reported one new confirmed case of CJD and two suspected cases.

Odds of contracting CJD are less than one in a million. There were 42 CJD cases in the British Isles last year.

Still, after a decade in which the British government repeatedly and unswervingly affirmed that BSE posed no possible risk to humans, Major’s promise now of new “comprehensive measures” echoes hollowly--in Europe and at home.

There is consumer fear and anger: Millions have abandoned beef, historically as much a part of the British psyche as rain.

Many wonder if they are incubating a deadly disease contracted years ago from beef their government always swore was safe. Is an epidemic coming?

There is pathos: Vicki Rimmer, 18, has been ill with CJD since 1993. She lies blind and comatose in a hospital, where doctors say she could live 20 more years.

“Vicki has a healthy heart and a good pair of lungs. There’s nothing wrong with her except her brain, which is like a sponge,” said her grandmother, Beryl Rimmer.

There is controversy and uncertainty: Farmers and their government cannot agree how confidence in beef is to be restored.

The National Farmers Union wants 750,000 older animals killed each year, preventing them from passing into the food chain. How does a country destroy 400,000 tons of beef a year while observing ecological niceties? At what cost? No one knows.

There is staggering financial and social loss: With British beef banned for export anywhere in the world and the domestic market flat, losses to an industry that generates about 650,000 jobs will soon be in the billions of dollars. Layoffs could become as commonplace as Sunday roast beef with Yorkshire pudding had been for centuries.

And since there will always be an England, there is also wry wit in adversity: B.R. Yates wrote the Times of London to applaud a headline: “Cabinet may accept call for slaughter.” Said Yates: “At last a useful suggestion, but the question remains whether we should slaughter the whole Cabinet or just those members who have reached the end of their useful working lives.”

Here at 200-acre Staunch Farm, it is calving time. Evans pauses in his rounds to hand-feed some hay to an old friend, a 10-year-old Limousin-Freisan cross awaiting her eighth calf.

“Good-eating beef. Maybe not a Rolls-Royce but a bloody good Jag,” Evans said.

Once, maybe. Now the aging cow faces the incinerator.

Evans understands, but he does not like it.

“There’s the commercial side of things, of course,” he said, “but I only have animals because I like ‘em. There’s nothing worse than when they’ve got to go.”

In his four decades as a farmer, Evans never imagined that the British beef in which he takes such pride would become a pariah, shunned by consumers at home and abroad.

“There will be a long-term impact on all British farming after this,” the 63-year-old Evans said, walking sadly among market-ready animals for which there is no market. “I’m afraid a lot of farmers will be getting out of beef; many will never go back.”

Evans says he has about $150,000 worth of cows he planned to market by June. Right now he can’t sell any. As unsold animals mount up, at the rate of about 10 per week, so do farm bills.

Roger Daniell, who has an organic farm south of London, said that beyond “the heartbreak of losing the animals” the impact for farmers may prove less than for others whose livelihood also depends on beef, one of Britain’s blue-ribbon industries.

“We are promised some compensation. But what about the thousands of people who have no protection and may get no help?” Daniell asked.

British slaughterhouses, case in point, normally employ about 15,000 people. That number is now dwindling.

“I’m 49 years old, and I’ve been in this business all my life. Now I fear I’m seeing the end of it,” said the manager of a mid-size family-owned slaughterhouse in rural Essex. “Normally, we kill 350 cows each week; this week not a single one. We’ve been killing extra pigs and sheep, but there’s no way we can replace the beef. Next week, I start letting people go.”

An average lamb brought about $100 at the slaughterhouse before the crisis; last week it was close to $140. At Europe’s largest livestock market, near Oxford, pigs sold at record prices Friday--up 60%. There were no cattle sales.

“The situation is catastrophic,” market director Jim Watson said.

A $1-billion-a-year export industry has been wiped out. Jobs by the hundreds are being lost in meat exporting and processing firms, at freight companies, among truck drivers, auctioneers and animal feed manufacturers.

Northern Ireland fought desperately but unsuccessfully to have its beef sold under a local label to distinguish it from the British. More than 20,000 jobs in the province depend on the beef industry.

Since BSE was first classified in 1986, there have been about 160,000 cases in Britain. In the rest of the world, fewer than 400 cases have been reported.

In second-place Switzerland, there have been just over 200 reported cases. Ireland, third place, has reported 124 cases among 7 million head.

By now, BSE has struck about 33,000 British farms.

It is an ordeal to have to witness, farmers say. Here is how one farmer in Wiltshire whose herd has included more than one “mad cow” describes the disease’s impact:

“It begins losing weight, walks unsteady and sometimes a bit sideways. It stares; it begins shaking, lowing. It’s nervous, upset. It can go berserk. It may charge.”

Farmers say BSE strikes most often at dairy herds because in the past dairy cows were fed the greatest amounts of protein-enriched feed, which included parts of sheep infected with the brain disease scrapie.

There is no evidence of any danger from milk or other dairy products, though, and no suggestion that BSE can pass laterally from one animal to another, or from mother to calf.

The use of sheep parts in feed has been banned since 1988, so infected cows are among the oldest in the national herd of 11 million. Bovine offal in food products for humans has been banned since 1989, although inspectors last year found that at least one-third of slaughterhouses did not fully comply with restrictions.

Pending an expected government-ordered cull this week, all meat from cattle over 30 months, about 4.5 million head, was banned effective Friday.

Meat from older cows typically goes to meat pies, sausages, hamburgers, soups and pet foods.

Each week, government veterinarians kill about 300 animals suspected of having BSE. They are taken to laboratories for analysis, then destroyed by incinerators built for the purpose.

The 15,000 animals that the National Farmers Union wants culled each week far exceeds incinerator capacity.

In 1967, more than 200,000 head of cattle were burned and buried on farms to stamp out hoof and mouth disease. That option is not open now because of environmental restrictions.

“It’s an enormous logistical problem. We couldn’t bury culled animals on farms because of the potential threat of pollution to the water supply,” said Evans, past president of his local farmers association.

One idea being bruited is that the culled animals could be frozen whole, stored and destroyed as incinerator time became available.

The crisis has pummeled a government that has seen one “mad cow” scare after another for years.

A 1989 government report described cattle as “a dead-end host” incapable of passing on BSE and predicted that only about 20,000 cows would become infected.

By the end of last week, there was every indication that the government would order the same massive cull of older cattle that Health Minister Stephen Dorrell had earlier said could not be scientifically justified and would be “a grotesque waste of resources.”

“This matter has been handled with mind-boggling incompetence,” opposition leader Tony Blair taunted Major in heated parliamentary debate.

Major assailed what he called “collective hysteria, partly media, partly opposition, partly European.”

A fair number of people agree with Major.

“No, I won’t stop eating beef; I eat it nearly every day. . . . If I was going to be sick from beef, I’d be dead by now,” 53-year-old Londoner Chris Davis said.

All the big burger chains have dropped British beef, but it is still on the menu at Buckingham Palace, at 10 Downing Street and at the Tower of London, where the bearded guards are Beefeaters and the chief yeoman says stiffly that diets are not changing and jokes about British beef are unwelcome.

“Unfortunately, in people’s minds beef is now guilty, and we have to prove it is innocent,” one of Evans’ friends told a meeting of distressed farmers.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Risk to Humans

The “mad cow” scare threw Britain’s beef industry into crisis when the government acknowledged that the cattle disease is the most likely source of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a similar brain disease that has struck 10 young Britons.

1. Sheep entrails, contaminated with a brain-wasting disease, scrapie, is fed to cattle.

2. Contaminated cattle are slaughtered and meat is distributed.

Top importers of British beef

Tons / 1994

France: 80,000

Ireland: 18,920

Netherlands: 17,050

South Africa: 11,330

Germany: 1,980

Belgium / Lux.: 1,320

Symptoms of CJD

* Visual failure