How Now Mad Cow?: The Making of a Major Political Disaster

In many ways, it has been a typical British “cock-up”--the last in a long line stretching back from Lloyds of London through the battle of the Somme to the Charge of the Light Brigade. It has involved the British establishment, unnecessary secrecy, a series of muddled decisions (most, as usual, taken by decent people acting in good faith) and, above all, animals.

For a long time, mad-cow disease was, to be honest, a bit of a joke; even the name seemed funny. Now, suddenly, it seems, literally, to be a matter of life and death. Even if the end result is not a stream of human fatalities, it will still create carnage in the English countryside.

For the British, a nation nicknamed Les Rosbif by the French (allegedly because it is the only thing we can cook), it seems to strike at the heart of Englishness: After all, we even call the people who guard the Tower of London “Beefeaters.” But the mad-cow epidemic also brings up two wider issues, important to people the world over. The first is the whole concept of science’s inability to measure risk; the second, still broader question is whether any of us will ever look at our lunch in the same way again.

First, the facts, such as we know them. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, as we are supposed to call mad-cow disease, belongs to a group of degenerative diseases that attack animals’ brains. Its main human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), is extremely rare, affecting only about one person in a million and typically attacking old people--its best-known victim is the Russian choreographer, George Balanchine, who died at age 79. But BSE does have a more common cousin, scrapie, that has killed sheep and goats for centuries.

There have been 161,000 cases of BSE in British herds over the past decade--far more than anywhere else. (The next biggest is Switzerland, with 206 cases.) British cattle probably caught the disease from, in effect, eating sheep--or, to be more exact, bits of their brain, spinal cord or other forms of offal (BSE hides in the central nervous system). For decades, it was common practice for ground-up bits of animals (including cows) to be used in cattle feed. The British farmers’ mistake was to use a higher proportion of animal parts than other countries and to prepare the feed less hygienically.

In 1988, with the countryside filling up with deranged cows, the British government banned this practice; it also outlawed the use of various bits of cows (such as the spinal cord) in human food. Meanwhile, it continued to insist there was absolutely no scientific evidence linking BSE to CJD. This it did ineptly--one minister was ridiculed for force-feeding his daughter a beef burger in front of the cameras--but the overall impression was of farce rather than danger. Mad-cow jokes were common. (Two cows are standing in a field. The first asks, “Ermintrude, aren’t you worried about BSE?” “Not at all,” replies an irritated Ermintrude. “Can’t you see: I’m a perfectly healthy pig.”)

All this changed March 20, when Prime Minister John Major’s government announced the possibility--no more--that 10 fairly young people had contracted a new strain of CJD that might be linked to BSE. Though the Tories have since pleaded with the public (and the world) that British beef is “safe in the common usage of the word,” nobody, it seems, believes them. The European Union has banned British beef imports; McDonald’s and British Airways have stopped serving beef. It seems inevitable that Major’s government will have to order the slaughter of at least some cows just to assuage public opinion. Most estimates of the cost begin at $5 billion, and it could be several times that.

As an example of political ineptitude, the mad-cow drama will take some beating. A political adage says you should never go into any room if you don’t know if there is an exit. The Tory government released the dramatic new research without any remedy for the problem--other than some waffle about setting up a commission to study the problem. If there had been a simultaneous announcement that, say, none of the older cows would be allowed to enter the food chain, panic would probably not have set in. Instead, having been told their health was at risk but nobody was doing anything, consumers took matters into their own hands.

Not for the first time, Major has looked like he is being guided by events rather than guiding them. Indeed, since the first case was in 1986, the government has had a decade to prepare. All the same, the scientists gave Major an awkward pitch to play on. The people in white coats have not been able to prove a link between CJD and BSE; but neither have they been able to prove it is safe. Every time the Tories have claimed beef is safe, the cry has gone up, “prove it!”

And this is only the beginning. For example, let us assume that there is a link between BSE and CJD, but not a particularly strong one. However, even this assertion does not get us far. We know virtually nothing about the disease’s incubation period, and there are question marks about the effectiveness of the controls introduced in the late 1980s. According to historical data, our chances of dying from CJD are around one in 2.5 million--or about three times less likely than being killed in a plane crash on a reputable airline. Yet, you can also argue that anyone who ate British beef in the 1980s--perhaps several hundred million people--is now at risk.

In other words, lack of any certain data makes reasonable debate about BSE just about impossible. The same cannot be said about the way we treat (and eat) animals. For many people around the world, the idea that people feed sheep to cows (let alone cows to cows) is disgusting--as is the idea that burgers are made out of things like spinal cords. In the United States, firms that slaughter cows even sell the beasts’ retinas to drug companies--so keen are they to squeeze money out of their carcasses. And America, unlike Europe, still feeds cattle to cattle.

Moreover, compared with many other farm animals, Britain’s beef herds lead a charmed (if relatively short) life, mostly spent wandering around fields and eating grass. By contrast, the average U.S. battery hen lives in a tiny cage about the same size as this newspaper with four other birds, whom she spends most of her life pathetically pecking--assuming her beak has not been cut off.

Discussing the unpleasant lives of American chickens may seem a long way from worrying about Britain’s mad cows. It is not. In Europe “animal rights” is becoming almost as emotive a political issue as abortion is in the United States. Nor is it just a crusade for the young, hairy and vegetarian. In London, it is striking how many otherwise conservative people are objecting to the way the food industry operates. This is a debate that U.S. farmers should expect soon.

In the end, however, the mad-cow crisis is really about science rather than politics or agriculture. Many of the intensive farming techniques that caused BSE were once heralded as “scientific.” Now this magical discipline has convinced millions of people to stop eating a substance without proving it has done them any harm. A few centuries ago, people used to burn scientists and worship animals; now it is the cows that will go to the pyre.

Get rid of all the scientific speculation and the layman is left with two common-sense conclusions. The first is that beef is pretty safe and getting more so. As of October, 1995, only one British cow born in 1993 had got BSE--as against figures of 30,000 for some 1980s herds. The number of new CJD cases in Britain has stayed under 55 for the past four years. This also implies that the sensible way to deal with BSE is to let the older cows die off--without letting them into our food chain--rather than killing millions of them.

The second conclusion is that the only really mad thing is the panic itself. If we all caught CJD during the 1980s, then there is remarkably little we can do about it. It is simply another of life’s unquantifiable risks. In my own mind, I put the chance somewhere between winning the lottery and being asked to breakfast by Cindy Crawford. I know which I would rather lose sleep over.