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January 1998 Review Editorial: Stopping the Madness By Martin Rowe

Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. Common Courage Press: Monroe, ME (1997). $24.95 hardcover. 252 pages

Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Treatment of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry by Gail A. Eisnitz. Prometheus: Amherst, NY (1997). $25.95 hardcover. 302 pages

It was the 19th century German chancellor Bismarck who summed it up best: Laws are like sausages. Its better not to see them being made. While its likely that Bismarck thought that the end products of government and the slaughterhouse justified the means, no matter how unsavory, two recent books show not only just how very unsavory the processes are, but how inextricably the two are linked.

In Mad Cow U.S.A., John Stauber and Sheldon Ramptonthe authors of Toxic Sludge is Good for You, the revelatory and highly entertaining expos of the public relations industryexercise to similar effect their journalistic skills on the subject of what has been popularly called mad cow disease and ask whether it could be present in the United States. You probably have heard about how a degenerative brain disease called BSE or mad cow disease has been ravaging British cattle and how it is becoming increasingly probable that consumption of certain parts of infected cattle has caused a similarly degenerative disease in humans, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. You may also know that no-one knows quite how the diseasewhich has all the infectious properties of a virus without its nucleic structure, and leaves a cows brains perforated like a spongespreads, although it does appear to be more prevalent than might be imagined (lots of other species can catch their particular versions of the disease). Nor, for that matter, do scientists know definitively what parts of cattle are infectious, or even whether other animals we consume also have forms of brain disease and whether they too are infectious.

There is one thing, however, that the scientists seem fairly sure about. While transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (the scientific term for these contagious degenerative brain diseases) have been around for yearsthere have been regular outbreaks of scrapie in sheep for centuriesthe bovine form is new and appears to be connected to the practice that farmers were using in Britain in the mid- to late 1980s: of feeding ground-up animal parts back to the same animals, in this case cows. Rampton and Stauber chart the growth of the rendering business and the economies of scale both in the U.S. and U.K. that made it highly desirable to feed the parts of the animal considered inedible or industrially useless back to animals as protein feed. Not only was it an efficient way of dealing with the waste products of animals (for instance, only 60 percent of a steer is edible), but it offered a way to maximize the growth potential of both the animals and the slaughter and rendering industries.

The major problem with such an approach, as Rampton and Stauber show, is the potential increase in both the frequency and severity of transmissible diseases, and it was ironically a human transmissible disease called kuru that showed just how terrible such a disease might be. In the mid 1950s, Carleton Gajdusek, a brilliant physician (and, as depicted by Rampton and Stauber, a maverick Renaissance man) discovered that a highland people in Papua New Guinea were suffering from a curious disease which, we now know, had all the hallmarks of both BSE and CJD: an increasing loss of coordination, tiredness, disorientation, failing bodily functions, paralysis and finally death. The Papuans called it kuru and it seemed to come from nowhere, affecting almost exclusively women and children. It was invariably fatal. Gajdusekwhom Rampton and Stauber somewhat breathlessly and as we shall see ironically make the hero of the hourdiscovered that early in the century Papuan women had taken to eating the brains of the dead of the tribe (mainly because their social customs kept the better game meat for the men, leaving women to fill their diet with vegetables and small animals). Men were generally not affected by kuru because, when men did eat human bodies, they ate the good parts, leaving the women with the brains and other internal organs.

Governmental Inertia

This is where governmental inertia enters the picture, and Rampton and Stauber are particularly incisive in their criticism. As the number of cases of BSE began rising exponentially in the United Kingdom in the latter 1980s and early 1990s, scientists began to see the similarity between BSE, kuru and an obscure and extremely rare brain disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The question was whether BSE only infected cows, and whether it could spread. Throughout this time, as evidence that many other species were coming down with the disease after they were fed BSE-infected animal protein, there was clearly a case for a ban on feeding dead animals back to food-animals of the same species (all of whom were natural herbivores).

Finally, the British government initiated a ban, yet they continued to placate the public (and, more significantly for them, farmers) by both suggesting that BSE was not a problem and that British beef was entirely safe. Statistics, however, told a different story. In April 1988 there were 455 cases of BSE. By June that year there were over 600. A governmental committee meeting in November 1988 estimated that 17,000 to 20,000 cases would be in existence by 1993. They underestimated by a factor of 10. Likewise, the incidence of CJDnormally a disease of the elderly and infirmbegan increasing, and appearing in a new form as nv (new variant) CJD in the young and healthy. In 1995 alone, five farmers died of the disease.

From 1987 to 1997, the Conservative government failed to grasp the nettle at every opportunity. Ministers chomped on burgers for the press, saying there was nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, the scientific advice became more and more seriouseven the countrys leading neurologist announced that he feared a connection between BSE and CJD. The pressure on the government to make a statement admitting that there was a problem became overwhelming, and finally in March 1996, it did. There may be a link, it announced to a stunned House of Commons, and special efforts will be made to cull all cattle which may have BSE.

All of this, as Rampton and Stauber make clear, is something Americans should be worried about, since it was not until 1996 that USDA suggested that farmers should not practice feeding animals back to animals. It was only last year that it finally banned it: a full 10 years after the cause of BSE became known in Britain. While there have to date been no actual reports of BSE in the United States (although the States also has its transmissible encephalopathies), numerous cows die each year of downer cow syndromea sporadic and mysterious ailment, some of which may be due to BSE, and which has unsurprisingly been virtually ignored by farming and governmental agencies. It is unsurprising because of the enormous costs involved in changing the agricultural system. When news about the possible connection between BSE and CJD became known in Britain, the beef industry collapsed overnight. Farmers killed themselves; the European Union banned British beef, leading to a crisis which is still not over. In December 1997, European Union scientists called for a ban on British lamb and beef still on the bone since there is a chance they might be infected.

In America, when Howard Lyman, a former rancher turned vegetarian, went on the Oprah Winfrey show in April 1996 and announced that BSE was not only in the United Stateshidden in downer cow syndromebut had the potential to be an epidemic even more devastating than AIDS, the cattle futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange briefly collapsed. In a case that comes to court on January 5, Texas cattle-farmers are suing Oprah Winfrey and Lyman under agricultural product disparagement laws to the tune of $2 million. For Stauber and Ramptonas well as Oprah Winfrey herself, who has issued a statement to the same effectwhat are at risk in such a suit are the issues of free speech and the right of people within a democracy to expect their government not only to have an interest in their well-being, but to provide them with accurate information about public health. And the price of free speech is high: the day after Lyman was on Oprah, the beef industry pulled $600,000 worth of advertising from her show. That kind of power aligned with governmental inertia, Stauber and Rampton argue, is likely to quash all concerns about public health and safety.

Not the Only Disease

Mad cow disease is, however, not the only disease one can catch from consuming animals killed in todays slaughterhouses. As Gail Eisnitz reveals in the shocking and well-written Slaughterhouse, just about any infection latent in the animal in question can make it through to the consumer. Independent research has shown that 80 percent of all chickens sold for human consumption show traces of salmonella, with an even higher percentage showing traces of the less virulent disease campylobacter. The E-coli bacteria, virtually unknown in the early 1980s, have now killed adults and children around the world. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that America has between 6.5. and 8.1. million cases of food poisoning each year, and that as many as one in every three Americans suffers a foodborne illness in the same period. In the 10 years to 1994, deaths from food poisoning have more than quadrupled to 9000. The major source for this is food of animal origin.

Much of the reason for this increase, Eisnitz shows, is due to government deregulation of the slaughter industry. In 1978, USDA slaughterhouse inspectors were told they didnt have to automatically condemn any bird with fecal contamination, merely to wash it off. The result, however, was that the washing tanks became fecal soup, soaking disease into the birds. In 1985, the government imposed nationwide a two-year-old pilot program known as Streamlined Inspection. Inspectors would no longer be stopping the production line to inspect for the many contaminants there could be. Instead, employees would do the jobemployees who were, of course, subject to firing if they stopped the line and thereby held up processing. At that stage, 450 fewer USDA poultry inspectors were examining a billion and a half more birds than in 1975, and were effectively being allowed one and a half seconds to inspect fully each bird. Deemed a success in the poultry industry, Streamlined Inspection was transplanted to the cattle industry. Today, although all beef is stamped U.S. Inspected or passed, only 0.03 percent of the meat some of us eat is thoroughly inspected by government inspectors. And, if Eisnitzs sources are to be believedand she has been thorough and professional in her citationseverything from the cows penis to bruises, bone, fecal matter, hair, mucous, and blood clots ends up on our plates.

There is not enough space to detail all the horrorsfor humans and non-humans alikethat Eisnitz records from people who have worked in the slaughter business, an industry with an almost unprecedented staff turnover rate of nearly 100 percent. Many tell of the alcohol problems and marital strife they and others have experienced because of the stress of their jobs. Others recall workers unable to leave the slaughter line when they wanted to go to the bathroom and being forced to relieve themselves on the floor. They tell of four-inch roaches and rats infesting slaughterhouse floors, where offal and animal waste often accumulates.

The animals being killed fare no better. Because of deregulation, the shockers or bolts used to render an animal either unconscious or dead before slaughter routinely lack the voltage to complete the task. The results are horrendous: conscious animals, kicking and screaming as they are skinned or scalded alive; animals wounding workers by kicking the knives back into their face or body; animals running amok in the plant, getting caught in machinery. The effect on workers is always desensitizing, and sometimes alarming. The men Eisnitz interviews cite instances when either they or men they know beat the heads of hogs with concrete bars until they died, sawed or torched off legs of live steers; of cattle repeatedly stunned, choked, draggedall of it in contravention of the Humane Slaughter Act that, even to those required to enforce it, is not worth the paper its written on.

Beyond The Jungle

Over 90 years after The Jungle, Upton Sinclairs expos of the slaughterhouse industry, which galvanized the American public to demand cleaner food, conditions do not seem to have improved. Inspectors still use their five senses to assess contamination of meateven though much more sophisticated equipment exists to trace the multiple diseases of which our senses are unaware that this flesh is heir to. And the scale of slaughter is so much greater than in 1906. In one year in the United States, 93 million pigs, 37 million cattle, two million calves, six million horses, goats, and sheep, and eight billion chickens and turkeys are killed. In such a situation, you would think that the government should be tightening regulations, not loosening them; making the industry more and not less accountable. But as long as citizens can be sued for raising a question about a public health danger, this seems unlikely. In Britain, the Ministries of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Farming is going to change its name to appear concerned more about consumer safety rather than change what it has done for the last 10 yearsprotect agribusiness. In the U.S., President Clinton last year initiated a campaign to educate the consumer to cook his or her meat more thoroughly to avoid infection. Apparently, it is not industrys fault that so many people are getting sick from eating the dead flesh of diseased animals: its ours.

I should admit to more than a passing interest in all of the above. Between 1985 and 1989 (the period of greatest infectivity), I was eating British beef, and blissfully oblivious to how animals were killed and what was fed to them before they were sent to the slaughterhouse. According to Carleton Gajdusekwho, after his youthful days as a dashing international disease troubleshooter, won the Nobel prize, became an eminent Harvard professor and recently pled guilty to two counts of sexual abuse of some of the 50 or so Polynesian boys he brought over to Americathe transmissible agent that causes BSE and nvCJD could be present in manure from animals who may carry the agent genetically or through their milk. Thus, even a strict vegetarian who eats organic vegetables fertilized by manure could catch it. It could be in gelatin capsules (common vitamin casings), in tallow, and in all the other by-products of the slaughterhouse industry.

Some scientists have suggested that the increasing rates of Alzheimers disease could be masking a much higher rate of nvCJD than previously imagined. Because BSEs incubation rate is so long, we dont know how many people will die in the end; indeed, we routinely slaughter all pigs before they show whether they too are infected with the porcine versionwho knows what bizarre version of brucellosis we could get? Currently, there are 20 people who have died of nvCJD in Britain, and the rate could increase ten-, a hundred-, even a thousand-fold. What is certain, at a most conservative estimate, is that the public on both sides of the Atlantic is going to experience greater sickness as a result of mechanized slaughter and feeding practices that have nothing to do with nature, nothing to do with the health and welfare of people, and absolutely nothing to do with even a modicum of respect for the welfare of non-human animals.