Thursday, April 26, 2012
Mad Cow is Back... And Not A Problem, Apparently.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/mad-cow-disease-discovery-not-likely-to-threaten-beef-industry/2012/04/26/gIQAfgcwiT_story.html
The last time mad cow disease was spotted in America was almost a decade ago and caused an 82% drop in beef exports. Now, the disease has been discovered in a dairy cow carcass in California and nothing is really happening. The carcass was apparently not intended for consumption and so beef executives are saying that the disease’s reemergence is not cause for alarm- since the 2000s, the US has had three cases of the disease, while Canada has had seventeen and the UK has had more than eight hundred. With beef exports on the rise and the beef industry having a banner month in March, the discovery of mad cow disease in a dairy cow could be a potential threat to the industry. But thanks to regulations made after the 2006 outbreak, importers are not alarmed. Every year, the world becomes more dependent on US beef, and so the only danger even being looked at here is the potential economic danger.
Personally, I think that this is cause for some alarm, but ultimately is not too much of a threat to the food industry- which is a shame because this could have served as a serious wake-up call to the beef producing industry. Mad cow is a prion disease, meaning it can only be passed on genetically or by consuming tissue from an infected individual. Commercial cattle feed, while officially being free of mammal parts since 1997, is known to contain bone meal- that, combined with poorly-planned breeding, is how the disease spreads. Seeing as how cows are herbivores, one would assume that other cows are not part of their natural diets. I am sure that another source of the nutrients in the bone meal- calcium and protein- could be included in a healthier cattle diet that doesn’t include the remains of other cows. I do not think that the beef industry is paying attention the right set of problems here. Instead of worrying about the economic security of the industry, they should be paying attention to how the mad cow spreads in the first place and what they can do to prevent this.
Aside from the diet, testing is also a contentious matter. Small beef companies have tried to acquire the resources to test their entire herds, but the FDA, which controls the sale of testing materials, will not allow this on the grounds that it makes their random sampling test look insufficient. If mad cow is still a problem, then perhaps the random sampling is insufficient. But testing every cow at a large scale commercial feedlot is also problematic and probably impossible. I think that diseases like mad cow should cause some kind of actual reaction instead of contented economic rumblings about a record year for such a problematic industry.
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I just watched a video on CNN entitled "Do we need more mad cow disease testing?". According to the Agriculture Secretary, they make sure that the disease carrying parts of the brain and spinal cord do not make it into the food system. The government no longer allows ground up dead cows to be fed to other cows (yay?), but dead cows are allowed to be ground up and fed to chickens. The chicken excrement is then sometimes mixed in with other cow feed, and subsequently fed to cows. So, in reality, live cows do sometimes end up eating other dead cows. In 1992, there were 37,000 reported cases of mad cow disease world wide, and by 2011, that number had dropped to 29. Clearly, regulatory agencies are doing something right, but banning cow parts from showing up in any animal feed would be ideal.
ReplyDeleteI think Summer brings up a really good point. Though regulation has effectively kept Mad Cow Disease from becoming an epidemic in the U.S., it is still important to consider what happens with cows, whether they are butchered or ground up to feed other animals. This is especially important given the prevalence of factory farming systems in the U.S., where the slightest slip could result in an entire farm being shut down and several products being recalled from the shelves because of one bad batch of feed. One case isn't cause for panic, but I do think it's an important reminder that regulation and, more importantly, enforcement of that regulation are crucial to the health and well-being of the animals and the consumers.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest concern with the outbreak of disease is that instead of feeding cows grass like they’re supposed to be, scientists will just develop new drugs to load up these cows with. While it’s true that the measures that have been taken to prevent mad cow disease are clearly working, all it takes is the right combination of accidents and human error to have another major outbreak of disease; and if it’s not mad cow, it’ll be something just as bad or even worse. What we really need to learn from these situations is that what we are doing isn’t natural and eventually we’re going to have to face the consequences – and they’re not gonna be pretty.
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