Mad Cow II: The Social Disease
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
BUSINESS WORLD
Wall Street Journal
June 28, 2006
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been determined to keep mad cow a matter of government-to-government diplomacy. Now comes the payoff in the form of a recent agreement that has Japanese government inspectors descending on U.S. meatpacking plants, snapping photos and judging whether their output is fit for Japanese consumption.
This might seem, from the point of view of bureaucratic amour propre, to be ceding a precious piece of USDA's sovereignty to foreigners. But -- hooray! -- at least government bureaucrats remain in charge. The alternative, unbearable even to contemplate, would have been to leave it to private buyers and sellers to reach their own terms.
That was the terrible danger posed by Creekstone Farms. It had assayed the collective appetite of the Japanese and proposed testing each animal for mad cow before shipping beef to Japan. No, the expense is hardly justified by the risk. But Japan has instituted universal testing for its own beef and blocked imports of foreign beef that doesn't adhere to the same standard. Retail beef prices promptly blasted off in Japan, reaching an average of $27.80 per pound. Creekstone saw this and naturally would like to help itself to some of this money.
Let's stop here and note that markets are usually more adept than bureaucrats at catering to irrational tastes, fads and preferences. That's why our world is enriched with $700 perfumes, $10,000 wristwatches and Italian motorcycles. Japan's taste for beef subjected to mad cow testing falls into the same category -- an opportunity for somebody somewhere to make a lot of money selling overpriced beef.
Unfortunate for Creekstone was a preemptory decision by USDA to prohibit it from acquiring the necessary testing kits. The agency isn't just protecting its monopoly on testing: Its central planners have a "strategy." They want to use diplomacy and the power of government-to-government nagging to change Japanese preferences.
Toward this goal the machinery of trade negotiation has drudged away for three years, trying to get the Japanese to accept American beef without testing. Unwisely perhaps, the U.S. cattle industry has been supportive. Cattlemen, legislators and farm state radio commentators all flow freely with indignation about Japan's refusal to adopt "science-based" trade policies.
True enough. With each year, retrospect makes it clearer that the cycling up of a communicable epidemic of prion disease (for the misfolded protein widely believed to be the agent of infection) in the British cow was a fluky, one-of-a-kind phenomenon.
Nothing similar has been seen elsewhere, despite many of the same feeding practices. Though an odd case of mad cow turns up now and again, these increasingly are "atypical" -- they don't show the hallmarks of British-style mad cow and are most probably examples of a sporadic version that was there all along.
And without the now-banned feeding practices to turn one sick cow into a herd-wide epidemic, the danger to the public is virtually nil. Government's job is done. So far, exactly one Japanese has died from mad cow, and he lived in London in 1990. Japanese consumers continue to be in far greater danger from fugu, the toxic pufferfish eaten as a delicacy. One careful study showed that fugu was responsible for 179 deaths over a 10-year period.
And this is nothing compared to commoner forms of food poisoning. On the science alone, then, Japan would drop its own testing of every cow and its insistence that others do the same. On the science alone, the USDA would hastily retreat from worrying about mad cow. It would devote its resources instead to garden-variety bacterial poisonings that claim some 1,300 U.S. lives annually.
Then again, on the science alone, scientists like Stanley Prusiner, who won a Nobel Prize for identifying the prion, wouldn't be continuing to advise consumers not to eat beef that hasn't been tested for mad cow.
Here's a mixed blessing: Mad cow has unlimbered untold sums from governments, universities and drug companies for research into prion disease that wouldn't have been unlimbered otherwise. In the nature of things, prion disease has repaid the favor by continuing to yield mysteries to justify spending even more money. Scientific uncertainty is elastic -- it grows with the amount of funding available.
Scientists discovered that most of the human mad cow victims were young and all shared an identical genotype common to 40% of Britons. A review of tonsil and appendix tissue from otherwise healthy Britons of other genotypes was mounted. Sure enough, a few were found to contain the offending prions.
Researchers turned anew to a related disease, kuru, that raged among New Guinea cannibals half a century ago. Lo, aging survivors were found still to be contracting kuru 50 years after their mortuary feasts were banned.
Putting these facts together has led to a splurge of fearful new headlines. Hundreds of Britons once thought to be genetically immune may yet come down with mad cow decades after their exposure. Hundreds may be "symptomless carriers," capable of infecting fellow citizens of the vulnerable genotype through transfusions or surgical instruments. Or so scientists have not minded speculating.
Mad cow fears seem destined to be with us a while yet, and somebody will make a lot of money selling beef stamped "guaranteed mad cow free." But notice that USDA, its foreign counterparts and the beef industry are all fighting the last war. The vector of future troubles decidedly isn't from cows, but from human carriers.
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