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U.S. Consumers Had Short-Term Response to First BSE cases

flounder

Well-known member
Subject: U.S. Consumers Had Short-Term Response to First BSE Announcements
Date: September 7, 2007 at 6:19 pm PST

U.S. Consumers Had Short-Term Response to First BSE Announcements


Food safety news following the discovery of infected cattle increased
consumers’ awareness of BSE but did not affect beef purchases beyond a brief
period.


Fred Kuchler and Abebayehu Tegene


Food purchase data reveal that the response of U.S. consumers to the 2003
discovery of BSE in two North American cows was limited and dissipated
within 2 weeks.

Purchase data are a more reliable source of information on consumers’ risk
perceptions than consumer surveys.


Future food safety announcements may not have the same effect on consumers’
food purchase decisions because consumers’ risk perceptions are likely to
change.



This article is drawn from . . .

Did BSE Announcements Reduce Beef Purchases? by Fred Kuchler and Abebayehu
Tegene, ERR-34, USDA, Economic Research Service, December 2006.


You may also be interested in . . .

ERS Briefing Room on Food Safety.

In May 2003, several U.S. Government agencies announced that bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE—also known as mad cow disease) had been found
in Alberta, Canada. The following December, agencies reported that a cow in
Washington State had BSE. Both of these announcements had the potential to
influence consumers’ food choices and retail food markets in the United
States.

To measure consumer reaction to those announcements, ERS researchers
compared household-level retail food purchases of three types of beef
products before and after each announcement to see if consumers reduced
their purchases of those products, and, if so, for how long.

Evaluating the impacts of BSE announcements is only the first step in being
able to forecast the impacts of other BSE or food safety announcements.
Consumers’ reactions to food safety news will be influenced by how much it
changes their risk perceptions. Consumers’ beliefs about food safety may
change over time, and subsequent announcements could be made under very
different conditions.

Beef Purchases Fell Briefly in Some Markets

Many consumer surveys were conducted after the BSE announcements. Each
survey asked consumers whether they reduced beef consumption following the
announcements. The main drawbacks to such surveys are that consumers’
memories of previous food purchases may be error prone and consumers may
sometimes feel compelled to answer in the affirmative. Using records of food
purchases can be a more reliable means of assessing consumer response.

Food purchases vary throughout the year and evolve over time. Americans
habitually consume more of particular foods seasonally and around holidays.
Some foods, over time, have fallen out of favor while other foods have taken
their places. Change attributed to BSE announcements might be confused with
seasonal purchase patterns or longrun trends if underlying patterns created
by habit and tradition, as well as evolving preferences, are not taken into
account.

ERS researchers used food purchase records to establish a
pre-BSE-announcement baseline. Researchers examined three markets—fresh
beef, frozen beef, and frankfurters. Frankfurters are more processed than
frozen beef (primarily steaks and hamburger patties). More processed food
satisfies demands different from those for fresh or frozen beef, so a BSE
announcement might have different impacts on consumers’ frankfurter
purchases than on other meats.

Using purchase records from the Nielsen Homescan panel, researchers
estimated total U.S. beef purchases before and after each announcement. Data
were available from 1998 through 2004, extending more than 5 years before
the first announcement and a year after the second announcement, allowing
comparisons of purchases before and after the announcements. (The Nielsen
Homescan panel is a nationally representative panel of households that scan
their grocery purchases at home, thereby providing detailed information
about each food item, including the purchase date, expenditure, quantity,
and attributes that finely differentiate food products. Panel size varied
from 7,124 households in 1999 to 8,833 households in 2003.)


Weekly purchases of fresh beef products exhibit strong underlying patterns.
Fresh beef includes roasts, steaks, veal, hamburger, ribs, and liver
purchased from grocery store meat counters. Fresh beef purchases show a
7-year downward trend, at an average rate of 5.2 percent annually.

Fresh beef purchases also display seasonality with predictable peaks and
troughs throughout the year. Troughs in beef purchases occur just before
Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Deep troughs occur exactly as other
meats peak (turkey at Thanksgiving). Peaks in early March and around
summertime holidays are typical.

Frozen beef and frankfurters display different longrun trends, but all three
types of beef display peaks at summertime holidays and troughs prior to
Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The May 20 announcement came just
before the Memorial Day peak in purchases and the December 23 announcement
came just before the trough at Christmas.


After accounting for trends and seasonality, researchers found that the
market for fresh beef provided the strongest case for an impact from the BSE
announcements. There is no statistical evidence that the Canadian
announcement altered purchase patterns of fresh beef, but purchases during
the first 2 weeks after the Washington State announcement were unusually
low. Following the announcement, frozen beef purchases fell only for the
first week. In contrast, frankfurter purchases dropped in the second week
following each announcement, but purchases of no-beef frankfurters also
fell, suggesting that unrelated events were more likely responsible for the
decline.

Statistical uncertainty precludes a calculation of a reliable estimate of
the pounds of fresh beef not purchased because of the BSE announcements.
However, the duration of adjustments is clear. There is no evidence of any
response beyond 2 weeks after the announcements.

BSE Announcements Did Not Change Consumers’ Risk Perceptions

The short duration of the drop in beef purchases suggests that the
announcements did not fundamentally change consumers’ risk perceptions.
Assuming that consumers always make food choices under some set of
assumptions about risks, they will adjust food choices only if the news
changes their risk perceptions. For the BSE announcements to change
consumers’ purchase behavior, they would have had either to affect consumers
’ perceptions of the likelihood of contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease (vCJD)—the human form of BSE, which is strongly linked with exposure
to BSE—or to change consumers’ perceptions of the severity of the health
outcomes.

Survey evidence on consumers’ BSE risk perceptions supports the conclusion
that the announcements did not change consumers’ risk perceptions, although
consumers did become more aware of the disease and its human variant.
Consumer surveys conducted by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
asked consumers if they had heard about mad cow disease in the last month.
Results indicated that awareness of BSE increased after both the Canadian
announcement in May 2003 and the Washington State announcement in December
2003. In the latter case, awareness increased from 61 percent during the
quarter prior to the announcement to 96 percent in the quarter after. The
survey also asked respondents if they were confident U.S. beef is safe from
BSE. The quarterly surveys show the share of respondents confident in beef’s
safety increased even after each 2003 announcement.

In addition, U.S. consumers’ knowledge of vCJD seemed to increase after the
announcements. For example, Joost M.E. Pennings, Brian Wansink, and Matthew
T.G. Meulenberg conducted a survey of consumers in the United States,
Germany, and the Netherlands in the last week of January and the first week
of February 2001 (before either U.S. BSE announcement but after the first
announcement of finding BSE in Germany). The survey characterized U.S. and
Dutch consumers as perceiving significantly less risk from beef than German
consumers. Survey results also indicated that U.S. consumers were the least
informed about vCJD. A survey by researchers at Rutgers University conducted
in mid-January 2004 (after both announcements) indicated that, although
Americans were still far from fully understanding all the consequences of
vCJD, about 75 percent were aware that vCJD could be fatal.

It is surprising that the purported increased awareness of vCJD after the
two announcements did not lead to a larger fall in beef purchases. Analysis
of the publicity BSE received in Great Britian showed a substantial, but
temporary drop in beef demand in the early 1990s. It also revealed a
smaller, but persistent reduction in demand. Analysis of the first BSE
announcement in Japan showed qualitatively similar results: an immediate
drop in beef consumption along with a longer-lived reduction in demand.

The symptoms and outcome of vCJD lead one to speculate that consumers could
react negatively to BSE announcements. BSE and vCJD fall into the class of
diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). All TSE
diseases display a prolonged incubation period of months or years and are
progressive and debilitating neurological illnesses. There is no treatment
for them, and they are always fatal.

If BSE announcements had signaled consumers that beef was unsafe, there were
few preventive actions consumers could have taken, other than switching to
other meat products. Unlike bacterial contamination, which may be controlled
with cooking methods and ordinary hygiene, there are no such safeguards
against vCJD. Likewise, bacterial contamination poses a lower risk of
illness or death to healthy adults than to those with compromised immune
systems, the young, or the elderly. In other countries, vCJD has killed
people with no underlying health problems, so being healthy might not offer
much defense.
Since the first announcements, additional food safety regulations have
created greater protection from BSE exposure even if infected cattle were
slaughtered. Safety experts have identified particular tissues in an
infected animal’s carcass that could be unsafe. As long as those tissues are
removed from the food supply at the source, any and all other products
derived from the carcass are considered to be safe. But unless consumers are
as aware of these safety measures as they are of infected animals, the
existence of infected animals could reduce beef consumption.

Government Took Action After BSE Discovery

Given the dreadful nature of vCJD, the limited consumer response suggests
that consumers considered additional information in making beef purchase
decisions. It appears that as consumers were becoming more aware of BSE and
vCJD, they were also getting the message that the risk of exposure or
contraction was very low. After the BSE discoveries, several Federal
agencies made public statements that the likelihood of exposure to BSE was
negligible and that the government was taking steps to reduce the risk even
further.

On May 20, 2003, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement
saying that the Government of Canada reported that a cow in Alberta had
tested positive for BSE. FDA said meat from the infected cow did not enter
the food supply and, although there was no evidence of transmission to other
animals, the infected cow’s herd mates would be destroyed as a precaution.
In its statement, FDA stated, “To date, no case of BSE has ever been found
in the U.S., despite years of intensive testing for the disease.”

FDA described USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service import
prohibitions on cattle and beef from countries that were on the list of
BSE-restricted countries (which was immediately amended to include Canada).
FDA also highlighted its rule prohibiting mammalian protein from being fed
to ruminants; that rule was designed to limit the spread of BSE within the
United States even if it did cross the border.

In December 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
issued a statement after the Washington State finding. CDC also described
some of the USDA programs—the testing that confirmed the BSE finding, the
beef recall, and the epidemiologic investigation into the disease source—as
well as the apparent species barrier protecting humans from BSE. In its
statement, CDC stated, “The risk to human health from BSE in the United
States is extremely low.”

Following the Washington State finding, the Secretary of Agriculture was
interviewed by major media outlets and issued public statements describing
new programs that USDA was undertaking. For example, on December 30, 2003,
the Secretary announced an expansion of the ongoing surveillance program,
new regulations that would reduce consumer exposure to BSE if it were in
animals intended to be part of the U.S. food supply, and development of a
national animal identification system. New regulations included a ban on the
use of downer cattle—those too sick or injured to walk—for food uses; a
requirement that slaughter plants remove, segregate, and dispose of tissues
most likely to harbor the BSE agent, so they do not enter the human food
supply; process-control regulations on advanced meat recovery that would
prohibit spinal cord tissue; and a regulation prohibiting the use of air
injection to stun cattle. A technical team provided daily public statements
for several weeks, reporting progress in the epidemiological investigation
and on tracing the infected animal’s cohorts. USDA’s Food Safety and
Inspection Service provided updates on the meat recall. And, like the CDC
and FDA statements, the Secretary of Agriculture reminded the public that
“…our food supply and the public health remain safe.”

The limited response to the BSE announcements indicates that consumers did
not revise their perceptions of the likelihood of exposure to BSE. They
thought the risk was low before and after the announcements. In addition,
the negligible likelihood of exposure seemed to have had a larger influence
on food choices than increased awareness of BSE and vCJD.

Future Announcements Likely To Generate Different Responses

If consumers always responded the same way to food safety news, one study
would provide information allowing analysts to confidently predict consumer
responses to other food safety incidents. That is, understanding responses
to one BSE announcement would point to responses to another BSE announcement
or entirely different food safety issues. Unfortunately, one study is not
enough because consumers’ risk perceptions are likely to differ among news
events.

Measuring the impacts of the 2003 BSE announcements provides some
information about consumer behavior, but also reveals the gaps in our
knowledge about the baseline factors that guide food choices and the
attributes of risks that are most important to consumers. This case reveals
that consumers’ beliefs about the likelihood of exposure to BSE were the
most significant factors affecting the outcome. But it does not say how low
the likelihood of exposure has to be before it is the only factor that
guides consumers’ food choices.

There is no reason for consumers’ ideas about the likelihood of exposure to
BSE to be rigid. Since 2003, there have been additional BSE announcements in
Canada and the U.S. These newer announcements could have already changed
consumers’ risk perceptions. Any additional BSE announcements could also
change risk perceptions. And consumers’ response to future food safety news
could yield entirely different food choices.


http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September07/Features/BSE.htm


> U.S. CONSUMERS HAD SHORT-TERM RESPONSE TO FIRST BSE ANNOUNCEMENTS

i had to laugh at this, to keep from getting so dad gum mad.
what sort of response were they expecting after lying about it all so bad.
gimme a break! i know a few that were mad as hell about it and sued (see
below). ...tss


> It is surprising that the purported increased awareness of vCJD after the

> two announcements did not lead to a larger fall in beef purchases


exactly what the USDA et al wanted them to believe i.e. UKBSEnvCJD only
theory, which is bogus.


however, i bet this was not part of there survey ;


http://vegsource.com/talk/madcow/messages/1001540.html


TSS
 
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