NR APPB
AU Reid,T.R.
TI Mad Cow Scare Lingers in England - Early Missteps Contributed to Public Mistrust of Government and Science
QU Washington Post, Friday, December 26, 2003; Page A03
IA http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30789-2003Dec25.html
PT Zeitungsartikel
VT
It began with a few scattered reports of sick cows, coupled with forceful assurance from the government that the public had nothing to worry about.
Over time, it turned into an agricultural, economic and public health disaster that cost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars, played a key role in national politics and seriously undermined the people's trust in the pronouncements of public officials. It led to the slaughter of 2.75 million cattle and may have caused the death of more than 140 humans.
Britain's crisis over mad cow disease stretched from 1986 to the end of the 1990s. It still has repercussions today in the British public's tendency to veer from one health scare to the next, regardless of official assurances.
The United Kingdom's long, costly struggle with the cattle disease known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is on the minds of U.S. officials this week following Tuesday's report that a cow slaughtered near Yakima, Wash., earlier this month was infected with BSE - the first reported case in the United States.
Just as their British counterparts did in the 1980s, federal officials are downplaying the possible danger. "We believe the risk of any human health effects is very low," Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman said Tuesday. "I plan to serve beef for my holiday dinner," she added.
That brought to mind the unhappy saga of a British politician, John Gummer, who was Veneman's counterpart - Minister of Agriculture - in Prime Minister John Major's cabinet. When the first British cases were reported, Gummer repeatedly said that BSE posed no human danger. On national television, he fed a hamburger made with British beef to his 4-year-old daughter, Cordelia.
When his assurances fell apart, Gummer became an object of media ridicule. Today he is still in Parliament, but is serving as a back-bencher in a minority party. The photos showing Gummer feeding that hamburger to his daughter still show up on British TV now and then, in segments of the "where are they now?" genre.
Britain's mad cow nightmare started in 1986, when the Agricultural Ministry announced that a few cattle in scattered herds had tested positive for the disease. For the next 10 years, the government continued to promote British beef for domestic consumption and for export, saying that consumers had nothing to worry about.
But consumer groups and the media expressed suspicion, and beef sales slumped. Then, in March of 1996, the roof fell in. A government study warned that there was a link between the animal disease, BSE, and a human form called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The human illness causes dementia, blindness and paralysis. The British government says about 143 Britons have died from the disease, although it is not clearly established that the victims got sick from eating beef.
With the announcement of a possible human connection, British beef sales plunged to zero almost overnight. Butcher shops along every "High Street" - the British version of Main Street - posted signs promising "No British Beef Sold Here." When further warnings came out suggesting that sheep and pork might also carry infectious agents, the London tabloid the Mirror captured the national mood of near-hysteria with the banner headline "What The Hell CAN We Eat?"
The European Union banned all imports of British beef, shutting down a $2 billion export industry. To reassure consumers, the government finally decided to cull the national beef herd of all animals raised on or near an infected farm. By the end of the program, 2.75 million cows had been slaughtered and burned, with farmers reimbursed by the taxpayers for 100 percent of the market value of each animal.
The mad cow crisis - and the public perception that Major's government had bungled it - played a key role in the British public's disenchantment with the Conservative Party, which had dominated national politics for 18 years. In May of 1997, Labor Party leader Tony Blair swept to an election victory, and the Conservatives have been a struggling opposition party ever since.
The larger implication of the BSE crisis was a sharp increase in public suspicion of new technology in agriculture and medicine. To this day, the strident British media seem to trumpet a new public health scare every few weeks.
Measles, once nearly eradicated, has reappeared in disturbing numbers, perhaps because of media-fueled fears that the standard measles vaccine - used in the United States and nearly every other country - may be unsafe. British consumers shy away from U.S. beef because of growth hormones fed to cattle. Grocery stores and restaurants post large signs promising that they do not carry genetically modified foods, even though the same foods are consumed daily by hundreds of millions of people in the United States and other countries.
Blair says the continuing public health scares in his scientifically advanced nation can be traced directly to the mad cow crisis. "You have to understand how powerful the shock of BSE was in this country," Blair said in an interview in 2001.
"We have suffered to some degree a loss of faith in science, and a loss of faith in any kind of public assurance from government," he continued. "This feeling has lingered long after the actual crisis was resolved. It is always reasonable to be cautious about health matters, but it is possible to overdo that very greatly. And this was the impact of the BSE crisis on the British public."
AD T.R. Reid, Washington Post Staff Writer
SP englisch
PO USA