Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber reviewed by Heidi Thompson If you aren't a vegetarian, now might be a good time to convert. If recent outbreaks of e-coli in contaminated beef, added to knowledge that meat contains enormous amounts of fat and cholesterol, haven't convinced you of the enormous health risks associated with eating meat, this book will. Rampton and Stauber detail the incidences of several types of transmissible spongiform encphalopathy (TSE). TSE's include BSE (bovine spongiform encphalopathy) otherwise known as "mad cow disease", as well as variations of these diseases typically found in sheep, mink, and humans. Rampton and Stauber provide details of experiments that clearly link various types of TSE's to each other--in other words, it is now almost certain that a human could contract a variant of TSE from eating an animal which was similarly infected. This terrifying realization gets worse: it is possible that the governments of various countries (primarily Britain) could have stopped the outbreak had the meat industry not consistently denied that there was any connection between BSE and human illness. (Does anyone else see a parallel to the tobacco industry's constant denial that smoking causes lung cancer?) One of the main problems with TSE's (aside from being completely incurable) is that they are extremely difficult to diagnose. It is impossible be for certain whether or not the disease is present until the victim is dead and the brain can be looked at under a microscope. At that point the signs are unmistakable: the brains of TSE victims (animal and human) resemble Swiss cheese-full of holes. Another huge difficulty is that the incubation period can range from a few months (mainly in small animals such as mice) to several decades. For humans, the incubation period could be up to forty years. The TSE which normally occurs in humans is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD. It used to be that CJD was an extremely rare neurological disease that sporadically occurred in people between the ages of sixty and seventy; however, in March of 1996, England announced that at least ten young people had contracted a new form of CJD, known as nvCJD. These new cases seem to have only one consistent factor: all the victims had consumed beef. And it was possible that many more people had died of this new form of CJD without the government's knowledge. Even worse news is that as many as hundreds of thousands of people could have been dying of nvCJD, but because the disease was so rare, doctors tended to diagnose people as having other conditions. Autopsies done on many people who were believed to have died of Alzheimer's disease revealed that in fact they had CJD. The diagnosis of CJD is further complicated by the long incubation rate. It is theoretically possible (and, according to the authors, fairly likely) that many people have contracted the disease already but will not begin to show signs for several years or even decades. The obvious question at this point is, why is CJD (and TSE's in general), much more prevalent than before? Whether you like it or not, anyone who eats meat is almost always consuming an animal which was involuntarily a cannibal. A process known as rendering is the main source for most livestock feed. Rendering is a very simple process: dead animals and the leftover parts of slaughtered animals are ground up in a huge machine and becomes food for a new generation of livestock, pets, etc. This may seem to go against all natural instincts; since, after all, cows are herbivores. Unfortunately for the cows, however, whether or not they are natural carnivores seems to be irrelevant to the meat industry. It is much cheaper for a farmer (about $1,500 a year for a 100 cow herd) to feed livestock food containing rendered material than to feed them only natural food. Rendering has managed to continue for so long because most of the general public are not aware that it is a common practice. In fact, many farmers claimed to be surprised to find out that the long Latin words on the side of the food bags stood for ground up dead animals. Theoretically, at least, rendering itself doesn't pose a real problem. It appears to be a cheap, easy way for livestock to get the nutrients they need. Unfortunately for the renderers (and meat eaters in general) cannibalism has historically turned out to be a bad idea. Indeed, studies of a cannibalistic culture in New Guinea revealed that those members of the society (mostly women and children) who consumed other humans often suffered from a strange ailment known as "kuru". Under a microscope, the brains of those who had died of kuru looked remarkably like those of cows who had died of BSE. Before rendering, it was rare for one cow to pass the disease to another. All that had to happen was for one infected cow to be rendered back into the food chain for the disease to begin to spread. Once rendering was common there was no stopping TSE's from spreading in cows, sheep, mink, pigs and other animals. Because it is so hard to tell whether or not an animal is infected, merely trying not to render sick animals is not enough. In order to ensure that no sick animals were recycled back into the food chain the meat industries would have to stop rendering altogether, and that is not likely to happen any time soon. It wasn't until very recently that the meat industry was willing to even admit that rendering might potentially be harmful. After the announcement in England and the realization that not only was BSE spreading, but it might be spreading to humans, American beef industries and related groups decided to take steps against it. Actually, what they did was propose a voluntary ban on rendering. Rampton and Stauber think that "voluntary ban" is a contradiction in terms, and I certainly agree. They also proposed steps to prevent BSE from entering the USA. Amazingly enough, these few wishy-washy recommendations were actually more than what the British government had originally done. Up until 1996 the British government consistently denied that there was any possible link between mad cow disease and the rise of CJD in humans. They insisted that scientific experiments proving that BSE could be transmitted from cows to monkeys to mice and back again were flawed. Indeed, the experiments were flawed. But, they were flawed in the same way all lab settings are: they aren't natural. In addition, no tests had proved that BSE was transmissible to humans. The moral implications against attempting to transmit a fatal disease to humans are fairly obvious (more obvious than the moral implications of doing the same thing to thousands of animals of various species in a vain attempt to prove something to an unresponsive government). Setting moral implications aside, a test on humans would potentially have no results for forty years because of the incubation period. In addition, scientists had conflicting beliefs about BSE's and CJD. Some scientists thought the diseases were separate viruses, others considered them genetic mutations and therefore only transmissible from parent to child, and others came up with different theories. Some scientists working on CJD were not even aware of previous studies which could have helped the information come together more quickly. Therefore, the beef industry easily maintained its position that there was no scientific proof that humans were at risk for mad cow disease. Mad Cow Disease U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? is an apocalyptic nightmare tale. While the scientists and authorities associated with CJD and BSE do not agree on much, they do agree that this is a horrible disease. Howard Lyman of the Humane Society of the United States is quoted as having stated that CJD "could make AIDS look like the common cold." The idea that hundreds of thousands people could be infected with such a horrible disease is terrifying. Even vegetarians are at risk: it has not yet been proved that TSE's are transmittable through milk an