There's nothing very pleasant about mad cow disease. It's a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a progressive and fatal neurological disease. It causes loss of motor control and dementia.
C.J.D. is caused by prions, protein particles that, unfortunately, survive sterilization techniques and so is sometimes associated with surgical procedures. Something on the order of 300 people, or fewer, are thought to be afflicted with C.J.D. in this country annually. None of the cases in this country have ever been associated with the variant form, which is associated with consuming beef.
Europeans haven't been so lucky. In 1996, the first human cases of the variant form associated with cattle were diagnosed in Britain. To date, some 92 people have contracted the disease from beef, most in Britain, although contaminated herds have been found through much of Western Europe. The number of people infected isn't great, but because the disease has a long incubation period, the fear level is high since it can't be known if large numbers of people harbor it.
Although it's evidently the case that the disease hasn't entered America, there is growing concern that it could happen. Indeed, not long ago cattle were quarantined in Texas because they had been fed bone meal, thought to be the medium by which the disease is propagated through herds.
It's not difficult to imagine that if fear of mad cow reaches America, it will not mean just the loosing of a great human tragedy, but -- at the risk of trivializing the situation -- the collapse of beef production and beef sales in supermarkets.
At the moment, the issue in America is one of consumer perception: Do consumers fear the disease and are they considering altering their beef-buying habits? In a bid to discover if mad cow is a gathering storm, SN asked a group of food shoppers what they thought about the situation, and also contacted retailers to see what concern level they have detected from their shoppers. The news article about consumers is on Page 12; the one about retailers is on Page 29.
The shopper poll discloses a surprising degree of awareness of mad cow disease. And, it also found that many of those polled placed a great deal of confidence in the ability of government inspections of beef to ward the disease off these shores.
That sanguine attitude on the part of shoppers is reflected in the news article about retailers. Most of those contacted said they had received few expressions of concern from their shoppers about mad cow.
So far so good, then, and let's hope that the processes in place to keep mad cow from entering this country are effective.
But, let's face it: There's no way to know with absolute certainty. That's not just because of the long incubation period but because it's impossible to determine by any means short of examining brain tissue of the deceased whether a victim perished of C.J.D. or the mad cow variant. And, samples from well over half of those who die of C.J.D. are never examined to see if mad cow was involved or not.
This is not a fact that inspires an overabundance of confidence, but it's encouraging to realize that for four years now a surveillance center dedicated to checking for mad cow has been running under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (I'm indebted for the facts about surveillance for the disease, and some of the data in this column, to a news feature that ran in the New York Times last month.)
