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Mad Cow DiseaseThe killer illness for a new world order.

By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Jan. 26, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET

It has become very dangerous to be a pig in Europe. In the last several months, the mad cow disease hysteria that has paralyzed Britain since the mid-'90s has crossed the Channel. France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy, among other nations, have discovered cows infected with the disease in their herds. Beef consumption has plunged in the European Union, dropping 50 percent in Germany alone. Germans, French, and Belgians are baying for the blood of their politicians, who lied and claimed local livestock were mad cow free. Two German ministers have been drummed out of office. France is prosecuting a farmer for intentionally selling an infected cow to a supermarket chain. At least one insurer has started offering discounts to vegetarians.

Mad cow disease—officially Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy—is a world-class horror. Eating meat infected with it seems to be the cause of "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease" (nvCJD), an unbelievably gruesome, always fatal, brain-eating illness that has killed about 80 young Britons and a handful of other Europeans in the past five years. Click here for a rather revolting explanation of how the epidemic started and why it jumped from Britain to the continent. Warning: includes bovine cannibalism.

The United States has hardly blinked at the turmoil across the pond. No cases of BSE have been found here—we import no cow products from England—and the United States bans feeding cows supplements made from other cows. (A herd of Texas cattle was quarantined this week after a cattle-feed maker violated that ban.) Still, there is some cause for concern. The United States forbids blood donations by people who spent more than six months in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996. And BSE-like illness is rampant in Western elk and deer herds.

NvCJD has killed fewer than 100 people, and the much-anticipated mass epidemic—one scientist predicted 130,000 British deaths—does not seem to be materializing. The number of cases is rising, but slowly. So why should mad cow disease provoke such a frenzy?

Mad cow fits the classic profile of a disease likely to cause hysteria. Ebola, AIDS, and polio—three of the most flamboyant illnesses of the century—overshadowed deadlier but less flashy plagues, such as malaria, for several reasons. First, the hysteria-inducing illnesses usually affect young people and strike in particularly gruesome ways. Ebola causes massive bleeding from every orifice. AIDS is responsible for grotesque cancers and infections. Polio paralyzed young children.

Second, at the moment of the panic—before much is learned about the disease's origin—everyone seems vulnerable, and it's not clear that prevention is possible. Maybe an Ebola victim flew in from the Congo and breathed on you! Maybe your dentist is HIV-positive! And finally, the disease organism is new and weird and seems to have sprung from a dark, mysterious place. AIDS is a creepy mutating monkey virus. Ebola remains a riddle: The Hot Zone traces it to the bats in a spooky East African cave.

Mad cow is similarly vicious, unstoppable, and mysterious. It murders by driving its young victims insane, then melting their brains. It theoretically puts anyone who ever ate English beef at risk. It was spawned in the miasma of rendering plants and slaughterhouses, our own hell's kitchens. And the disease organism is a mystery. Some scientists say it is a new kind of infectious agent, a malicious, twisted protein called a "prion." Others blame a "slow virus," but they can't find it. Whatever it is, nobody has the vaguest idea how to kill it.

But perhaps the crucial reason mad cow grips Europe is its cultural resonance. Every culture gets the disease it deserves. Polio struck an America midway to urbanization: It was so threatening because it seemed vengeful confirmation that American cities were foul, murderous places. AIDS became an obsession because it nourished existing anxieties about the sexual revolution and gay rights.

Mad cow is a rage because it encapsulates the dreads and frets of today's Europe. Europe—unlike the United States—has been seized by fears of genetically modified food and scientific meddling in agriculture. Mad cow perfectly fulfills those fears. Corporate agriculture, by turning cows into cannibals, has made them killers. Nature is biting back.

Mad cow also heightens European suspicion of globalism. Europe is a continent of Naderites, and mad cow is their nightmare, a disease that has spread because of poorly regulated, corporate-dominated, transnational agriculture. Government lies have only magnified the belief that politicians are in cahoots with big business. The whitewashes in Britain, Germany, and France were vain efforts to protect national beef industries, efforts that both failed and increased mistrust of government.

Most of all, mad cow has come to exemplify what's worrisome about the European Union. The crisis reveals how porous the continent has become: Union means that everyone is connected in a web of business and agriculture. But those connections can be alarming.

Anti-union, nationalistic mutterings have been percolating for years, notably in England and France. Mad cow is turning muttering into real animus. The BSE panic is setting nation against nation in a way that Europe has not seen for decades. Most of the continent is enraged at Great Britain for spreading the disease. Britain, in turn, is almost gloating that the rest of Europe is mishandling the problem as badly as it did. Austria, which is disease-free, suspects that German cows are infecting its herds. Germany, France, England, and Italy are at each other's throats. Countries have issued beef bans and counterbans. Jon Cohen, author of Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine, says that mad cow is legitimizing centuries of distrust. "The French and the British are saying to each other, 'Just as we believed all along, you are poisonous to our culture.' "

The European Union probably won't collapse over mad cow, but it certainly looks more fragile. One small disease is sowing enough rage and consternation to undo what it has taken 50 years of cool diplomacy and economic self-interest to put together. Mad cow is proving what Freudians have known all along: When it comes to brain diseases, the id out-muscles the superego every time.

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Related in Slate

Click here if you missed the explanation of how mad cow disease started. Stanley Prusiner won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his claim that prions cause CJD and related diseases. In "Nobel Gas," Gary Taubes argues that Prusiner's theory relies more on self-promotion than good science. A few years ago, a rancher sued Oprah Winfrey for disparaging beef in a show about mad cow disease. Seth Stevenson defended and celebrated Oprah in this "Assessment."

Related on the Web

This page, which bills itself as the "official" mad cow Web site, has an incredible archive of links and articles about the disease and the European panic. An article about a teen-age victim of nvCJD is particularly moving. Great Britain just completed a massive inquiry into how the government botched the mad cow crisis. You can read the report and review thousands of pages of testimony here. Ickiest detail: In 1990 Agriculture Minister John Gummer, in a stunt to demonstrate his confidence in the meat supply, tried to force his 4-year-old daughter to eat a hamburger in front of TV cameras. Review the most recent British health stats about CJD. The three right-hand columns ("vCJD" and "nvCJD") enumerate the cases likely caused by mad cow disease.

David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

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Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Many readers made the same points as Evan Mahoney, below: his was chosen because we liked his gloating tone better than the messages that faked some sympathy for meat-eaters. Zeitguy was taken to task for making fun of the English: told that there was more to life than amusing the Fray Editor. (Not sure about that, but there is a reason why Zeitguy may have chosen the wrong method anyway.) Discussion of the prion theories here. A good isoloationist rant here ("close our borders to non-domestic meat…to hell with what the world press thinks"--what a sweeping change in attitude that would be.) And Andrew Craig-Bennett, making a careful distinction between dairy and beef herds, ends his post "Now you can start panicking". Tony Adragna (this is why he has a star) draws a cost/safety parallel with condoms, here.]

No, I don't have to worry about mad cow disease, nor do I have to worry about heart disease, colon cancer, prostate cancer, probably cancer in general, high blood pressure, constipation , diabetes, or impotence. Because I'm a vegan, non-smoker, I'll probably live to a ripe old age and be healthy along the way barring any accidents.

--Evan Mahoney

(To reply, click here.)

It's always reassuring to read the statistic noting that no cases of BSE have ever been found in the United States. It is less reassuring when one finds out that only about one percent of the cattle in this country have ever been tested for the disease.

It is an oversimplification to point out that Europe has gotten what it deserves, when our own country would behave just as badly under the same circumstances. When a farmer has a "downer cow", will he destroy the animal, or call the rendering plant to use in making other products? Do you think cattlemen here would gladly destroy their herds, or that the beef lobby would not do its best to maintain the industry, or that our politicians are better behaved than their British, French, German, Belgian, Swiss, Spanish and Italian counterparts? I pray that we will be spared from being put to that test.

My view is not subjective, as my mother died of the human form of this disease, CJD, in 1982. (Ironically, my father worked as a butcher off and on for fifty years, but he was not the one who was exposed to CJD.) For nearly twenty years now there have been no answers for me, or hundreds of others whose loved ones have died brutal deaths from CJD, as to how this disease is transmitted. Its cause remains unknown. Since this disease is known to jump species barriers, many of us are unable to believe that the United States is free of contamination. The source may not even be cattle, but without serious research, we are behaving rather smugly if we think this country is immune to the kind of outbreaks being experienced in Europe.

For a perspective on CJD, as well as CJD and nvCJD overseas, I recommend this website.

--Patty Cook

(To reply, click here.)

I find it ironic that when David Plotz asks the question why mad cow disease, like other "flashy" diseases such as Ebola, Polio and AIDS, has created such a frenzy, and then misanswers the question, he actually demonstrates the answer. The reason these illnesses have created a frenzy is because they attack affluent citizens in developed countries where, it is assumed, illness should not be an issue. Plotz suggests that the AIDS frenzy "nourished existing anxieties about the sexual revolution and gay rights" and that the concern with Ebola was that maybe "someone from the Congo with Ebola had got onto a plane"--you can almost hear the unfinished "and landed somewhere where human life matters".

These illnesses, especially AIDS, should justifiably generate a frenzy--in Africa infection rates are at an estimated 25% in some countries. And when there is an outbreak of Ebola, villages are decimated--tragic, regardless of whether or not these people step onto a plane.

So, to revisit the original question: why do these diseases generate a frenzy? Because for some reason life in the so-called developed world is valued more highly than life in the developing world.

--Siobhan

(To reply, click here.)

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