It could be the United States today. Or Britain in the mid ’90s. To the British public, the pattern unfolding in America has a wearying familiarity. Back in 1996, the British government first publicly confirmed a possible link between mad-cow disease (formally, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE)–already rampant in the national herd–and a new strain of its human form, the brain-rotting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
The result: unprecedented panic, headlines that spoke of an impending health crisis comparable to AIDS and warnings from responsible scientists that the eventual death toll could top 200,000. Precautions included a European Union export ban that covered not only British meat but a list of products containing beef that ran from cookies to cosmetics.
But if the American reaction is familiar, it’s also puzzling. These days the British know better. The plain truth is that CJD has not proved to be the mass killer first envisaged by the gloomier experts. Since the earliest cases were identified in the mid ’90s, the disease has claimed a mere 153 victims, all but 10 in the United Kingdom.
What’s more, the numbers now appear to be in slow decline. The death toll for 2003 in Britain stands at 16, down from 17 last year and from a peak of 28 in 2000. Flu kills far more Britons each year than CJD.
Indeed, the statistics suggest a near-negligible risk from the discovery of a single infected beast. Even if plenty more are found, the American numbers will never match the British tally. At the height of the BSE epidemic, Britain was logging more than 30,000 cases of mad-cow disease a year.
Hundreds of thousands of infected carcasses had entered the food chain before any possible link with CJD was formally acknowledged. Yet those scary totals don’t translate into mass mortality. Even the most pessimistic scientists now forecast an upper limit of a few thousand human casualties.
In hindsight, that first spasm of anxiety is easily explained. Back in 1996 the emergence of AIDS was still a recent memory. Newly sensitized to the dangers of baffling and deadly diseases that emerged suddenly from the unknown, the British public was ready to believe the worst. Just like AIDS, the incubation period of CJD was unpredictable. Like AIDS too, the symptoms had a terrifying inevitability: the slow decline into complete mental incapacity followed by certain death.
What’s more, there were plenty in the ecolobby ready to point up the moral behind the threatened plague. The origins of mad-cow disease, according to the best current theories, lay in the unhealthy practice of feeding cows with the ground-up remains of cattle carcasses–a neat example of the unnatural methods that the Greens deplored. To ram home the message, commentators were maybe ready to overstate the danger.
Politicians, too, were guilty of stoking the flames, albeit with the best of motives. For years, the government had insisted on the absolute safety of British beef. To restore confidence, there could be no question of half measures. Only the mass cull of cattle at risk–at a cost of some $6 billion–would satisfy. Necessary or not, the spectacle only fueled concern.
In short, for the sensation-hungry British press this was the health scare with everything, not least a gruesomely exotic background. The closest cousin of CJD, the scientists asserted was kuru, a fatal neurological disease once found among the tribesmen of Papua-New Guinea given to eating the brains of deceased relatives. Fears fed on media-fed worries to perpetuate the story.
So much for the history. These days the British are eating beef in pre-BSE quantities. The debate has cooled as the death toll declines. It’s now possible once again to question even the nature of the disease without exciting a media furor. Strong scientific evidence is emerging that challenges the long-accepted link between mad-cow disease and CJD.
What’s remains is a new and global susceptibility to anxiety, easily transmitted across borders, that has little to do with science or hard data. Earlier this year the SARS outbreak put China into quarantine and shut down entire cities elsewhere. Yet the disease killed fewer than 1,000, mainly among the old and sick. When the whole world is watching, no risk is now too small if public safety is concerned. Ask America’s cattle breeders.
