Conscious Choice: Don't Mess with Mad Cow

Archive | News of the Earth (March 1998)

Don't Mess with Mad Cow

by Ben Lilliston

Many scoffed at the National Cattlemen’s Association when it decided to take on arguably America’s most popular public figure in Oprah Winfrey. The Cattlemen sued Winfrey under Texas’s "Food Disparagement" law, for comments she made during a show on "Mad Cow" disease. But by suing an American icon, the beef industry not only risked putting Mad Cow disease in the headlines daily, but also threatened the legal standing of "Food Disparagement" laws in 13 states — part of a successful strategy to stifle comment of food safety activists and media reporting on food safety issues.

Though it seemed they had much to lose, the beef industry made a tactical decision to go through with the lawsuit against Oprah Winfrey. But make no mistake, the motivation behind the lawsuit has little to do with Winfrey — the real goal is to stifle discussion of Mad Cow disease. And regardless of the trial’s outcome, the lawsuit has already been successful. (At this writing, the trial was still on-going.)

"Literally dozens of reporters have told us they are afraid to report on Mad Cow disease because they are not sure what they can say," says John Stauber, co-author with Sheldon Rampton of the book Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? "It has worked to suppress coverage; we are not seeing good, scientific reporting on Mad Cow disease."

The unmistakable message sent by the beef industry is that if you want to talk about Mad Cow in the U.S., you better be ready to spend close to one million dollars in a court of law to defend yourself. If the beef industry is willing to take on an American icon like Oprah Winfrey, they are ready for anyone.

What is it about Mad Cow disease that pushed the beef industry to take such a hard line? Perhaps it’s the fact that the disease itself is like something out of a demented Stephen King novel. It eats holes in the victim’s brain, causing the loss of motor function, paralysis, hallucinations, and then death. There is no cure. The incubation period for the disease can be up to a decade. And apparently, the disease can be transferred across species lines through food. There are variants of Mad Cow disease (known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies, or TSEs) found in sheep, mink, even deer and elk. And when the announcement was made in Great Britain in March 1996 that Mad Cow had passed the species barrier to humans there was widespread panic — not to mention the catastrophic effect it had on the British Beef industry.

The nature of the disease itself is frightening, but just as scary to the beef industry is the name "Mad Cow disease." Public relations professionals have discussed with horror the challenge of damage control over a disease already called Mad Cow. As a cattleman said, "it would help if people would stop using the phrase‘Mad Cow disease’ and call it by its real name — bovine spongiform encephalophathy."

According to one PR journal, the term "Mad Cow" taps into consumers’ psyches on a variety of levels: fear of the unknown; propaganda about harmful effects of technology in modern agriculture; food safety concerns in general; and the concern that new diseases are being discovered faster than science can find cures.

It’s too late for the food industry to re-name Mad Cow disease with the acronym BSE, but even if they could, the disease has other PR problems. Videotaped footage of staggering and despondent cows tells half the story. The deaths of 23 people in Great Britain from the human form of TSE, a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), tells the rest. Many in Great Britain feel like they are sitting on a time bomb while they wait to find out whether the disease will turn into an epidemic.

According to Kerry Tucker, president of the San Diego public affairs and issues management firm Nuffer, Smith, Tucker, "it would take only one case in the U.S. to bring the domestic [beef] industry to its knees." In the U.S., the beef industry has reacted defensively to the British crisis because the feeding practices responsible for spreading Mad Cow disease in England also exist in the U.S. Strong scientific evidence now indicates that Mad Cow disease was spread through a form of cow cannibalism, in which dead cattle were rendered into feed to provide additional protein, and then fed back to other cattle.

While the practice of using rendered cattle in feed was banned in Great Britain in the early 1990s, it was still common practice in the U.S. until a little under a year ago. On June 5, 1997, the FDA published a final rule which imposed a partial ban on feeding rendered mammal remains back to ruminants. But the final rule is fraught with loopholes that betray it as only a half-hearted effort. According to Dr. Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union, the rule exempts swine, horses, gelatin, and milk.

The FDA rule also exempts cattle blood from the feeding ban. Yet, in March 1997, Dr. Paul Brown of the National Institutes of Health announced that his lab had injected blood from mice infected with a tse into the brains of healthy mice, and the latter subsequently developed a tse — indicating that blood and blood products do carry the tse agent.

It is no surprise that FDA rules are weak, as they were largely written by the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA). In a 1996 letter to the FDA, the AFIA outlined a set of new rendering rules acceptable by the industry, which the FDA essentially mirrored a year later. Not coincidentally, the non-profit arm of AFIA, called the Animal Industry Foundation, is leading the charge for the passage of food disparagement laws in states around the country.

The disclosure of cow cannibalism and the practices of the rendering industry were largely the basis for the now infamous comment by former cattle rancher Howard Lyman, of the Humane Society, on the Oprah show on April 16, 1996. Lyman commented that Mad Cow disease in the United States could "make AIDS look like the common cold." Lyman’s statement prompted Oprah to announce that she had just eaten her last burger.

On the day of the Oprah show, cattle prices plummeted on the commodities market, and dropped ten percent by the end of May. The beef industry viewed this as an indication of the vulnerability of their entire industry to fears about Mad Cow disease. The two cattle ranchers in the case claim they lost several million dollars in value. In reality, the drop in cattle prices was probably more indicative of the volatility of the commodities market and high grain prices. In the supermarket, the beef industry’s own surveys show that consumer confidence in beef continued to be extremely high even after Great Britain’s statements about the human TSE variant.

Following the Oprah show, the beef industry pulled $600,000 in advertising and canceled all scheduled advertising for the following year. The industry wasn’t even satisfied after Oprah ran another show on Mad Cow disease with only beef industry representatives as guests.

Enter the food disparagement law — the beef industry’s strategy for squashing discussion of Mad Cow disease in the U.S. The first food disparagement law was passed in Colorado in 1991. A food disparagement bill was introduced in Illinois in 1995, but never made it out of committee. While nearly all of the laws in 13 states differ slightly, they contain common elements. The laws allow the food industry — farmers and food manufacturers — to collect damages arising out of disparaging statements, or the dissemination of false information, about the safety of food products. Most of the laws leave open the possibility for punitive damages.

"Agricultural disparagement statutes represent a legislative attempt to insulate an economic sector from criticism," write David Bederman, Scott Christensen, and Scott Quesenberry in the Winter 1997 issue of the Harvard Journal of Legislation. "They may be strikingly successful in chilling the speech of anyone concerned about the food we eat."

The real strength of the disparagement laws is their broad nature. Both Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring and George Bush’s comments on broccoli would likely have been eligible for a lawsuit under food disparagement laws. In fact, most any critical research could become fair game. This puts consumers at considerable risk; there is a long history of the scientific "establishment" declaring various chemicals and foods safe, only to be proven wrong by later research. For example, DDT, DES, and Thalidomide were roundly endorsed by scientists and government officials; only later were they found to cause birth defects and cancer.

Although the Winfrey trial is not yet over, the judge has ruled that the Cattlemen did not meet the burden of proof under the Texas disparagement law, but she did not rule that the law was unconstitutional. This keeps the door open for more disparagements lawsuits.

"These laws are going to keep being introduced regardless of how this trial turns out," says Stauber.

And the laws pave the way for lawsuits. Two other food disparagement cases are waiting in the wings for the conclusion of the Oprah trial. One pits emu farmers in Texas against American Honda Motor Co., for a commercial that made belittling comments about the emu market. In Ohio, Buckeye Egg Farm, a giant egg producer, filed suit under Ohio’s food disparagement act against Ohio Public Interest Group.

Regardless of who wins the Oprah trial, the Animal Industry Foundation will continue to target an additional 20 states for food disparagement laws. After all, the trial has achieved its main purpose — to stifle real reporting on TSE diseases in the U.S.

The U.S. media continue to ignore several core issues surrounding TSE in the U.S. Well documented in Stauber and Rampton’s book is the possibility that a variant of the British Mad Cow disease may already be present in American "downer" cows. There is evidence that the U.S. may already be vastly underestimating the number of human CJD cases. Recent research indicates that victims of CJD are often misdiagnosed as having dementia or Alzheimers disease. And there has been next to no coverage of the alarming discovery of TSE in deer and elk in Colorado, while the Colorado wildlife agency continues to give venison a clean bill of health. And Stauber and Rampton’s remarkable book continues to be shut out of the book review sections of even progressive publications.

From the heart of Texas, the unequivocal message to journalists and food safety activists is: "Don’t mess with Mad Cow."

Illinois
In the Illinois’ Governor race, John Schmidt has been the first to declare a pro-environment agenda. In February, Schmidt outlined an environmental plan which emphasizes clean water and air, and stepped up statewide pollution prevention efforts. Schmidt promises to take tough enforcement actions against big polluters.

Schmidt pledges to fight pollution run-off into rivers, improve air quality by passing legislation to encourage companies to support the development of clean energy, redevelop urban brownfields, and work on pollution prevention measures. He also pledged to clean up hog farms, and shift regulatory enforcement to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency from the Department of Agriculture.

National
In December, the USDA came out with guidelines that mirrored the warnings voiced in this column in the July/August 1997 issue of Conscious Choice. The Purefood Campaign is currently heading up a Save our Organic Standards (SOS) campaign and is actively trying to get stores to put up displays that show customers how they can help fight the new standards. To get a copy of the display, call the Purefood Campaign at 218-226-4164, or check out their web site

International
Two international protocols designed to control and reduce risks from heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in 43 European and other countries are now certain to be signed in June, following negotiations in Geneva. The protocols will be introduced under the U.N. convention on long-range transboundary air pollution.

The protocols represent the first time that such substances will be dealt with at the international level, and will set the basis for legislation in Europe and North America. Substances to be controlled under the POPs protocol include pesticides, industrial chemicals, and by-products or contaminants such as dioxins.

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