Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Begins

By John Stauber, AlterNet. Posted December 30, 2003.

When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our 1997 book, "Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?", it received favorable reviews from some interesting publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, New Scientist, and Chemical & Engineering News. Yet although the book was released just before the infamous Texas trial of Oprah Winfrey and her guest Howard Lyman, for the alleged crime of "food disparagement," the book was ignored by the mainstream media, and even most left and alternative publications failed to review it.

Apparently many people who never read it at the time bought the official government and industry spin that mad cow disease was just some hysterical European food scare, not a deadly human and animal disease that could emerge in America. In March, 1996, when the British government reversed itself after ten years of denial and announced that young people were dying from the fatal dementia called variant CJD -- mad cow disease in humans -- the United States media dutifully echoed reassurances from government and livestock industry officials that all necessary precautions had been take long ago to guard against the disease.

Those who did read "Mad Cow USA" when it was published in November, 1997, however, realized that the United States assurances of safety were based on public relations and public deception, not science or adequate regulatory safeguards. We revealed that the United States Department of Agriculture knew more than a decade ago that to prevent mad cow disease in America would require a strict ban on "animal cannibalism," the feeding of rendered slaughterhouse waste from cattle to cattle as protein and fat supplements, but refused to support the ban because it would cost the meat industry money.

It was the livestock feed industry that led the effort in the early 1990s to lobby into law the Texas food disparagement act, and when an uppity Oprah hosted an April 1996, program featuring rancher-turned vegan activist Howard Lyman, she and her guest became the first people sued for the crime of sullying the good name of beef. Oprah eventually won her lawsuit, but it cost her years of legal battling and millions of dollars. In reality, the public lost, because mainstream media stopped covering the issue of mad cow disease. As one TV network producer told me at the time, his orders were to keep his network from being sued the way Oprah had been.

In the six years since the publication of "Mad Cow USA," Sheldon Rampton and I have spoken out in media interviews, at conferences of United States families who had lost relatives to CJD, and we saw our book published in both South Korea and Japan. Our activism won us some interesting enemies, such as Richard Berman, a Republican lobbyist who runs an industry-funded front group that calls itself The Center for Consumer Freedom. Berman is a darling of the tobacco, booze, biotech and food industries, and with their funding he issued an online report depicting us as the ring leaders of a dangerous conspiracy of vegetarian food terrorists out to destroy the United States food system. Last week alone he issued two national news releases attempting to smear us.

Of course, he had an easier time attacking us before the emergence of mad cow disease in America. I was saddened but not surprised when mad cow disease was finally discovered in the United States. When the first North American cow with the disease was found last May in Canada, I told interviewers that if the disease was in Canada, it would also be found in the United States and Mexico, since all three NAFTA nations are one big free trade zone and all three countries feed their cattle slaughterhouse waste in the form of blood, fat and rendered meat and bone meal. In fact, in North America calves are literally weaned on milk formula containing "raw spray dried cattle blood plasma," even though scientists have known for many years that blood can transmit mad cow type diseases.

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