Washington Post Editorial: Cow Madness

NO ONE WANTS American food regulators to emulate the British government minister who, in 1990, made his daughter Cordelia eat a hamburger on television to prove that his country's mad cow epidemic was harmless to humans. Nevertheless, it is important that the detection of a single U.S. cow with the illness more correctly known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) be put into perspective. After the disease was first discovered in Britain -- and after scientists there first claimed that it could be passed from cows to beef-eating humans -- some predicted the onset of a mass epidemic, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of people contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the human version of the illness.

But despite the fact that the epidemic proved to be far more widespread among cattle than predicted, affecting some 180,000 animals, the human impact has been far more limited than expected, with about 140 deaths thought to have been related to CJD, and not all of those were for certain. The links between the human and bovine versions of the disease are not well understood: Clearly, not everyone who ate infected meat caught the disease. Some CJD victims are thought to have contracted the illness from blood transfusions, not beef.

The means by which the disease spreads among cattle are not fully understood either. Although it seems clear that the British cattle epidemic was caused by the use of feed that contained ground bone meal -- a feed that is now banned in this country -- there also seem to be naturally occurring incidences of BSE as well as of scrapie, the version that appears in sheep. Until the source of the U.S. case is known, it is important not to jump to conclusions about how widespread the disease might be.

The discovery of a single cow with the illness does not, in other words, merit a consumer boycott of beef or a mass cattle slaughter on the scale that took place in Britain. For that matter, foreign boycotts of U.S. beef, while understandable until more facts are known, probably are not warranted either. In Europe, BSE has been used as a thinly veiled excuse to provide extra protection to domestic farmers. It wouldn't be surprising to see a recurrence of that phenomenon.

But the administration also must act quickly to maintain confidence in the industry. Its announcement yesterday of a recall of 10,000 pounds of meat that passed through the slaughterhouse on the same day as the infected cow was another step in that effort. The British government's big mistake, at the time of that epidemic, was to cover up facts and hide statistics. Official secrecy led to increased anxiety. Over the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has long claimed it is prepared for an outbreak of the disease, will be on trial. The competence of U.S. inspection and detection teams will be tested, and so will the department's ability to communicate with the public. The British lesson is clear: If more facts are revealed, consumers will feel safer, and the industry is less likely to suffer permanent damage.