France Set to Overtake Britain in New Mad Cow Cases

[franklanguage]

I just read this article on VegSource about how - to the embarrassment of the French, who are th only EU nation to ban the importing of British beef - France's load of new cases of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is growing so fast, they may well overtake Britain's record.

The link is FRANCE SET TO OVERTAKE BRITAIN IN NEW BSE MAD COW CASES!!! . Does anyone have any thoughts about this? I know a lot of beef eaters who are throwing caution to the wind (at dinner one night, a man at our table said, "I'll have the prions..." referring to the steak tartare) but all kidding aside, BSE is a horrible way to die. Could it be that in France they actually have similar hygiene problems to those of other countries in the care of their livestock? Perish the thought!

[macrosan]

You're seriously confused, Frank.

You said "(France) may well overtake Britain's record" but you've misread the headline which says "FRANCE SET TO OVERTAKE BRITAIN IN NEW BSE MAD COW CASES". See that word "NEW" Frank? What this means is that the number of new cases being reported weekly in France will soon be higher than the number of new cases being reported weekly in Britain. Got the idea, Frank?

The chances of France EVER overtaking Britain on a cumulative basis is miniscule.

You also said "Could it be that in France they actually have similar hygiene problems to those of other countries in the care of their livestock?". Frank, maybe nobody explained this to you, but BSE is not caused by bad hygiene. It is caused by feeding livestock with certain meat products. And what do you mean by "other countries" ? Are you suggesting that other countries than Britain (which counts as one country in my mathematical convention) have had a significant BSE problem ? Do you know something that none of us knows ?

Yet another quote out of the franklanguage compendium "BSE is a horrible way to die." Well, ummm, no Frank, unless you're sympathising with cows, that is. People don't die of BSE, they die of New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease which is contracted primarily as a result of eating meat infected with BSE. The total number of deaths worldwide from nvCJD is about 120 in the 5 years since the disease was documented, which is less people than die from being stung by bees.

As a matter of interest, the ORIGINAL CJD has been known about for 80 years, and in the last 20 years nearly 5,000 people in the USA died of it. The cause of CJD is largely unknown.

Frank, if you're going to post scaremongering stories, at least try to get your facts straight.

[Bux]

scaremongering stories

I have to agree with marcosan that the original story was little more than scaremongering and to the extent that it resulted in a thread here with this title, it was successful. Marcosan is correct in pointing out the difference between animals discovered with BSE and humans being infected with anything that might be connected with these cows.  

I have a good deal of respect for vegetarians, although vegetarianism goes against my basic instincts. I am dismayed however and lose respect for the movement when I read pieces that are designed only to inflame the already converted. The Veg Source post by Steve Connor, Science Editor, is bad journalism and bad science. One cannot legitimately make projections for coming years based on a short history, nor can one compare the results of finding any condition after it is expected to be found with finding it before anyone was looking. Even the report notes that there are alternate hypotheses to explain the numbers which make the headline a bit unreliable. The thrust of the original story on which Connor bases his post was more about the British faulting France for it's ban on UK beef and looking to defend it's own position.

Marcosan was also quite correct in noting that hygiene is neither an issue in the Veg Source post, nor relevant to the spread of BSE among animals. To the best of my knowledge, very recent vCJD in humans that can conceivably be traced to the food chain is almost zero and there are those who are still not convinced about the connection. Marcosan offers some perspectives of his own on disease, but I'd have to note that more people died showing up early for work than may have died from anything that may be related to BSE. That however is not the point of my complaint about this post and the one in Veg Source. If we assume that BSE is the only threat to a long and healthy life, the article is still a scare mongering report painfully short on information and facts. Even so, the numbers in the post, do not support the contention of the author, in my opinion.

[Bux]

Perhaps this quote from the page in question may be short enough to comply with copyright law and offer some illumination.

"The scale of the French epidemic, now involving a total of

about 500 animals, is still dwarfed by the overall British

epidemic, which has seen more than a million infected cattle.

But the fact that numbers have risen so fast in France will be

exploited by British farmers who want the export ban lifted."

[cabrales]

I wonder whether Mad Cow Disease in France has affected the availability in restaurants of parts of the cow that are deemed most likely to cause problems (e.g., brain material; spinal cord area -- although I query how the latter would be served).  

Also, while I have not ordered beef in Europe (except for Charolaise and on two or three other occasions), beef products are used sufficiently in stock for there potentially to be some amount of risk (albeit an extremely limited amount of risk that does not bother me) for all diners eating at restaurants.

On risk, I have on occasion thought fleetingly about: (1) the risk of severe illness from eating oysters, which I relish, and (2)  the risks some Japanese take in eating the fish that, if prepared inappropriately, can offer potent poisons.

[Bux]

There's probably good reason to suspect most of the food we eat is poisoning us. It's as true for plants and fish as mammals. I suppose many Americans in France, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, may be a bit self conscious about eating beef. On the one hand it's easy enough to find other foods, especially red meats if that's what you crave in France. Certainly game is plentiful during the winter and lamb all year round. I always keep an eye out for pigeon and duck. The first time I ordered in France after the Mad Cow situation, BSE entered my mind and I steered away from beef. Then I considered that the aspic in the cold lobster dish was certainly made from veal bones and feet, but figured the odds were less. You just play the odds. Or as I said to my wife when she ordered the langoustines with sweetbreads, "You said you weren't going to order veal on this trip." She replied that she ordered the langoustines. ;) This akin to the fact that dessert only has calories for the person that ordered it. Dieters may feel free to nibble away at someone else's dessert.

Cabrales, I have heard that some beef parts were taken out of the food supply, at least for a while. I don't know about the current situation. As far as I know, there have been no new reports of nvCJD recently. Have I just been in the dark?

Assuming the worst possibility that eating meat from BSE infected animals may cause nvCJD, the odds still seem mighty low. I wish I could remember the article which detailed a number of rare diseases most of us have never heard of, and then went on to tell how much more common all of them are than CJD. It's a scary world out there and mad cows are the least of it, but of course we should all take the precautions that seem reasonable to us and keep as well informed as possible.

[Fat Guy]

Here's an article on Mad-Cow Disease that I wrote last year:

"Mad Cows and Englishmen"

(Please forgive some of the misprints that seem to have arisen as this archived story from Commentary got transferred to a different database.)

[Bux]

To get back to the original post on this, it seems the British still report more new cases of BSE than do the French. The problem seems to have peaked in England where it was first discovered.

I've spent some time reading about BSE (the cattle disease) and its connection to nvCJD (a human disease). Many are not convinced there is a direct connection. Steve Shaw published an article highly critical of such conjecture. I am not a scientist and not able to follow much of the highly technical writing on the subject, but I am more inclined to believe there is a direct connection between eating meat from mad cows. However, I am still critical of much of the media. It's been hard to get good information and I've spent a fair time on the web some time back reading all I could find. There were many threads about mad cow disease on the rec.travel.europe usenet newsgroup. Most of the threads contributed nothing to the store of knowledge on the subject, but a few were informative and a few led to hard scientific pages. I'm sorry I no longer have the URLs for those.

Mad cow disease appears on it's own in nature, but the incidence is increased by feeding bone meal to live cows. The spread from cow to cow is the fault of humans. In nature, cows are not cannibals. We have made them such by mixing bone meal in their food. As long as bone meal is used in the feed, the disease will not be controlled. The problem is not only in stopping the production of bone meal laced feed, but in destroying existing supplies. It's no secret that plenty of the feed was shipped out of England and that some of it is in the US. Many feel it's only a matter of time before the disease appears here in cows. There appears to be universal agreement that the disease is spread among animals this way. The only questiion is whether the form of the disease found in humans is related to eating beef from mad cows. A variant is already rampant among game in the far west and another variant has been found in sheep here in the northeast. I believe in sheep, the disease is called "scrapies." This is a serious matter and not one that should be dismissed lightly.

[franklanguage]

Here is a link I just found to a site which is reporting on the current state of Mad Cow and nvCJD in the food supply; there are areas both for the States and for Europe. It was started in response to the feeling that Creuzfeldt/Jakob disease is underreported in the U.S. (and possibly the world at large):

Mad Cow Disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, Chronic wasting disease)

[Bux]

One of the more interesting things I read in an article linked to on the site is that a rather small percentage of potentially related cases in this country are even checked to see if they are related to Mad Cow disease. Thus reports that it's not appeared here may be reports that we're not looking all that closely. In the article, in the The Wall Street Journal on November 28, 2001, Steve Stecklow says "a close examination of America's mad-cow safety net shows some possible flaws" and goes on to make that seem like an understatement. On the other hand, I've not always found the WSJ to be accurate. I may be overly sensitive to being quoted way out of context by one of their feature writers on the health hazards of raw fish which I routinely eat.

Nevertheless there's lots here for those interested in research on the subject. You have to take both sides with a grain of salt, but the scare mongers may be no less credible than the government experts who say there's no reason to worry.

Anyone who reads the New York Times regularly should already be aware of flaws in the US efforts to absolutely prevent the problem in the US.

[franklanguage]

One very disturbing aspect of the whole cow thing is the incidence of "downer" cows in the states. Although the "experts" (and I use that term loosely) insist there have been no mad cows found in the United States, it is quite possible that we're not looking hard enough.

"A downer cow -- one of nearly 200,000 each year the U.S. won't test"

There is even a link to a petition that calls for increased testing of cows in the United States. According to the article the link goes to, countries like Japan and Ireland "actually care about the welfare of their citizens" and are testing every cow that goes to market. Why aren't we - could it be we're afraid of what we'd find?

[i realize this doesn't relate directly to France, and perhaps I should move it and start another thread.]

[Bux]

It doesn't directly relate to France at this point, except that if you look at the precautions the two countries are taking rather than the cases discovered in the past, it may make French beef more appealing than American--or should I say American beef less appealing then French. This came up in another board on eGullet.com and I posted the link in your Jan. 12 message in a thread on sweetbreads.