'20/20': Should Americans Fear Mad Cow?
March 3 -- Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of cows and bulls suspected of having mad cow disease have been ground up and stored in huge mounds in airplane hangars — still infected and dangerous to humans. Others are being incinerated but the ashes themselves are contaminated.
Michael Hansen, of the consumer advocacy group the Consumers Union, says the infectious strain is "virtually indestructible … it defies all of our thinking about what living things are and how they should act."
No cases of mad cow disease have been found yet in the United States, but some say America is not in the clear.
Possible Threat in United States
Professor Richard Lacey is one of the leading experts on mad cow disease and was one of the first to sound the alarm in Britain. He says America needs to be very much on the alert. "It is just possible that there is no mad cow disease in the U.S.A., but I believe it's more likely there is, but not detected yet," he says.
Lacey, a microbiologist at Leeds University in England, was perhaps the most outspoken scientist to warn British authorities that humans could contract bovine spongiform encephalopathy by eating infected beef. The warning was largely ignored and dismissed as scientifically impossible until five years ago when people began to die.
Victims of the degenerative brain disease lose their motor skills and slowly waste away. There is no vaccine and no treatment, which is why Lacey is concerned that the United States isn't doing all it could to protect itself.
The U.S. banned British beef and cattle products in 1989 and the American beef industry has taken additional precautions. The head of the National Cattleman's Beef Association, Chuck Shroeder, says that along with federal regulators, his group has actually gone through mock drills to prepare for the discovery of mad cow disease. Containment procedures have been planned and a full-scale public relations campaign is ready to go. "We're not just whistling on our way past the graveyard on this," he says.
