An Urban's Rural View

Journalism, like any craft guild, abounds with old sayings, folk wisdom passed on from each generation of practitioners to the next. Three come immediately to mind

"If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

"If you've got a good story, write it every once in a while."

"If they put out a press release on a Friday, they may be hoping it won't get much attention."

That third adage appeared to get a hat tip from USDA last Friday when the department proposed a new rule on bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the cattle disease that's also known as BSE or mad-cow disease. Under the rule, the U.S. would comply with international standards in assessing mad-cow risks in other countries' beef.

The new rule would abandon the tougher standards USDA adopted in 1998, which among other things banned imports of boneless beef from countries with mad-cow cases. By accepting international standards based on a scientific assessment that boneless beef poses little risk, the U.S. would potentially open the U.S. market to European beef while pressuring other countries to accept American exports.

Debbie Stabenow, the Senate Agriculture Committee chair, applauded the move (http://tiny.cc/…): "This effort is crucial," she said, "to breaking down other countries' unfounded trade barriers, and re-opening trade markets that are closed to U.S. beef."

Judging by some of the other reaction, however, USDA may have been wise to pick a Friday for this proposal's unveiling.

According to the Hagstrom Report, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, Wenonah Hauter, called it "another case of trade trumping food safety."

R-CALF's Bill Bullard said, "Despite the fact that BSE persists in the European Union (EU), which reported four new BSE cases in 2013, the new USDA rule opens the door to allow U.S. meatpackers to begin supplementing tight U.S. beef supplies with beef of questionable safety from Europe."

According to Food Safety News, Consumer's Union's Michael Hansen said the proposal puts American consumers and the U.S. cattle herd at risk (http://tiny.cc/…), citing "a recent study that found roughly one in 2,000 people in the U.K. were silent carriers of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of BSE."

Do the denunciations of Hansen, Hauter and Bullard have merit? Check it out, the journalist's first adage suggests. As it happens, the Food Safety News account contains all the numbers needed to decide. (I've cited similar numbers in the past, so this post shows me in full pursuit of the second adage, as well.)

Since the 1980s, the United Kingdom has been the problem country for BSE, with 180,000 cases, and 177 UK citizens have died from vCJD. That's 177 over a couple of decades, not in a single year.

Assume the new research is right and 1/2000th, or .05%, of the people in the UK are silent carriers of vCJD. Some might argue that's not a small percentage when we're talking about the chances of dying a horrible death after a person's brain slowly wastes away.

But remember, the .05% chance of being a silent vCJD carrier was associated with 180,000 BSE cases, and there were four BSE cases in all of Europe this year. Assuming a proportional relationship, four cases would result in .000001% of a population silently carrying vCJD. Not dying of it -- silently carrying it, without exhibiting symptoms.

Even assuming a disproportional BSE-to-vCJD relationship that moved the decimal point two or three places to the right -- .0001% or .001% -- the threat to food safety in USDA's proposal seems negligible.

Maybe the department should have put out the press release on a Monday after all.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com