January 6, 2004
A Little More Technology, Please... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
There's no doubt that the recent discovery of mad cow disease in the American food supply has been a real eye opener.
For starters, who knew the extent to which a single animal is parted out, not to mention how far those parts actually travel? How many of us really understood about "downers", or the fact that so few of the animals were tested? And who would have guessed that even those meager test results come in after the meat has already reached our table and we've consumed it? The fact that these abnormal proteins, called prions ("pree-ons"), aren't destroyed by cooking underlines just how serious a problem this might be.
For the last decade we've been told that American beef is free of mad cow disease, and why would we question it? But now we learn that Europe is far more stringent in testing and Japan actually checks every single animal. And they all complete these tests before the meat enters the food supply.
Whatever crowd decided that total testing wasn't worth increasing the price of beef by several cents per pound seriously underestimated the values of the American consumer.
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As it happens, a totally reliable answer hasn't actually presented itself. According to our own Centers for Disease Control, "The nature of the transmissible agent is unknown. Currently, the most accepted theory is that the agent is ... prion protein." And what does that mean? It means we think we know, but we're not exactly sure.
Dr. Stanley Prusiner, the University of California at San Francisco researcher who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for being the first to describe these prion proteins, agrees. He'll tell anybody who will listen that we don't know a heck of a lot about prions, or how they move through the bodies of animals, which brings the current testing methodologies and our own food safety assumptions into question: What we don't know, we can't test for. What we don't see, we can't avoid.
Dr. Prusiner has been extremely vocal about pursuing new scientific research, but so far, no one's funding. And besides that, there's another problem - this one more human than scientific.
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It turns out that the USDA and the State of California Department of Health Services have an agreement which prevents the state from telling the public which counties have actually received tainted meat. In turn, the state of California has asked the counties to avoid publicly identifying themselves or the companies and institutions that have received the problem meat.
This information-quashing deal was brokered in the summer of 2002 to induce voluntary cooperation with the meat distributors, when an E. coli outbreak caused the recall of 19 million pounds of beef. I can't be the only person who understands that pandering to bad behavior is always bad policy - especially for government agencies whose charter it is to protect the public good.
Needless to day, technology can stop this questionable deal-making in its tracks: We need to test all the cattle. We need to test them before they enter the food supply. We need to do more scientific research. We need to build better testing technologies. And we need to insist on full disclosure of all information.
And there's a very good reason for it - this is both the mission and the responsibility of a modern technological society.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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