FOR years, while the world鈥檚 BSE experts warned that it was virtually impossible for cattle in the US to escape the deadly infection, US officials responded with fervent denials. So it is heartening to note that they acted decisively when the first infected creature was found. They could have dodged the issue by insisting the cow was an interloper from Canada 鈥� even though feed and animals move so freely across the border that it is effectively non-existent. Instead, the US has imposed a series of costly controls that hard-won experience in Europe has shown are needed to stop the infection spreading.
Two things are still missing. First, the US must ban the feeding of mammals to other mammals entirely. Europe found that merely stopping cattle eating rendered carcasses was not enough to stem the spread (see 鈥淯S faces up to BSE鈥�). Crucially, it must also measure the true extent of infection, which will mean testing tens of thousands more animals. This could be a hard sell because in the short term consumers may not like what the testing uncovers.
While existing tests show that BSE has not reached epidemic proportions in the US, the cow discovered over Christmas is very unlikely to be a one-off. The pool of infection may even be shrinking already because the US stopped feeding cattle to cattle in 1997. But customers at home and abroad want safe food. So long as doubt remains about the extent of infection, consumers and foreign importers will remain wary of American beef.
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