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In the Journal of Public Health Medicine, Dealler, the microbiologist, wrote:
The United States has the highest per capita beef consumption in the world.[65] and 100,000,000 cattle[8] Traditional bovine spongiform encephalopathy hit North America in 1993.[15] The first cow discovered to be infected, one of many imported from the UK before both Canada and the US banned the importation of British cattle, was found on a ranch in Alberta, Canada.[8] Of the 499[116] British cattle imported into the US before the 1989 ban, 188 of them have been melted down into lard and protein[8] (presumably for other livestock to eat) and 35 remain unaccounted for.[116] One of the imported bulls slaughtered had a "central nervous system abnormality" of which the USDA reported, "There is no definitive evidence that [the bull] either had or did not have BSE."[8] Although the importation of British beef has been banned from the US for a decade due to an unrelated disease[7], over 13 tons of meat and bone meal, which has been implicated in the birth of the British epidemic, has come into the US from England between 1982 and 1989.[2]
"BSE was 'almost certainly'[10] caused by feeding cattle ground up, dead, diseased sheep"[18] infected with an ovine spongiform encephalopathy known as scrapie.[20] In modern agribusiness, cows are no longer herbivores. "Protein concentrates" (or meat and bone meal, both euphemisms for mashed- up bits of other animals left over from the slaughterhouse) are fed to dairy cows[22] to improve milk production,[65] for example. The real problem now, though, is not that we've made cows meat eaters but that we've turned them into cannibals as well; the recycling of the remains of infected cows into cattle feed[60] has probably led to the epidemic's explosive spread.[42] An editorial in the British Medical Journal described BSE as resulting "from an accidental  experiment on the dietary transmissibility of prion disease between sheep and cows."[57] A subsequent experiment of this kind, with humans, probably occurred in England in the late 1980's when meat contaminated with BSE entered the food chain.[57] The result of this experiment is awaited "as we live through the incubation period" over the next decades.[57]
Indigenous conditions here conducive to a BSE outbreak include the presence of scrapie in 39 states.[54] The 40-year[52] USDA Scrapie Eradication Program has been deemed a "dismal failure"[63] and even implicated in the recent rise of scrapie-infected sheep.[54] Admitting defeat, the USDA scrapped the Scrapie Eradication Program 2 years ago and replaced it with an "entirely voluntary" control program.[21] The proportion of sheep to cattle in the US is dramatically smaller than in the British Isles though , which helps minimize the risk of an outbreak.[65] This is a moot point, however, if BSE is already here. Since 1947 there have been 25 outbreaks of Mink Spongiform Encephalopathy (also called TME) on US fur farms.[22] This perplexed researchers who were unable to orally infect mink with scrapie-infected sheep brains.[49] A clue came in 1985 when TME wiped out a population of minks in Wisconsin who hadn't eaten any sheep.[35] Their diet consisted almost exclusively of dairy cattle called "downers,"[54] an industry term describing a syndrome in which cows mysteriously drop down and are too sick to get up.
The possibility, then, that US dairy herds were harboring some form of BSE intrigued University of Wisconsin veterinary scientist Richard Marsh.[65] To test this, Marsh inoculated US cattle with the infected mink brains.[49] As predicted, they died.[49] And when he fed the brains of these cows to healthy
(Sorry.  Lost this bit due to computer problem.  Believe brains were fed to healthy mink who then came down with TSE.)
BSE cases have been severely underreported with as few as 60% of clinical cases reaching UK government statistics. It was reported in the Sunday Telegraph that "British officials believe that some European countries concealed or ignored evidence of 'mad cow disease' for fear of the consequences for their own farming industries."[124] The problem, as many English pundits saw it, is that the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food represents the interests of both consumers and the beef industry.[78] A similar conflict of interest exists in the United States.
The mandate of the USDA is to promote agricultural products but also to protect consumer health. In Britain, at least, it would seem that the government's attempt at protecting the beef industry by concentrating more on PR crisis management than on doing anything substantial ended up not only hurting the industry, but consumers, farmers, and the government as well.[98] With scientists like Marsh saying "The exact same thing could happen over here as happened in Britain,"[35] and with beef consumption already at a thirty-year low,[34] the USDA is justifiably worried. There was even a complaint filed with the FDA concerning a woman with CJD who had been taking a dietary supplement containing bovine tissue.[4] Like England, we have been feeding dead cows to living cows for decades.[7] In fact, here in the US a minimum of 14% of the remains of rendered cattle is fed to other cows[49] (another 50% goes on the pig and chicken menu).[2] In 1989 alone almost 800 million pounds of processed animals were fed to beef and dairy cattle.[115] Partly because of this, the USDA has conceded that "the potential risk of amplification of the BSE agent is much greater in the United States" than in Britain.[8]
To make things worse, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of animal protein in commercial dairy feed since 1987.[35,49] The recent introduction of bovine growth hormone will only increase the need for rendered animal proteins in the rations of dairy cattle--of whom we eat 2.6 billion pounds of annually[8]. According to top encephalopathy expert Joseph Gibbs, one out of every million cattle naturally develops BSE.[65] A single teaspoon of ingested high infectivity meat and bone meal is thought to be enough to cause BSE in a cow[80]. Between this and evidence that prions may be able to adapt to their hosts and become more virulent with time[22], it would seem absolutely necessary to enact the ban and stop recycling this disease through US cattle. In June 1993 the Foundation on Economic Trends, a Washington public interest group[191], petitioned the FDA to ban all feeding of ruminants (cows, sheep) to other ruminants as the European Commonwealth had done three years before[23]. The legal petition was largely ignored[115]. The next year the FDA did propose to at least stop feeding sheep offal to cows, but it was blocked by vehement protests from the rendering and may be dying from eating burgers, another public interest group, the International Center for Technology Assessment, filed a similar legal petition[115]. Leading consumer group Public Voice for Food and Health Policy has since also called for a ban[[135].
Three days after the latest petition was filed the meat industry announced a "voluntary" ban on feeding cows to cows[115]. In Britain they tried a similar voluntary ban; it failed miserably[115]. In the US the same rendering industry promised to stop feeding sheep brains to cows years ago; the FDA confirmed that this failed also[84]. On April 3, 1996 the World Health Organization called for a worldwide ban on feeding animal tissues to livestock[134] The FDA has promised to "expedite" such regulation s.[132] This is expected to mean that putting a formal ban in place will take 12 to 18 months[132]. Even with the law in Britain, though, surprise random inspections last year showed half of the English slaughterhouses in violation of the cow to cow ban regulations[91], but it is better than no law at all[105].
US officials admit that it is "very difficult" to verify compliance with the current voluntary ban[32]. In fact weeks after the "voluntary" ban was announced by the industry the feeding of ruminant protein was still continuing at rates of millions of pounds a day[115], supporting the director[104] of the Center for Media and Democracy John Stauber's contention that the oxymoronic voluntary ban was just a "worthless PR sham".[132]
A spokesperson for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), admitted 3 years ago that his industry could indeed find economically feasible alternatives to feeding rendered animal protein, but that the NCBA did not want to set a precedent of being ruled by "activists"[Food Chemical News, July 5, 1993]. Another NCBA spokesperson, Gary Weber, appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show this April[131]. Clearly alarmed and disturbed by the fact that cows in the US are forced to eat cattle remains, Oprah swore she would never eat another burger again[131]. Our government knew that the such feeding practices would be "vulnerable to media scrutiny" as portrayed in an internal PR crisis management document.[115] After Oprah tried to remind the audience that cows were supposed to be herbivores, Dr. Weber defended the practice by stating "Now keep in mind, before you--you view the ruminant animal, the cow, as simply a vegetarian--remember that they drink milk."[131]
Cattle prices plummeted after the show aired.[97] The president of the National Cattlemen's beef Association called Oprah "a cheerleader for...anti-beef propaganda."[203] "We're not going to sit back and let trash TV trash a vital industry..." said the Texas Agriculture Commissioner in a prepared statement.[97] Texas agriculture officials are planning to bring a lawsuit against the opposing guest on the show, Howard Lyman, a cattle rancher turned vegetarian, under a 1995 state law that prohibits unfounded comments about perishable food items[97]. These are among the same Texas officials that responded to the tragic news of the human deaths in Britain by staging a mocking April 4 publicity stunt cook-out.[115] On the show was Beryl Rimmer, whose 16 year  old granddaughter lay in a coma, blind and dying, one of the ten diagnosed with the new variant of CJD[131]. A doctor from the government's CJD surveillance unit reportedly told her not to make her granddaughter's plight public; she should "think of the economy and the Common Market."[68]