January
7, 2005: The Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote that
“the struggle of man against power is the struggle of
memory against forgetting.” The BSE crisis (“mad
cow disease”) and the foot and mouth outbreak in the
U.K. are by no means distant history, but Andrew Rowell, the
author of Don’t Worry, It’s Safe to Eat,
wants to make sure we do not forget them. He revisits them
to suggest that the corruption and venality that marked the
British government’s response is present in the current
U.K. and U.S. inquiries into the safety of genetically modified
(GM) foods. There has been no GM crisis yet, insofar as a
documented human death toll represents a crisis, but the glossy
assurances by the British and American leadership that GM
foods are safe to eat and the intimidation and vilification
of scientists who have come public with less rosy findings
suggest that perhaps we are not on the gilded path to food
heaven that the shining full-page biotech advertisements in
our magazines purport.
Take the British government’s response to BSE (bovine
spongiform encephalopathy), which in its human form leads
to the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In the mid '80s the
first cows started dying. For the next ten years of the epidemic
the government assured the public that the beef was safe to
eat and could not be transmitted to humans, although practically
every scientist with expertise in the area believed transmission
was possible. Those scientists who came out suggesting that
BSE was transmissible to humans were at best sidelined and
dismissed as alarmist; at worst they received death threats,
were fired, or lost tenure. Rowell shows how the investigative
bodies were populist in rhetoric but in practice were committed
to the meat and dairy industries, ensuring that the consumer
they claimed to represent was kept in the dark. In one of
the inquiries the grandmother of a child who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease was told to not talk to the press because of the effect
that would have on the economy.
Rowell then examines the British government’s response
to the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth, an infectious virus
that affects cloven-hoofed animals but not humans. Over six
million animals were slaughtered (another commission found
the number closer to eleven million), often in brutal conditions.
The EU Parliamentary Inquiry into foot and mouth said the
British government’s decision to slaughter so many animals
did little or nothing to stop the disease. Vaccination could
have been used to treat the infected animals and possibly
would have ended the epidemic in weeks but a trade law gave
preference to slaughtering animals over vaccinating them.
Fred Brown, a scientist who worked for decades on foot and
mouth, called it an issue “governed not by science but
by international trade.” The mass slaughter also proved
beneficial to Snowie, a Scottish company that was paid £38.4
million to construct and manage the waste disposal site for
the animal carcasses from northern England and Scotland. Coincidentally,
one of the four brothers who run the Snowie companies donated
£5000 to the Scottish Labor party just after the height
of the foot and mouth outbreak.
The second half of the book details the findings of two scientists,
Dr. Arpad Pustzai and Dr. Ignacio Chapela, and the attacks
to which they have been subjected for making their research
public (only a crime when the findings are inconvenient).
Dr. Arpad Pustzai, a senior scientist at Rowett Research Institute,
examined rats fed with GM potatoes and non-GM potatoes and
found that the rats fed with GM potatoes had retarded organ
growth and weaker immune systems. He presented his findings
on the TV show World in Action. Soon thereafter he was removed
from GM research, his Ph.D. students were shifted to other
areas, and he was in effect fired when his contract expired
three months later. The second scientist, Dr. Ignacio Chapela,
found evidence that GM maize was somehow crossing the U.S./Mexico
border and contaminating Mexican maize. He also found that
the GM DNA was randomly fragmented in the maize, suggesting
it was unstable. A potential 'Frankenstein maize' was bad
press for biotech companies and at once Chapela was attacked
as being an anti-science activist. Nature bowed to pressure
by pro-GM groups like AgBioWorld Foundation and retracted
the paper it had published of Chapela’s findings. Despite
the fact that the Mexican government investigated Chapela’s
claims and found his findings correct, Chapela remains a scientist
non grata in the U.S.
In the Soviet Union there was loyalty to the party; now,
as Rowell notes, there is loyalty to the company. The scientist
may have replaced the priest, but the scientist is now being
cowed or wooed into becoming a glorified corporate yes-man.
It may not be as easy to demand ideological discipline in
the hard sciences, which rely on innovation and dissent to
evolve, as it is in the social sciences, which can better
cozy up to the dogma of the day, but Rowell’s book suggests
the scientific establishment is no torch-runner for truth,
at least with regard to food issues.
“The public has been betrayed over BSE,” writes
Rowell, “they have been betrayed over foot and mouth
disease, they cannot be betrayed over GM” (p. 219).
The book goes into great detail about the intricacies of the
British crises and the corrupt commissions that paraded by
with the lifespan of mayflies. The story of the BSE crisis
may read like a saga at times (no, not another investigative
body, not another acronym), but the details are important
in revealing the inner workings of contrived investigations,
political schmoozing and professional assassination, which
in the end are as universal as meat and potatoes. It is through
these details that we might sniff a hint of the forgotten
past, remember it fully, and then, seeing the past rear like
a vampire to make its old grisly rounds, stand as grim sentries
in its path.
Constantine Markides is a writer living on Monhegan Island,
Maine. He can be reached at cons76@yahoo.com.
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