Arnaud’s doctors never guessed the diagnosis could be true–not even after they hospitalized him a year ago for a battery of medical tests. It was his mother who suggested checking for signs of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of mad cow. The doctors ordered a tonsil biopsy, one of the standard tests these days for CJD. The results confirmed his mother’s worst fears: Arnaud was suffering from the mysterious, incurable brain illness that has frightened Europe and baffled medical researchers for the past 15 years (following story). By last May the boy had lost the ability to walk and talk. After surviving a brief coma last summer, he now drifts in and out of consciousness, utterly unresponsive. His parents have brought him home to die, but the Arnaud they knew has been gone a long time. “I don’t even remember what he was like,” Dominique told NEWSWEEK last week.
The story gives the chills to Europeans, nearly overwhelmed by the latest wave of mad-cow fears. On the heels of a recent British government report on what went wrong during that country’s mad-cow epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, the European Union last week ordered a fresh round of tests for the disease in beef and dairy herds across the Continent in the coming year. In Britain, where CJD has killed more than 70 people so far, scientists have been warning that European governments have left the door open to another devastating outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its slow but lethal human variant. No sooner had the EU decision been announced than cases of the cattle disease were reported in Germany and Spain, countries considered safe until now.
Meanwhile, the toll keeps rising in France, where nearly 200 animal cases had been confirmed by last weekend (all of them dairy cattle), and doctors at a Paris hospital were examining a woman they worried might be the country’s fourth human victim. As neighboring countries frantically slapped bans on French beef, demand for the meat plunged at supermarkets and butcher shops across the continent, and farmers braced themselves for profitless times ahead.
The trail keeps returning to Britain, where the illness first surfaced in 1985. Most–but not all–medical researchers believe the disease was spread by commercial livestock feeds containing the ground-up remains of BSE-infected cows and other slaughterhouse refuse. For decades, beef and dairy farmers have routinely given their animals grain pellets laced with meat and bone meal (MBM). The British government banned the feeding of MBM to cattle in 1988. Rather than give up a lucrative product, however, the grain companies began marketing it to farmers on the Continent. The cheap feed supplement was supposed to be fed to pigs and chickens in France, not cattle, but farm experts say there were “accidents” practically every day. Only two weeks ago the prime minister, Lionel Jospin, finally issued an absolute ban on MBMs. Germany followed suit last week.
What’s worse is that no one knows how much irreparable harm has already been done. Doctors say the human form of the disease can incubate for a decade or more before symptoms appear. It’s impossible to say how long ago Arnaud Eboli contracted the disease, or whether he caught it by eating hamburger. The mystery is just as deep for Laurence Duhamel, France’s second-known human victim. She died last February at 36 after more than a year of crippling depression and paranoid delusions. A year ago her doctors finally confirmed that she was suffering from CJD. “As soon as I found out,” says her brother, Jean, “I asked who had poisoned her.”
Duhamel and the Eboli family think they know. Convinced that their own goverment bears ultimate responsibility, they have filed suit. Their lawyer, Francois Honnorat, has also represented thousands of French hemophiliacs in an ongoing action against the government for allowing them to be infected with AIDS via untested blood supplies. Honnorat claims he has documents proving the French government knew all about the risks of MBM feed–and chose to ignore the danger. Maybe so, but can he prove his clients’ problems were caused by contaminated feed, and not by British beef that was shipped to France before the world’s first-known human case was diagnosed five years ago, setting off the initial mad-cow panic?
There are worse ills than panic. The British government’s BSE Inquiry report lists 13 “key conclusions,” including this: “The Government was preoccupied with preventing an alarmist over-reaction to BSE because it believed that the risk [to humans] was remote. It is now clear that this campaign of reassurance was a mistake.” One of the disaster’s most memorable moments was the unintended comedy of John Gummer, the agriculture minister, in 1990, trying desperately and failing miserably to persuade his 4-year-old daughter to eat a hamburger on national TV to prove it was safe. In the years since then the taxpayers have spent more than £4 billion trying to eradicate mad-cow disease, killing 177,000 infected animals and incinerating 3.7 million carcasses of cattle thought to be potentially at risk for the disease. And still the number of known human victims keeps rising.
But efforts to wipe out BSE can also be cruel. Jean-Benoit Rault, 40, a dairyman in Normandy, had to put down his entire herd of 75 milk cows, heifers and calves after Idole, a 7-year-old milker born on the farm, tested positive for BSE in late June. French law requires that if one animal in a herd tests positive for mad cow, all animals that have been in contact with it must be slaughtered and burned. “We talked to the French Agriculture Ministry and other groups,” Rault says. “Everyone told us the likelihood of contamination was less than 1 percent. My whole herd was slaughtered just to ease consumer fears.” After Idole’s herdmates were killed, the government carefully checked their brain tissues for evidence of BSE. Not one tested positive. “It was a total waste,” Rault complains.
He managed to keep his 46-hectare farm, not far from Mont Saint-Michel. The government’s reimbursement of 857,000 francs enabled Rault to buy 38 new milkers. But cows–and dairymen–hate sudden changes. The new animals still haven’t adjusted to their surroundings, and Rault is sure their milk production is off as a result. “We penalize our cattle breeders because our BSE safety measures in France are so rigorous,” he says. “But how can the cattle breeders survive when the public believes that all our cattle are mad, and the government and media confirm that mistake?”
It’s hard to blame people for being scared, though. Almost every day there’s another official warning. Just before Jospin’s MBM announcement, a slaughterhouse in Normandy was reported to have distributed meat from 12 cattle that had been in contact with another animal later diagnosed with BSE. One of the country’s largest supermarket chains, Carrefours, bought meat from the slaughterhouse and sold it before the safety lapse was discovered. Was the meat contaminated? Probably not. Could anyone be 100 percent certain it was safe? Hardly.
Risk is everywhere now. Spain had never reported a case of BSE until last week, when tests identified two 5-year-old cows, one suspected of carrying the disease and the other confirmed as having it, in Galicia. The northwestern autonomous region’s verdant hills are among Europe’s most pristine landscapes, a place where some villages got their first telephone service scarcely five years ago. Galicia’s traditional family farmers may be the very antithesis of modern agribusinessmen, but the disease doesn’t discriminate. The government insisted Spanish beef remained completely safe despite the two animals in Galicia. Even so, butchers in Madrid said their sales had dropped by 80 percent.
Millions of Europeans are giving up beef entirely. Even then, you can’t avoid all CJD worries, of course. Never mind the steak tartare you ate five years ago in Marseilles–or that cheeseburger you ingested on a whim in Cheddar. Some scientists are even worried about Norwegian fish farmers feeding British MBM pellets to their schools of salmon. Whether fish can transmit the infection is just one more question researchers will eventually need to answer.
At present most people’s anxieties remain focused on mad cow, not mad coho. Italian cattle raisers wasted no time setting up private roadblocks at the border to keep French beef out, and the checkpoints stayed in place even after the Italian government officially banned it. Italian government officials insisted the locally grown product was perfectly safe. “We have a system of total prevention,” declared the health minister, Umberto Veronesi. Even so, the market for beef crashed in Italy, while sales of horse meat soared.
The European Union is still trying to make up its mind whether national bans on French beef conform to the EU’s basic principles–and if not, what to do about that. Such doubts haven’t kept about half the EU’s member states (including Spain) and several aspiring members from unilaterally imposing such restrictions. Many European consumers and cattle growers are too nervous about BSE to care what Brussels thinks.
Some countries can actually expect an eventual payoff from Europe’s crisis. In the short term, Brazilian agriculture officials say, BSE fears are likely to depress the global beef market. But they go on to predict that their country’s beef exports will rise to 770 metric tons next year–more than double the figure for 1998. The agronomists insist that MBM feed has never been commonly used in Brazil or Argentina–a big plus for beef lovers afraid of BSE. It may cost a little extra. But imagine what Arnaud Eboli’s parents would pay to have their son back the way he used to be, kicking air and gobbling fast-food hamburgers.
