Mad Cow Implications

Kelly Crowe recounts how questions about a prion led to further questions about the safety of drugs,medicines and food.

Could mad cow disease be lurking in the medicine cabinet, at the cosmetics counter, even hiding in vaccines being jabbed into children’s arms?

Those frightening questions formed the basis of this story, which began with a single question.What’s a prion? It was a little over a year ago and I didn’t know anything about the sinister protein that folds abnormally, starting a chain reaction that destroys the brain of whatever mammal is unfortunate enough to be exposed. The prion is almost impossible to kill, surviving most food processes and normal sterilization procedures. It puzzles even the scientists who first discovered and then started exploring this bizarre infectious agent 20 years ago.

After an introductory primer on the prion,how it can jump the species barrier, infecting cows and then humans who eat infected beef, I started asking about other possible paths of infection. Is the danger only from eating beef or could other bovine tissue be dangerous as well?

Scientists had determined that prions were found in the highest concentrations in brain tissue and central nervous system fluids. I recalled that bovine serum and other cattle by-products were used in other manufacturing processes, so were they infectious?

No one knows for sure, I was told. It’s possible, my sources said. The experts are checking into it.

The human form of mad cow disease,known as Variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease is cruel. There is no treatment, no cure, it is always fatal and it targets young people, robbing them first of their balance, their speech, their movements, then forcing them along a tortured path to utter helplessness.

If drugs, medicines and other food pose even a remote risk of passing on this disease, isn’t that something people should know?

The senior editors at CBC National-TV News agreed that people should know about the possible risk,and so began weeks of research to answer a long list of questions. How are cosmetics and vaccines made? Where are they made? What ingredients do they contain? Where do those ingredients come from? And is anyone keeping track of all of this if it turns out that there is a problem and a recall is necessary? What about gelatin and nutritional supplements containing bovine ingredients? How worried should people be? Who can say for certain that these products are safe?

Poring over import/export documents, reading through the 16 volumes of the BSE* inquiry in Britain, searching for the handful of experts around the world who are researching the prion, it became clear that the risk from these bovine by-products had not been thoroughly evaluated, and in some cases the risk had not yet been seriously considered, in part because the science is still too young to fully answer the questions.

The British BSE Inquiry revealed that British experts wondered almost immediately whether there was a risk in medicines or cosmetics, noting that expensive creams contained ingredients like bovine placenta, possibly harvested from cows infected in the mad cow epidemic that had devastated the British beef industry. Still the British did not implement guidelines on all of this until much later. There were no import controls placed on British cosmetics or medicines.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had asked drug companies not to use bovine ingredients from countries that have mad cow disease, but later when the FDA checked for compliance with this voluntary guideline, it learned that vaccines with those ingredients were still in use. Some were also still in use in Canada.

On the tricky question of whether anyone was keeping track of the trade in animal tissue, experts agreed it would be difficult to track where materials came from and in which products they ended up.

Surrounded by bulging files stuffed with scientific papers and interview notes, it was all still research on paper and interviews over the phone.

One of the most difficult challenges in television news is to transform complicated concepts and technical details into something visual, something that moves, walks and talks. The other perennial problem is finding experts who will agree to tackle a controversial topic, not just on the record, but on TV Some of the world’s leading experts on prions and vCJD are right here in Canada.

Although they realized a story like this had the potential to frighten and alarm, two of those researchers still agreed to talk on camera about a risk that is certainly small, infinitesimal probably, but not zero. Because of the possible risk, the experts believed people should be informed.

The final hurdles? How to tell this complicated story in a clear and balanced way that would inform, but not alarm? And how to do that in less than four minutes, a generous length of time on The National, about twice as long as an average news item.

Since that story went to air, the issues around vCJD, and mad cow disease and the other variations that make up the family of brain wasting diseases known as Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs) continue to make headlines.

There have been no cases of vCJD in Canada and no domestic cases of mad cow disease in any North American cattle.

So far,more than 100 young people,mostly in Britian and France, have died from vCJD. All of those cases are believed to have been caused by eating infected beef.

*Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is the scientific name for Mad Cow Disease