Several years ago, before I had much of an interest in animal rights, I happened to attend a speech by the Humane Society of the United States’ Howard Lyman where he gave his ridiculous spiel about Mad Cow disease. I don’t remember the exact quote, but Lyman went on about how Mad Cow disease might turn into a human epidemic that would vastly outstrip HIV as an epidemic.
In fact the latest available statistics reveal what many skeptics long suspected — so far there is absolutely no evidence of any epidemic of the human analogue to Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
In fact given all the hoopla over Mad Cow disease in the media, it is suprising to see just how few people die from CJD. In Great Britain, which had a massive outbreak of mad cow in that nation’s cattle during the 1980s, an average of 12 people a year die from CJD. Even assuming that every single case of CJD was caused by eating beef (and there is yet no convincing evidence to finally establish the CJD/Mad Cow link), that would make eating beef from Great Britain far safer than walking up or down stairs or entering the bathtub. More children die in playground accidents in the United States every year than die of CJD in Great Britain.
This level of risk is what drove Oprah Winfrey to claim she’d never eat another hamburger? Talk about a tempest in a teapot.
Source:
Report: Incidence of human form of mad cow disease settles down. The Associated Press, June 16, 2000.