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by Stewart Truelsen

The U.S. food and agriculture industry likes to boast of America having the safest food supply in the world. Now a Harvard University study of BSE or mad cow disease confirms that the risk of the disease entering this country and posing a threat to human health is very low. Europe and now just recently Japan have not been so fortunate.

According to George Gray, deputy director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, "What we found is that the United States is very resistant to BSE. As far as we know, it's not here now, but if it does get in, it can't become established." Gray directed the study, which took several years to be complete.

BSE is linked to a human brain-wasting disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), which has killed around 100 people in Europe. The human disease is very rare. Since 1991, there have been 179,500 cases of BSE reported in British cattle. The number of new cases is declining in the U.K. but increasing in several European countries. The first discovery of BSE in Japan was made in a dairy cow in September.

The United States has been fortunate not to get this serious livestock disease. Our good fortune, however, has more to do with safety precautions than luck. One of the major safeguards against the disease was the 1997 prohibition on feeding ruminant-derived meat or bone meal to cattle as a protein supplement. This is the most likely way for the disease to be passed from an infected animal to a healthy one.

There are two other important safeguards in place. Import controls block the importation of meat and live animals from countries with the disease, and a surveillance program was put in place to detect BSE in our meat supply. Not a single case of BSE has been found in the United States.

However, the Harvard study didn't rest on this triple firewall being impenetrable. It assumed there might be violations of the feed ban and even concocted a "far-fetched" scenario of 500 sick animals being imported. Even then, the Harvard study found that BSE could not become a major public health or animal health threat for the United States.

Japan and its beef industry are reeling from the few cases discovered there. Prime Minister Koizumi told his country's lawmakers that poor communication and confused responses by officials have damaged public confidence in his administration, to say nothing of Japan's food supply.

What the Harvard study shows is that vigilance in the United States has paid off. Our food supply is and will remain safe even with BSE still moving about in the world. Cattle producers, veterinarians, government inspectors and everybody else responsible for ensuring the health of animals and safety of the meat supply deserve credit.