SHOULD WE HAVE A COW?

Tim Luckhurst writes at The New Republic (subscription required) that the government’s reaction to the mad cow (BSE) case sounds spooky:

Today, comments like those made by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman are producing an alarming feeling of déjà vu in Britain. Her insistence last week that “[p]eople should continue to feel very confident in the safety of our meat supply” was powerfully–and frighteningly–reminiscent of the tone adopted by British officials [during the outbreak of BSE in the U.K. in the late eighties].

On the other hand, Sandy Szwarc at Tech Central Station echoes Douglas Adams and says “DON’T PANIC”:

We can be assured of one thing when it comes to the safety of our food: media hysteria will be inversely proportional to actual risks….

Those fretting about mad cow probably think nothing of taking a bath (which kills 320 Americans a year), walking downstairs (which kills 1,421 Americans annually) or driving their car (which kills 42,000 of us each year). Our odds of getting vCJD from eating British beef, said the CDC, is about one in ten billion….

[T]he USDA commissioned a study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to study worst case scenarios. Their report found that should BSE be introduced in the U.S., measures taken during the last five years by the government and industry, while not foolproof, will arrest and eradicate the disease. The risk isn’t zero, said David Ropeik, director of risk communication, “but it’s as close to zero as you can get.”

The cow in question was born before these measures were taken, but the executive summary of the study cited by Sczwarc has the following info:

The import of one sick animal yields on average less than one new BSE case in 20 years and the disease and the disease is likely to be quickly eliminated from the U.S. following its introduction. Similarly, there appears to be no potential for an epidemic of BSE resulting from scrapie, chronic wasting disease, or other crossspecies transmission of similar diseases found in the U.S. Even if they existed, these hypothetical sources of BSE could give rise to only one to two cases per year.

Remember this study when lax regulation is blamed for this (posted by Daniel Drezner).

UPDATE: Scott Ratzan has more in the New York Times.