Opening
and ending paragraphs excerpted from an update from Vanishing
Borders: Protecting the Planet in the Age of
Globalization
Lead
Quote: �Though
estimates vary widely, experts project that as many as three
hundred thousand to five hundred thousand Britons could
die over the next thirty years from BSE, depending on the incubation period
and the success of past attempts to eliminate the disease from the British
herd.�
Microbial
Migrations
The
recent foot-and-mouth and mad cow scares should serve as a wake-up call to the
challenges of a borderless world.
By Hilary French and Brian Halweil, in
Orion
Magazine online, Jan. 07,
2004 @ http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-1om/MadCow.html
TWO YEARS AGO, the
world news media presented viewers with the garish spectacle of thousands of
animal carcasses going up in smoke in the British countryside in a desperate
attempt to contain the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease there. The effort
destroyed more than two million animals and brought tremendous suffering to
the country's farm families. In mid-March of that year, the press reported a
related event, in which U.S. federal agents raided a Vermont farm to seize
sheep suspected of carrying the biological agents implicated in mad cow
disease, the frightening ailment that has led to the slaughter of nearly two
hundred thousand cattle in Europe.
The
two diseases are not related in any biological sense, of course.
Foot-and-mouth is caused by a virus and is not thought to be transmissible to
humans, while mad cow is caused by a prion - a poorly understood snip of
protein - and is responsible for nearly one hundred human fatalities. The two
diseases are connected,
however, by the economic environment that allows them to
thrive.
Their spread from isolated incidents to potentially global epidemics can be
traced to trade that crisscrosses the globe, growing international migration,
and the practices of industrial agriculture.
For
most of history, natural boundaries such as mountains, deserts, and ocean
currents have served to isolate ecosystems and many of the species they
contain. But rapid growth in trade and travel in recent decades has made these
physical barricades permeable. More than five billion tons of goods were
shipped across the world's oceans and other waterways in 1999, over six times
as much as in 1955. More people are flying greater distances than ever before,
with some two million people now crossing an international border every day.
This explosion in the movement of goods and people across international
borders is fast leading to the spread of infectious disease as well as
ecological disruptions with unpredictable consequences. Nascent
efforts at international cooperation are
struggling to deal with the problems posed by today's burgeoning microbial
migrations.
Although
mad cow disease (officially known as bovine spongiform encephalitis or BSE) is
much less contagious than foot-and-mouth, it presents a far graver risk for
humans. Mad cow spreads when an animal consumes feed containing the remnants
of infected animals, and humans get it by eating infected meat. Since 1986,
the year mad cow disease was detected in the U.K., British meat has been
shipped around the world. So have British feed products, which can harbor this
poorly understood illness. Though estimates
vary widely, experts project that as many as three hundred thousand to five
hundred thousand Britons could die over the next thirty years from BSE,
depending on the incubation period and the success of past attempts to
eliminate the disease from the British
herd.
Mad
cows have already shown up in nearly a dozen European nations, Canada, and,
more recently, in the United States. The United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization has declared that all nations should consider themselves at risk,
but many seem unprepared to deal with the threat. A 2000 survey by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration found that one
in four American slaughterhouses and feed processing plants fails to take
measures
to avert mad cow disease, such as the proper labeling of feed that contains
animal parts and implementing systems to prevent commingling of cattle feed
with feed for other animals.
�WHILE
RECENT OUTBREAKS
of
livestock disease have inspired new interest in more localized agriculture,
they have at the same time dramatized the need to step
up cooperation across international borders to combat shared health and
ecological perils.
Countries have in fact been working together on these matters for decades,
harmonizing regulations for trade in animals and animal products across
borders. But an inherent weakness in the international agreements, especially
in the U.S., is the tendency for international standard-setting bodies to be
disproportionately swayed by the very industries they were created to
oversee.
It
is becoming clear that a global governance system that will be up to the task
of stemming today's rising tide of biotic mixing will be fundamentally
different in character from the post-World War II system in place today.
Instead
of standard-setting bodies dominated by industry,
there will have to be new
forums
where citizens, farmers, companies, and governments can collaborate across
political borders to reshape current agriculture and industrial practices so
that they protect the health of the planet's people and natural systems. The
silver lining to the foot-and-mouth and mad cow scares of 2001, and those of
today, may be the added political
will
they may generate for setting this transition in motion.�
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