Snippets from the Italian Scene Dioxin and Mad Cow Disease
Moving slightly more towards Italian cuisine, a
while back I wrote about the EEU's attempts to force Italy relax its dioxin
limits to allow other EEU member states whose meats don't pass now to sell
their meats here. Well, now the EEU veterinary commission has decided that it's
no longer necessary to test any European beef for dioxin content, and all EEU
countries will have to accept whatever meat gets sent their way. Why? The EEU
commissioners say it's because only 51 of 2,219 dioxin tests on Belgian beef
revealed concentrations greater than 200 nannograms/kilo (30 of which in the
200-500 nannogram range), and they conclude that contaminations of this sort
are the unavoidable result of growing animals in an industrialized nation (the
beef was being tested because the Belgian pork industry was recently rocked by
a dioxin scandal). Other people, according to Cecilia Casamonti's article in La
Nazione, say the real reason that Belgian and by extension other European beef
is no longer being tested for dioxin is that the Belgians threatened to test
everyone else's beef. Faced with the danger of having their meats declared
illegal, the other countries (except Italy) backed down. The health of the food
industry is again more important than the health of the citizens.
The same page of the paper also has a long article on Mad Cow Disease,
which is still quite with us despite the relative silence on the part of
governments. And it seems to be spreading: a number of cases have been
registered among wild ungulates in North America, and the disease is striking
humans as well; the article mentions cases in Oklahoma and Montana. Nor is this
all. Last week's Case Record in the New England Journal of Medicine (Vol. 341,
Number 12, P. 901) discusses a 68-year-old woman who succumbed to
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. While her illness could have had nothing to do with
cattle because the disease can be familial, the Journal's decision to present
the case does make one think. How to avoid the disease? Avoid meat from animals
that have been fed feed made from other animals. Seek out organically raised
beef, poultry, pork, and so on. Or become vegetarian. Sorry to bring these
things up, but the only way to avoid them is to be as informed as possible. And
to change the situation, put pressure on your legislators to get them to do
something about it.
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