I recently ran across an article online that mentioned "mad cow disease" tangentially, and it got me wondering.  Weren't we in the United States supposed to have a massive outbreak of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) by now?

The prion disease which is called Bovine Spongiform Epilepsy (BSE) in cattle and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people was a media darling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it has largely faded from view.  (Not least because a more lethal form of e. coli has developed in cattle, which presents a far more pressing medical issue. If you're a journalist looking to scare people, e. coli is where it's at these days.)

The United Kingdom first admitted that it had a BSE problem on its hands in November of 1986. It was then, and has been since, a disease which struck Britain the hardest among all countries.  vCJD has killed 164 people in Britain and 42 elsewhere, although annual cases in Britain have dropped to around five per year.

Why Britain? Two factors contributed to the high rate of BSE in Britain:
1.    Cattle feed. Soybean meal is a common cattle feed ingredient and protein supplement in other parts of the world (including the United States).  However, soybeans do not grow well in Britain, and the cost of importing soybeans for cattle feed is prohibitive.  

Lacking soybeans but needing to supplement their herds' protein intake, British ranchers turned to meat and bone meal almost exclusively.  Unfortunately, BSE is spread through bone meal.

2.    In order to keep the price of British beef competitive, the British government lowered the required temperature for rendering plants.  If you lower the temperature meat and bone meal must be rendered at, you reduce the electricity consumption of the plant, which can then offer the meat and bone meal at a lower cost.  Unfortunately these lower temperatures allowed the prions to survive the process intact.

At the time, the United States was warned that vCJD was a ticking time bomb in the population. Although American feed lots rely primarily on soybean meal as a protein supplement, plenty of meat and bone meal was being fed to cattle as well.  And rendering temperatures in the United States were similarly low.

Of particular concern is that whistleblowers have repeatedly warned the American public that regulatory oversight is sadly lacking in this respect.  In 2007 Westland/Hallmark, a national beef distributor, was found to be using downer cows. The United States has also cut back on the number of cows inspected for BSE.  In fact, the regulatory situation is so dire for American beef that 65 nations have instituted a total or partial ban on the import of United States beef.  Furthermore, BSE has been identified in our agricultural system: three cows have been positively identified as suffering from BSE.

All of which raises the question, where is the vCJD epidemic that we were promised? The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) continues to track vCJD cases, but only three cases have been reported in America in the last 20 years.  And according to the CDC there is "strong evidence" that all three of the cases had been exposed to BSE-contaminated meat in other countries.