From now on

From now on
Livestock precautions must become the normal way of doing business

September 11, 2001

Panic about foot-and-mouth disease in Britain earlier this year had abated. Livestock officials seemed to have the disease under control, and government ministers were at work on a plan to prevent future outbreaks. The world’s livestock producers breathed easier.

Then an additional round of cases was reported.

Likewise, fears about mad cow disease — bovine spongiform encephalopathy — had eased as programs were implemented to prevent its spread. The European Union has lifted its ban on the imports of British beef.

Now, though, a dairy cow in Japan is suspected of being infected with BSE. That would be Asia’s first BSE case.

That means that restrictions on the import of animals and animal feed must continue. Those limits relevant not only to livestock but to pets and to people. Travelers from the United Kingdom are required to subject themselves to inspections (and confiscations), and to have their shoes cleaned with disinfectant before they can clear Customs, to prevent them from bringing livestock diseases into the United States.

Japan had banned the imports of beef, beef products and bull sperm from the European Union, and had also banned the import of human blood products from Britain, where more than 100 people have been diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal human equivalent of mad cow disease, in the past two decades.

Now, with a suspected BSE case in Japan despite those precautions, Japanese officials are asking themselves whether they’ve done enough.

"We must now ask ourselves if our previous way of thinking was wrong, if there were factors we hadn’t foreseen," said Kiyoshi Onodera, deputy division chief at the Ministry of Agriculture’s animal health division.

No cases of animal BSE or human variant CJD have turned up in the United States — but neither had BSE been seen in Japan until this cow. Initial tests were negative, but the animals brain showed signs of BSE, and further lab work is taking place. This may be a false alarm, or it may be the first of the Asian cases of BSE.

That’s why the need for vigilance will never go away: The threat can come from unexpected directions. Japan is a long way from Europe, and its connections with the United States are on the opposite coast of this country. Our imports from Asia differ substantially from — and far exceed — those from England and France.

As international trade continues to grow, testing and health precautions must keep pace. They can’t be emergency measures; they must be worldwide industry standards. That’s the way it has to be, even when the threats are out of sight and have slipped nearly out of mind.