 | | | | by Rob Lyons |
We are used to health panics in the UK, the most famous being the ongoing mad cow panic over whether BSE in beef can cause CJD in people. Now the Japanese are getting in on the act - and their panic looks even more irrational than ours.
| In September 2001, the Japanese government confirmed that a cow in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, had BSE - and since then two more BSE-diseased animals have been discovered in different parts of the country. Then in October 2001, a Tokyo teenager was reported to be Japan's first victim of variant-CJD (1).
| Beef sales plummeted as a result. Japanese government figures suggest that sales fell by between 40 and 70 percent since the first BSE case was announced (2). A poll for the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper suggested that 68 percent of Japanese people have stopped eating beef, even though 70 percent of beef eaten in Japan is imported (3). Now the Chinese and Australian governments have banned imports of beef from Japan.
| As you might expect, there have been calls for government action to tackle the 'outbreak' at the same time as experts are pinning the blame on ministers for allowing British bone-and-meal feeds into the country. In 1996, 'administrative guidance' was published which suggested such feeds should be avoided, but no ban was introduced (4). Commentators are now speaking favourably of Germany's reaction to the discovery of BSE, which resulted in mass slaughter of animals and the resignation of two ministers (5).
| | | The panic that put the terror in beef teriyaki has little to do with disease |
| But Japan's panic has run way ahead of the actual science. Agriculture ministry experts have been unable to trace the source of the outbreak, and there are too few cases to make a proper sample. The one reported case of vCJD appears to have only some of the symptoms associated with the disease. And as we have pointed out before on spiked, a causal link between BSE and vCJD has not yet been proven - even in the UK, where there have been thousands of BSE cases and over 100 cases of vCJD. In Japan, with just three cases of BSE and no cases of vCJD confirmed, the reaction against beef is all the more irrational.
| After all, in a country of 126million people, what are the chances of eating meat from one of three sick cows - never mind that there is no evidence that eating that meat would give you vCJD?
| It seems strange that even a technologically advanced country like Japan seems to have developed the fear of modern living exhibited in the UK. The BSE panic that put the terror in the beef teriyaki seems to have less to do with disease than with a more general distrust of modern life and politicians. The inability of politicians to calm public nerves led one farmer in Kumamoto to release six cows in a local park, spray-painted with slogans including 'It's safe', 'No BSE' and 'Koizumi Help' (6).
| As has been the pattern in Europe, the more governments react to health scares, the more the panic seems to spread.
Read on:
spiked-issue: Mad cow panic
spiked-issue: After 11 September
(1)Sakaguchi plays down new variant CJD scare, Japan Times, 19 October 2001
(2) Japan: Convenience store sales down 2.4% in October, Siam Future Development Co., 20 November 2001
(3) Nation urged to take measures to deal with mad cow disease, Japan Times
(4) Mad cow outbreak 100 days old, no solution in sight, Japan Today, 11 January 2002
(5) Nation urged to take measures to deal with mad cow disease, Japan Times Online, 28 December 2001
(6) Protest uses cows to air beef with state, Japan Times, 8 January 2002
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