The media has been giving a large amount of coverage to foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in Europe. The matter is worse because before FMD news broke, we were hearing about BSE (mad-cow disease). Having BSE and FMD in the news at the same time has led to a lot of confusion. When it seemed all would die a quiet death, a Texas Purina plant inadvertently put some meat and bone meal in one of its cattle supplements. This led many to think there was mad-cow disease in America and that all the cattle dying from FMD in Europe would cause people to die. This is total nonsense.

It is important to understand that foot-and-mouth disease and BSE are two different diseases. Foot-and-mouth disease is caused by an infective organism that can be transmitted by air, water, saliva, meat, animal-to-animal and even human-to-animal contact. Foot-and-mouth is a contagious disease to cattle but is not contagious to humans. Therefore, foot-and-mouth is an easily spread animal disease that poses no health risk to humans. On the other hand, mad-cow disease is a disease that is not highly contagious and is extremely hard to transmit. However, it can be transmitted to humans. It, therefore, is a health threat. The good thing (if there is such a thing in this situation) is that it is believed the only way mad-cow disease can be transmitted is by consuming the brains and spinal cord of an infected animal. There has never been a case of mad-cow disease in the United States, and foot-and-mouth has been eradicated since 1929 in the United States. It would be extremely hard to transmit mad-cow disease to the United States because importation of cattle from Europe is banned. However, foot-and-mouth disease could easily be transmitted intentionally or unintentionally. Some animal rights groups have admitted that it would be the best thing that could happen to our imprisoned animals that are in constant slavery. These radicals could very easily transmit the disease to the United States.

In summary: To date, there has never been a case of mad-cow disease (that humans get). The Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is being blamed on mad-cow disease. However, it is not believed to be transmitted through the meat. It is illegal to feed ruminant meat and bone meal to cattle (the only known source of transmission), so even if there was a mad-cow case in the United States it would not spread. In order to have a safety hazard, we would have to have a BSE-infected animal, and we would have to eat the brains or cut open the vertebra and eat the spinal cord. Foot-and-mouth, on the other hand, could be devastating to the cattle industry even though it poses no human health threat. Cattle catch it like we get the flu. They don't die but are not worth much after they go through it. Because it can be transmitted so easily through so many different ways, it poses a much bigger threat than mad-cow disease even though it is not contagious to humans.

The bottom line is FMD is easily transmitted and a real threat even though it is not a human threat whereas BSE is a human threat but nonexistent in the United States--and it is extremely hard to transmit even if we would have a case.

MFA uses NO meat or bone meal in our ruminant feeds. Your chance of getting mad-cow disease in your herd is negligible; however, foot-and-mouth could sweep through the United States like a hurricane.