Mad Cow Disease in Europe
The countries of Europe are at war with mad cow disease when mad cow disease break out. The europe government ordered the destruction of many and many cattle in a draconian attempt to halt the outbreak there.Just in a short time,infected cows have also been reported in herds in France, Denmark, Poland, Spain, and Italy.
It has been over 15 years since the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain led to the slaughter of fully a third of all the cows in Britain, 3.7 million animals. While warnings of the danger posed by infected cows came too late for British consumers, the other countries of Europe had not felt themselves at risk, because all of these countries had banned the import of British beef. In the 1990s, as British citizens began to die of the disease,some 750,000 infected British cows entered the human food chain as hamburgers, sausages and other meat products before the infected herds were slaughtered and the outbreak among cattle brought to an end. The rest of Europe watched horrified, glad to have dodged the bullet. Only they hadn’t.
When the BSE crisis first broke out in the UK, butchers’ shops on the continent put up signs saying, “no British beef sold here.” European governments reacted with a mixture of nationalism, extolling the virtues and safety of their own beef, and then banning British imports.
However, a general relaxation of safety-critical standards combined with the domination of farming by massive agribusiness is not a purely British affair. This is particularly so in Europe, where the Common Agricultural Policy provides billions in subsidies to protect European farming.
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