Ten Years After Mad Cow: How Europe Solved its Food Crisis
Read our exclusive profile of David Byrne, who helped bring confidence back to 400 million European consumers after mad cow struck ten years ago
Mike Wilson
Published: Sep 1, 2009
While livestock interests debate the pros and cons of a mandatory National Animal Identification System, one high-profile health official says the decision is a no-brainer.
 "I think Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack is absolutely right when he says it would be valuable to have a mandatory animal ID scheme," says David Byrne, former European Union (EU) Commissioner of Health and Consumer Protection. "In a crisis, only traceability will give you the ability to have rapid response and removal of food from the marketplace within 24 hours."
Byrne speaks from experience. He was the key public figure in Europe when mad cow disease caused wide panic and loss of livestock markets just 10 years ago. At the same time there was an outbreak of dioxin contamination in Belgium in beef and dairy products.
"People became very scared," he recalls. "Beef consumption went to zero. Milk products, even chocolate bars, vanished from store shelves."
Belgium’s reigning leaders were thrown out of office and ministers across Europe faced severe criticism. "Nothing concentrates the mind of a politician more than the prospect of losing an election," he says.
It was Byrne who brought confidence back to Europe’s 400 million consumers. He quickly realized to deal with the crisis properly it had to be science-based and credible with the public. His team prepared a white paper on food safety in six months and amended the general food law in 18 months. He helped establish the European Food Safety Authority. At that time there was nothing like the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in Europe.
"It needed to be something that the public demanded and was free of political influence and science based," Byrne says. "The group decided that traceability and labeling was important, so it installed a rapid alert system and a mandatory recall system so the public would feel protected." Here in the U.S. those are voluntary.
Lessons learned. Did any of these laws work? "Within two years consumer confidence returned," says Byrne. "I learned a lesson throughout this. If you can establish that there is someone in charge who is responsible, that there is a plan that is working, you will increase consumer confidence."
Byrne used those lessons for following outbreaks – Foot and Mouth Disease in 2000, SARS in 2003, and bird flu in 2004. "What was shocking, especially bird flu, was the speed of how it spread around the world, facilitated by global travel," he says. "This caused enormous panic in Europe."
The crises revealed what a poor job scientists do in communicating their work to the public. "Teaching scientists how to communicate with the public is something that badly needs to be done because it is too easy for consumers to get the wrong notion, particularly if the info is being fed to them by an unscrupulous press," he says.
One of the poorest communications jobs – in Europe anyway – has been the perception of GMOs. "Consumers in Europe get terribly scared when the term GMO comes up and immediately respond, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that,'" he says. "The guys who thought up that name should go to marketing school."
Byrne adamantly champions animal Identification and traceability. And he believes it must be mandatory.
"A voluntary animal ID system will not work," he says. "We had to do a cost benefit analysis in Brussels and one of the reason we needed a mandatory system was the concerns over mad cow. Had we not put in mandatory identification we would not have been able to contain that disease. And because the disease transferred to the human variation you would have a situation where the Europeans would not have accepted anything less than a mandatory system.
"If it means entire herds have to be slaughtered because there was no traceability system, it will cost a lot more money than the cost of putting in the system in the first place. You can’t track just some animals; you have to track them all. If you don’t have those systems in place the citizens of the U.S. will react strongly."
Will there come a time when Europe restricts access to its markets from products grown in countries that don’t have traceability programs? Byrne says just because traceability programs don't exist elsewhere doesn't mean that food isn’t safe. But, "there is considerable pressure from consumers who demand these risk management systems are in place to preserve the safety of their food," he adds. "Other parts of the world that export to the EU, if they want to gain access to the EU, will have to comply with EU standards."
As a result of what Europe has gone through Byrne now believes the European Union has a far better food safety network than the United States. "You don’t have animal ID, you don’t have mandatory traceability and you don’t have mandatory recall," he says. "There are many areas where the U.S. is well behind Europe in food safety. I don’t say that to be critical. I think that’s because the consumer here was not confronted with the scares we had 10 years ago, and that’s why we put through those reforms when we did.
"The public here is now getting concerned about these issues," he concludes. "They are demanding action and the Obama government is responding,"
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