A real beef with our deadly livestock practices

THE LATEST mad-cow scare has died down for the moment, but it's already spurred serious discussion about U.S. food-handling policies.

While U.S. meat producers no longer feed cows to cows, there are as many troubling gaps in our livestock firewall as there were in Canada's. It's not so easy now to laugh off the question of whether bovine spongiform encephalitis may be here.

Meanwhile, SARS marches on, as a disease that's now known to have come from cramped animal markets in China, where civet cats, raccoon dogs and badgers are sold as food. In both these cases, the general population is at risk for a fatal disease because of the profit-driven practices of meat producers.

This odd connection between two headline-grabbing panics hasn't been widely noted. Instead, writers like those at the Toronto Star and Financial Times have pointedly reminded us that this is nothing compared to the 1918-19 flu pandemic, a legendary catastrophic killer of 675,000 Americans and 40 million worldwide.

But that debacle, it turns out, was also caused by close confinement of food animals. In the late 1990s, medical historians determined that the source of the so-called "Spanish flu" was a hog farm in Iowa, where pigs caught a bird flu, then passed on a mutated version (akin to "swine flu") to their handlers.

In fact, the transmission of animal diseases to humans - zoonoses, scientists call it - is more common than we realize, and often occurs because of the close confinement of food animals. It is, after all, an extreme situation, a fertile breeding ground for diseases and viruses far removed from what could occur in the wild. People processing these food animals acquire the bug and pass it on.

Tuberculosis was picked up from cows and became a scourge. Chickens in Hong Kong markets spread avian flu in 1997; it jumped the species barrier and killed six people. Now a new variant, devastating flocks from Denmark to Germany, has already killed a man. Even HIV is thought to have spread to humans principally from the eating of "bushmeat," or chimpanzees.

But it's not just the front-page afflictions that come from food animals - there are also the diseases that get into our food. More than 75 million Americans are sickened each year, and 5,000 die, from food-borne illnesses. Bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter are the overwhelming culprits. And all of them come from one place: an animal's intestines.