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It is supposed to be a singular virtue of Native Americans that when they killed, say, a cow, they used the entire animal. With all due respect to the thrift and industry of these good people, they've got nothing on us. We use animals right down to the last atom. (When hot dogs first hit the market, it was claimed that they used every bit of the pig; air-pockets were said to represent its squeal). What we cannot sell as meat we disguise as other products — candies, cosmetics, medicines — and what we cannot by any effort of love or art make acceptable to human sensibilities we force-feed to other animals, whether naturally carnivorous or not. As most people are probably aware, it was this habit of turning ruminant animals into cannibals that led to the ongoing epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, among Britain's cattle.

In the 1980s, the British government's “best available science” indicated that there was no risk of BSE crossing the species barrier into humans. However, as those who have pondered Shimmy-Disc Records' mail-order catalog are well aware, the best that's available from a single, self-serving source is often none too good. The first death from new variant Creudtzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) was reported in 1993. Three years and roughly a dozen fatalities later, it was officially acknowledged that nvCJD is the human form of BSE; previously, this had been nothing more than an eminently logical belief held by a majority of those scientific experts who had no affiliation with government or agribusiness. The death toll as of November 1, 2000, is about ninety, with many of the victims in their teens and twenties; assuming the continued absence of a cure for this invariably fatal disease, the final death toll in England has been estimated by various experts at anywhere between several thousand and several million people. British authorities claim that the average Briton has eaten fifty meals contaminated with BSE. Regardless, they have not yet imposed a complete ban on cannibalistic recycling of animal protein. Calves are still being raised on a diet of pooled blood, tallow, and gelatin from potentially infected animals. (If I dared to suggest that there was a flaw in capitalist thought, I would say that it confuses economies of scale with Laws of Nature. Thus it is that a European official, when asked to implement a ban on cannibalistic feeding, can state — without feeling at all ridiculous — that calves must be fed on blood or they will starve to death.)

Brandan Kearney: I mentioned something about mad cow disease to a friend, and she said "Isn't that just some sort of conspiracy theory?" I also know people who refuse to visit your site because they don't want to be upset. One might argue that the United States doesn't need to censor information, because we're prone not to believe things when we hear them, or we choose to tune them out entirely.

Dr. Thomas Pringle: Good observation. This is the golden age of denial and avoidance... something like twenty percent of adults are on Prozac, and a lot of the others wallow in TV.

Brandan Kearney: Still, you mentioned that the site got seventeen-thousand hits one week; obviously people are using it to educate themselves. Could you discuss the beneficial effects of your site - the most gratifying, concrete results you've seen?

Dr. Thomas Pringle: The way it works is indirect and ungratifying. While there have been two-hundred-thousand visits from .gov from fifty-seven countries (they need to stay informed), only a handful provide direct links to us from their own TSE pages. It is a control-of-information issue for them; governments are used to controlling and spinning information. The press goes along with this to an alarming degree. Thus the Web threw their system into chaos. People who actually knew something now owned a printing press and had free perpetual distribution.

This disease is an inherently difficult topic. All power ultimately arises from content. Governments can be driven into information oblivion. Content rules.

However, governments are very reluctant to acknowledge an information alternative to themselves, because this cedes power. And so while I was quoted in two London papers and the New York Times yesterday on different subjects, only the Times identified me. And when a long-advocated, no-brainer policy comes about, such as today's end of cannibalistic feeding in the UK, it is their own thinking.

It is all compounded in this particular disease, indeed driven, by huge economic stakes in two megabuck industries: medical (blood, surgery) and livestock. Most government agencies -- e.g., the FDA or CDC -- were captured long ago by the industries they were supposed to regulate, and were reduced to towel boys.

Scientists are very similar to government; they are not accustomed to the rapid-publication aspect of the Web. Again, it is all about control. They are up the creek. Brandan Kearney: Obviously, the British have shown the world how not to handle BSE.

Do you think the U.S. has learned anything from them?

Dr. Thomas Pringle: There are eerie parallels with mad deer and elk in the United States: denial, ignoring the best available science, being driven solely by money.

The best available scientific evidence shows that CWD is comparable to BSE as a risk to humans. If we regulate BSE, why not regulate CWD -- and scrapie for that matter -- the same way? If a visitor to England for six months cannot donate blood in the United States and Canada, a hunter in northeast Colorado or southeast Wyoming should not either. Do we encourage people to hunt for meat in a herd of cows with fifteen-percent BSE? If scrapie is just as bad as BSE, why is the meat still being sold into the human food chain?

Our TSE policy is paralyzed by economic conflicts, fears that past coverups of public health risks taken will unravel, and worries over accountability and liability. After all, the scrapie-to-human risk was established two years ago, but no policy changes were made because it would wreak havoc in the sheep industry (there is no way to certify a flock as scrapie-free). Then there is the vexatious issue of transmission of CWD to co-pastured cattle, and the problems this poses to the gigantic U.S. beef industry. In short, nothing will be done; the United States, like England, only digs itself in deeper to put off the day of reckoning.