A few months ago,  former "Roller Derby Queen" Joanie Weston died in California at age 62. What we found particularly noteworthy about Weston’s obituary (and made it worth saving), however, was the cause of her death – a rare affliction that eats holes in its victims’ brains and supposedly strikes only one in a million people each year. 

     Or might it be claiming a greater number of lives? Intriguingly enough, on the very same day that this obituary appeared, network newscasts carried the disturbing tidings that, according to researchers, many more people may actually be dying of the identical ailment, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), but having their condition misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s. 

     These two coinciding, but largely forgotten fragments of last year’s news, have taken on renewed significance as we contemplate the spectacle of talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey duking it out in a Texas courtroom with representatives of the beef industry. 

     To many Americans, the idea of Winfrey’s being sued under a state "food disparagement" law for impugning burgers on her show may seem laughable. But in reality, it’s no joke – any more than is the subject at the center of the suit, so-called "mad cow disease," otherwise known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. 

     In fact, what seems to have been largely lost in the hoopla surrounding this trial are the deadly serious implications of the on-air discussion at issue. By counseling censorship of such dialogue, the plaintiffs in this case are courting disaster. 

     The uproar in cattle country was precipitated  when one of Winfrey’s guests, rancher-turned-vegetarian- activist  Howard Lyman, warned that "we’re following exactly the same path that they followed in England," leading to the spread of mad cow disease there.  He was referring to the feeding of cattle parts back to cattle – although some experts believe the culprit was sheep protein. In either case, the mad cow disease epidemic has been linked to a cluster of "new variant" Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease cases involving far younger victims than usual. 

     That, taken with Winfrey’s alarmed reaction – she was "stopped cold" from eating another burger –and a subsequent drop in cattle futures was what spurred feedlot operator Paul Engler and a company called Cactus Feeders to hire some big legal guns to go after Winfrey and Lyman. Winfrey’s chief offense, according to their suit, was to allow "anti-meat activists to present biased, unsubstantiated and irresponsible claims against beef…placing a tremendous amount of unwarranted fear in the public." 

     Unwarranted, that is, because the defendants could offer no proof positive that such a threat existed, based on "reasonable and reliable scientific inquiry, facts or data," as required under the new Texas food libel law.

     Proof, in fact, is a commodity in short supply when it’s mad cow disease you’re talking about, as investigative journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber  point out in a recent book, Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Not only can’t it be proven that American beef eaters are at risk; top scientific experts can’t even offer definitive proof  of what most now believe causes the disease – an infectious protein dubbed a "prion."

     Scientific inquiry, particularly research conducted by the late Dr. Richard Marsh of the University of Wisconsin, has pointed to the likelihood that a strain of mad cow disease does indeed exist in this country (notwithstanding official denials) whose symptoms may be less apparent than those seen in British herds.

     Such revelations are what prompted author Richard Rhodes to contend in his book Deadly Feasts that mad cow disease is "already here, in native form, a low-level infection that industrial cannibalism could amplify to epidemic scale." 

     That’s exactly the point Lyman was attempting to get across to viewers of Winfrey’s show. And it is what a prohibition since adopted by the Food and Drug Administration on the feeding of ruminant protein back to ruminants (animals with four-chambered stomachs, such as cows and sheep) was intended to address. 

     But that ban may be far from an adequate preventive measure, as various critics, including officials of the Consumer Policy Institute of the Consumers Union , have pointed out. That’s mainly because pigs are exempted on the theory that they’re no subject to similar ailments afflicting the brain – a theory that ignores some evidence to the contrary. As a result, rendered cow protein can still be fed to pigs, which can, in turn, be fed back to cows. 

     Not that the scope of the problem (and the limitations of our current comprehension of it) can’t be understood by anyone who takes the time to learn about it.  But while chronicles by experts may go unread by a majority of Americans, millions do take the time to watch "Oprah" – which is why beef interests have gone to such pains to muzzle her and her guests. 

     Can such an effort succeed? As contrary to our First Amendment rights as it might sound, it well might, at least initially, given the fact that the Amarillo area’s economy is dependent on the cattle culture. But if exposing the risks involved in unnatural animal husbandry practices poses a threat to some people’s livelihoods, enforced ignorance of those risks could conceivably pose a threat to many more people’s lives.