Ronald McDonald sat in his Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters in a mental fog. He could barely move, save for a few spastic convulsions. His brain was wasted. The outsize clown and burger peddler was suffering from what flummoxed health experts like to call “Alzheimer’s on fast forward.” In fact, he was North America’s first diagnosed case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
When, earlier this month, McDonald’s announced an earnings shortfall, it became clear that the disease which has plagued the global economy for the past decade had finally hit Americans. It had hamburgled them where it hurts most: in their pocketbooks.
“Effectively, most of the European market for beef is gone,” says Harvard University professor James Watson, who studies food and culture and edited a book about McDonald’s international expansion efforts.
Mad cow disease and, more recently, the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease across Europe have exacted a staggering toll on McDonald’s bottom line, cutting into profits and also paring off billions and billions of dollars from the global giant’s stock value.
Not a single case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of BSE (also called mad cow disease) has been linked to the Big Mac. But the recent beef scares have apparently been enough to send Germans and French fleeing to their nearest kebab stands. European sales at McDonald’s in January and February fell by 10 percent, no small amount considering the company derives as much as 36 percent of its overall operating income from the continent. The news was greeted with tears on Wall Street, and the stock quickly fell to its lowest in three years — at $27.55 a share, the price was almost half of its all-time peak of $50 in 1999.
In a statement announcing the hit mad cow had taken on the company, McDonald’s CEO Jack Greenberg wrote March 14, “The effect of consumer concerns regarding the European beef supply has persisted longer than we expected, despite the fact that McDonald’s overall safety and quality standards lead the industry and provide the benchmark for safe food around the world.”
Those venerated arches have been buckling under the intense pressure of a collapsing beef market in Europe. All those nightly newscasts of massive cattle burnings didn’t do much to drive hamburger sales. In France alone, beef sales have plummeted 40 percent since BSE hit the mainland of the continent. The European Union’s commissioner for agriculture, Franz Fischler, recently told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “BSE is the biggest crisis that European farming has ever had to face. It drastically changed the prospects for the farming market that we envisioned in 1999.” As one of Europe’s largest beef resellers, McDonald’s has been hit in its core there. It’s also forcing a company that has been associated with burgers and fries since the opening of its first store in 1955 in Des Plaines, Ill., to reckon with a new reality: The future of its staple product, the hamburger, is increasingly imperiled.
For a while now, McDonald’s has been marketing nonbeef products like Chicken McNuggets and McRib sandwiches. It has also marketed vegetarian products, like Veggie Macs, in New York and Amsterdam. In London, it sells the McChicken Korma Naan, a nod to the local Indian and Pakistani populations. In India, where cows are sacred and beef eating is taboo among some groups, the lamb Maharaja Mac tempts local appetites. Now the beef scare is forcing McDonald’s to fast-track the mainstreaming of these products — its future may depend on it.
Visit the Golden Arches on Paris’ Champs-Elysées or in Berlin’s sprawling new Potsdamer Platz technopolis and you’ll see that changes in the product lineup are already being made. Rather than focusing on the fare that’s kept its profits humming for half a century, the company is conspicuously downplaying beef in special offers, extra-value meals and restaurant menu boards. Instead, the company is promoting its chicken and pork products, like the McRib and the newly introduced McToast, a sort of down-market ham and cheese croque-monsieur for the on-the-go set.
To gauge the magnitude of this burger culture shift, just try to imagine John Travolta’s Vincent Vega character in “Pulp Fiction,” who offers a sentimental tribute to the Hamburger Royal (they don’t have Quarter Pounders in Europe; they use the metric system, after all) in the film, reminiscing fondly about a ham sandwich. While analysts see this latest beef crisis as only a passing problem, others, especially academics and journalists studying fast food, suggest that our hallowed symbol of the square American meal is on its way to the circular file.
Already, increased awareness of the beef scare in the U.S. has forced McDonald’s to change some of its practices. Days after the company announced its earnings shortfall, it also tried to assuage public fears about BSE or foot-and-mouth infecting the livestock it uses to make Big Macs here in the States. The company announced on March 14 that it would begin carefully auditing beef from all of its suppliers — from the sprawling feedlots and the abattoirs all the way to the fryer at your local McDonald’s — to ensure the beef came only from suppliers that adhere to federal regulations banning the use of ruminant meat or bone meal in livestock feed. That material can include the brain and spinal cord matter, which is believed to harbor BSE. Feeding such matter back to livestock is believed to have caused the spread of mad cow disease in Europe.
McDonald’s gave its suppliers a deadline of April 1 to provide documentation that their cattle hadn’t been fed with meat and bone meal from cattle or other ruminants. The Food and Drug Administration banned the use of mammal proteins in livestock feed in 1997, but those standards have been ignored by many cattle ranchers.
The day the steps were announced, McDonald’s spokesman Walt Riker told the Wall Street Journal, “We could do better from a prevention standpoint. Because of the [mad cow] issue in Europe, we thought it was absolutely prudent and common sense to say, ‘Let’s look to see if anything needs to be tightened up.’”
The company also said it would create a blue-ribbon committee of doctors, scientists and other experts to find ways to eliminate the risk of mad cow disease in McDonald’s products.
Time after time, U.S. officials have stated that regulations here will prevent the introduction of mad cow disease in the U.S., only to be discredited by embarrassing revelations, the latest of which was news in January that feed manufacturer Purina had shipped the wrong meal to a Texas ranch. As a result 1,222 cattle were fed banned meat and bone meal. The cattle were quarantined and ultimately tested negative for BSE. But the embarrassment only got worse when an investigation by the FDA showed widespread noncompliance with the regulation.
The scary news led to a crackdown and tougher enforcement — by both government regulators and companies like McDonald’s, which stand to lose the most if foot-and-mouth or BSE is ever discovered in the United States. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, McDonald’s convened a meeting on Dec. 18, over a month before the Texas incident, to determine whether its suppliers were adhering to federal standards.
In some respects, these scares have been overly hyped. The United States moved very early to keep BSE from coming to these shores. It banned the import of beef and other ruminants from the United Kingdom in 1989; it banned imports from continental Europe in 1997, following outbreaks there.
But the new auditing procedures, no doubt, were also influenced by the frighteningly close call McDonald’s had in Italy earlier this year. In January, cows were discovered at the Italian meat processor Cremonini that were suspected of being infected with BSE. The announcement shook McDonald’s foundations, since Cremonini is the company’s exclusive supplier of hamburger patties in Italy. The company quickly announced that there were no cattle earmarked for Big Macs at the plant where the suspected cases were found. But the fact that the scare hit close to home demonstrated how important it is for companies like McDonald’s to be able to determine the provenance of the food products they sell.
“The problem has always been with ground beef,” says journalist Nicols Fox, author of “Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.” “One has the potential of including those infectious bits of the cow, and that’s why McDonald’s has taken this proactive stance, as you noticed last week.”
“How do you know what’s in a hamburger?” she asks. “There’s something called ‘mechanically recovered meat’ and that’s a serious, serious problem. It can have spinal cord in it, and that’s the infectious part with regard to mad cow disease. People are going to look a little more suspiciously at hamburger, at least in Europe. I don’t think most Americans have any idea about recovered meat,” she says.
If McDonald’s rapid response was a public relations move, it was also proof of lessons learned from previous health crises, such as the E. coli outbreak of 1982, when tainted beef at McDonald’s restaurants caused outbreaks of the illness in Oregon and Michigan. According to author Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” McDonald’s kept mum about its role in the outbreak at the time. He notes that the closest the company came to acknowledging its role was the admission by a company spokesman of “the possibility of a statistical association between a small number of diarrhea cases in two small towns and our restaurants.”
But as author Fox documented in her book “Spoiled,” the company was the culprit in the outbreak. Years on, after the 1993 outbreak of E. coli at Jack in the Box restaurants in Seattle, the cumulative number of deaths in the U.S. relating to that beef-borne disease has been greater than the number of deaths attributed to mad cow disease in Europe. And yet, our confidence in beef here is nowhere near as shaken.
Fox says the E. coli outbreak did little to hurt the public perception of McDonald’s. “Almost no one knows McDonald’s was associated with E. coli. There were news reports in 1982 that lasted a day.” But it did serve as a wake-up call, and Fox says the company moved quietly and quickly to eliminate the problem. “They were among the first to make certain that their meat met a bacterial standard. They instituted changes in the way they cooked beef that were extremely helpful in making certain that they didn’t have problems with undercooked burgers. Other companies didn’t follow suit fast enough,” she says, pointing to the Jack in the Box catastrophe.
Fox believes fast-food hamburger became a significantly safer product as a result of the scares. “I always tell people that hamburgers from the fast-food places are probably safer than ones you make at home — in terms of bacteria.”
The proactive stateside move, made despite the fact that there has been no documented case of mad cow disease in the U.S., is indicative of a recent trend at McDonald’s, which has changed its product and marketing practices in American and other markets as a result of health concerns and environmental controversies in Europe. The company’s move to ban the purchase of genetically modified foods, like Monsanto New Leaf potatoes, for its french fries came as a result of fears that massive consumer protests in Europe, where the debate over biotechnology burns much hotter than here, might spread to the U.S. As a global company, it is able to detect problems with incredible speed and then make tweaks to the system in other countries to avoid the replication of controversies or risks that could adversely impact its market.
“McDonald’s has a very good, strong management system,” says Harvard’s Watson, who edited the book “Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia.” “These people are very good and very responsive to global issues. It’s characteristic for them to move rapidly, not only to respond to the genetically modified food fright in Britain. They were among the very first corporations to move in that direction. More recently, they were also among the first to reassure their clientele in Europe about the beef they provide.”
Watson praises McDonald’s swift and forthright response to BSE. “They’ve learned from the mistakes the British government made by trying to stonewall and trying to ignore it. They operate very quickly for the obvious reason that the managers in the European markets are local people.”
Watson also sees a link here to globalism. “McDonald’s and GMOs and the mad cow scare are all part of a package of how these issues have become global. Food is the next big global issue, and meat and the exchange of meat is what it’s all going to be centered on. Mad cow disease is becoming a disease of global trade. Of course, the American Department of Agriculture and the cattle industry are working very hard to be certain it doesn’t hit here,” Watson says.
But are they doing enough? Though there has not been a single physical outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States, awareness of the lethal pathogen is growing as a result of increasing media scrutiny. “I don’t think that most Americans think that mad cow disease is here or that foot-and-mouth disease is here, but they’ve begun to get a bit queasy,” says Fox. “McDonald’s is very aware that either one of these could come here. There’s no fence around America that’s going to keep them out. We have globalized trade, and trade is a pathway for pathogens. Every single day there are millions of things and people going in and out of this country. How long can we keep these illnesses out? The Europeans understand this better than we do.”
Thanks to intensive industrial farming, Fox expects, “we’re going to have more and more of these problems. Sometimes I feel like a hunter-gatherer trying to find something good to eat,” she says.
There’s a growing rift between business analysts and academics and journalists over how long the current beef scare will last. Most analysts believe the worst may be over, and that sales will return in Europe as soon as the most recent crises pass. But academics and journalists who have studied the fast-food and livestock industries believe there will be a long-term trend away from hamburger and other beef products that will force McDonald’s and other fast-food chains to reinvent their menus.
Part of this has to do with increasingly sophisticated palates here in the United States. Another aspect is the growing concern about the safety of beef — a trend neatly illustrated by the recent success of “Fast Food Nation,” a carefully reported tome that offers a damning portrait of the fast-food industry reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
Some analysts are skeptical about whether McDonald’s responsive marketing can get Americans to shake the deeply ingrained taste they have for beef. “It is wise for everyone to explore ways to reduce their reliance on beef, but when you think of McDonald’s, what do you think about? Burger, fries and Coke,” says Allan Hickok, a Minneapolis analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray who tracks McDonald’s. “When I think, ‘Honey, let’s go out for a salad,’ I don’t think of McDonald’s. You’re going to be bucking 40 years of educating the consumer as to what they’re all about. The bottom line is that we don’t know much about BSE. McDonald’s and everybody else can attempt to do all they want, but if we have a case of BSE here, all bets are off. The same things will happen here that happened in Europe because the disease is so grisly.”
But academics expect that efforts made by McDonald’s to change its image from burger flipper to diversified restaurant will pay off as the public increasingly looks for alternatives to beef. Harvard’s Watson, who tends to wear the hat of a food futurist, says, “It’s likely to have a much longer effect than many market analysts are giving it credit for. We’re now entering a new phase in global dietary change, where beef and other kinds of meats are going to be increasingly perceived as too dangerous to consume.
“You and I are too young to see this coming,” he predicts. “By the end of the 22nd century, there’s going to be a real dichotomy between meat-eating cultures and those that have effectively gone beyond meat eating or into something else altogether. As our meat processing becomes more and more industrialized and vulnerable to problems such as mad cow disease and all sorts of other things, you’re going to have increasing moves in this direction,” Watson argues.
Peering even deeper into the crystal ball, Watson sees a future where eating a McDonald’s hamburger or beef of any sort will be roughly analogous to the consumption of pufferfish in Japan. Despite highly trained chefs who are masters at cutting out the toxic portions of that delicacy, there are still several deaths stemming from the dish in Japan each year. “I suspect that probably not within too many more decades, meat will be perceived by some cultures in the same way.”
Thus, 50 years down the road, toddlers may scream for Veggie Mac Happy Meals rather than burgers and fries. And it won’t be any kind of green movement that gets us there, but rather a neopragmatism about food safety.
My doctor always walks into the exam room smiling. It’s not necessarily the countenance you’d expect from a man who spends much of his time working with people with Stage 3 and Stage 4 cancers — the kind that haven’t responded to other forms of treatment. Yet even when we speak on the phone, I sometimes swear I can hear him smiling. Granted, I’ve given my doctor something to smile about – I’ve been doing spectacularly well in my Phase I trial, delivering CT scan results that he appreciatively refers to as “neat.” Yet the extraordinary thing about my doctor is that he was smiling the day I met him, when I was facing a diagnosis that put my long-term odds of survival in the “probably not going to happen” range. And from that first grin, he deflated my terror and made me believe I was in the hands of someone not just invested in my wellness, but downright optimistic about it.
A natively cheerful demeanor isn’t a requirement for being a competent healer. But what is far too often lost in our grueling, impersonal and cost-driven healthcare system is the basic fact that a human being in the chaotic and scary world of injury or illness deserves sensitivity and compassion. That a shivering person in a paper dress deserves dignity. So if you’re a doctor, nurse or technician, here’s your reminder. And if you’ve ever been a patient, we’d love to read your own additions to the list.
Take your hand off the goddamn doorknob already.
We know you are incredibly busy and important and that your office has wildly overbooked your schedule today. You know what, though? It’s not our job to streamline your day. Conveying information while you’re walking out the door may work if you’re a character on “Revenge,” but it’s a crummy way to have a conversation with a person about his or her health. We just sat out in the waiting room for 45 minutes reading last week’s hype-trolling issue of Time magazine; we’ve sat here in a robe for a half-hour looking at the pain assessment chart. Now you can at least pretend to give us your full attention for the five minutes you’re prodding our vulnerable, unclad bodies. You’ll immediately rise in our esteem.
Dr. Carma Bylund, director of the CommSkil program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, notes that studies have shown that “when a doctor comes into the room and sits down with the patient, the patient perceives the visit as longer. The doctors are at eye level; they’re attentive — and they can’t put a hand on the doorknob.”
Remember that this random collection of faulty parts is a person.
At a Times talk last winter, Will Reiser, the writer of “50/50,” admitted he’d loosely based the poker-faced oncologist of the film on his own doctor, referring to him as “a mechanic” who saw him as the car he had to fix. It was a generous assessment of clinical sangfroid, one that acknowledged that nobody wants a doctor who’s lacking in the professional boundaries department. But that doesn’t mean you should let yourself turn into a robot.
Early in my treatment, I had a doctor on my clinical trial bring in a team of research fellows to look at “the tumor.” That the tumor had a sentient human host seemed utterly irrelevant to him. And when my friend Ariel had a miscarriage, the sonogram technician confirmed it by briskly announcing, “Yup, no heartbeat,” and walking out of the room. This is what is known, in medical terms, as a nightmare.
You may deal in tumors and miscarriages in a revolving door of horrible things all day long, but your patients live in a very different world. Their tumors and miscarriages and dying parents are pretty important to them. The moment they become trivial to you, seriously rethink why you ever wanted to do this for a living.
Consider that the patient is telling you something the charts don’t.
“I had one endocrinologist clearly point out during my exam all of the physical characteristics that lead him to believe I was hypothyroid and had adrenal function issues,” says my friend Alice. “He pointed out stretch marks (without childbirth). He pointed out dry skin. He pointed out my premature gray hair (specifically a prevalent streak near my forehead). My weight gain and inability to lose weight. Quite a few other characteristics. But the lab tests came back ‘normal’ and that is literally what he offered me. ‘Your tests say normal so there is nothing wrong.’” Can you understand why Alice was exasperated?
Most of us truly get it that doctors don’t know everything. We don’t expect all-seeing miracle workers. And we understand that some patients are either incapable of giving accurate information or are just plain wrong about what they believe they have. But a person who is suffering, who is symptomatic, is entitled to a fair and thorough investigation – and if you can’t provide it, please, suggest somebody who can. Don’t shrug off pain with a blasé suggestion of Tylenol or cutting out dairy and not even look at the person. Instead, be like the doctor who once told me, “There’s always something more we can do for a patient.” Do something more.
Accept that we didn’t go to medical school
You know how you’re rattling off protocols and surgery plans and fancy words for body parts we didn’t even know we had? Whoa whoa whoa – slow down there, partner. You’re talking to someone who may not know a colostomy from a semicolon. Your rapid-fire delivery is intimidating and scary. It makes us feel stupid and bothersome, like we should know all this stuff and not ask questions.
“Doctors forget that the minute a patient hears bad news or that there’s a problem, patients stop listening,” says my doctor friend Joe. “Or if they hear anything, they’re hearing incomplete info. The onus then is on us to find ways to help patients understand what just happened, whether it’s writing down instructions, calling a patient later in the day after the dust settles, or simply asking a patient to repeat something back.”
“Healthcare providers often have a kind of script,” adds Dr. Bylund. “They may have certain things they may always say to everybody. We teach doctors to check patients’ understanding and use that to tailor consultation to the person’s needs. Say things like, ‘Tell me what you know about your disease,’ or ‘Tell me what your last doctor said.’ And we show them how people’s past experiences may impact their choices now.” Maybe we don’t know anything about Parkinson’s. Maybe we know a harrowing amount because of what Mom went through, and we’re frightened to death of it. Start with what we know before you dump everything you know on us.
Leah Berkenwald, a health communication student and writer, says, “What good is the diagnosis or treatment if a patient cannot understand it or follow instructions? What is often deemed noncompliance is often a result of a failure to communicate.” And, she says, “It doesn’t matter how good a physician is at diagnosis or treatment if the patient doesn’t understand what they’re supposed to do, how to do it, or why it matters. Medical knowledge and clinical skill become moot when a physician makes assumptions about their patients’ cultural values, beliefs and practices.”
Talk frankly about how we’ll pay for this – and don’t assume anything
As Salon reader Lila says, “The calculation about what choices are available to me seems to be made before I hear the medical advice … Don’t get me wrong, it can be tricky for individuals to figure out how to afford healthcare, and I’m glad for healthcare professionals’ sensitivity to that. But when my husband was being sent home from the hospital — too early, we felt — a problem came to light: The doctor finally said she too felt it was too early but said the insurance wouldn’t pay another day. In fact she was wrong (and the insurance ultimately did pay another day), but more problematic is that she made a decision to discharge based upon something other than medical reasons — and we didn’t know that was happening.”
Nobody – on either the medical or patient end – wants to get walloped with a contentious bill. So talk to us so we can work together to get the most care for the buck. Don’t treat us like dirtbags if we’re out of network or uninsured, either; work with us to find other options. And you can pass that tidbit on to your office staff. Imagine what it feels like to be both sick and poor — now imagine what it’s like to add “demeaned” to your list of problems.
All of us, even the strongest among us, find ourselves on the business end of the stethoscope sometimes. And though it seems pretty basic, I’ll let a real doctor say it so you take it seriously: “Ultimately, health and wellness have a lot to do with the comfort a patient has with a doctor. You’ll give better information when you have a doctor who makes you feel secure,” says Dr. Bylund. When you’re compassionate to us, we’ll show up for our checkups. We’ll be honest about conditions and circumstances, because we aren’t afraid of being shamed or judged. We’ll still put our faith in science, and accept that pain and sickness are sometimes unavoidable. But we’ll be less scared when we walk through those very scary doors. And though we’ll do our best to ward off disease, we’ll gladly submit to something infectious – the power of being decent, and your faith in us.
This piece originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Almost two full years after the BP oil spill, a panel of experts gathered at the 17th annual Tulane Environmental Law Summit, to present the continuing impacts of the BP Oil Spill. That spill began with the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling unit used by BP 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. Eleven men lost their lives. The resulting spill of oil into the Gulf of Mexico stands as the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the second largest environmental disaster in this country to date besides the nearly decade-long Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Scientists at the summit presented recent photographs of shrimp with no eyes and fish with cancerous tumors born long after the gulf was declared “safe” for fishing.
It turns out that testing water and fish flesh under the surface oil after the spill was not very telling about long-term impacts as oil and water don’t mix and the chronic, toxic impacts were delayed until long after BP was put in charge of the “cleanup.” When BP sprayed chemical dispersants containing a slew of toxic heavy metals including arsenic, the oil didn’t magically disappear. It sank into the sediment. Disturbingly, the allowable levels set by the government for the toxins in our seafood are based on health impacts for a 176-pound adult eating less than two medium shrimp a day. The testing is for one chemical out of a crude oil mixture containing thousands of chemicals. No synergistic effects are considered. This in no way protects children, fetuses, people who weigh less than 176 pounds or anyone who eats seafood on a daily basis like the folks here on the Gulf Coast.
Dr. Andrew Whitehead, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, who is studying the BP spill and has reviewed much of the scientific studies of the Exxon Valdez spill, explained that stock declines of species may take several years to develop as reproduction is impacted in successive generations and across species. The Exxon Valdez spill is now known to be responsible for the decline of many species, including marine mammals, marine birds, and fishes such as pink salmon and herring. Though we have a take on the immediate acute impacts of the BP spill on animals caught in the oil, the chronic ultimate impacts of the BP spill are still unknown. But we do know that the killifish, the most abundant forage fish for the bigger fish in Gulf Coast marshes, are being affected. Fish from oiled marshes show signs of direct toxicity and reproductive impairment. Dr. Whitehead’s experiments involving exposures to oiled sediments, done in collaboration with colleague Dr. Fernando Galvez, show that killifish embryos are taking longer to develop or don’t hatch at all. They are being born with malformed hearts and hearts that may not function properly when they mature. And as the impacts from the spill on the fish bioaccumulate and propagate across generations, liability is harder to prove without good and strategic scientific study that sadly is harder to fund.
But some impacts are being felt now, especially for sediment dwelling seafood. Current reports from fisherman up and down the coast are startling. The oyster harvest for 2010 was the worst in more than four decades and oystermen continue to report catches down as much as 75 percent. Crab catches are in steep decline. Brown shrimp production is down two-thirds. And the white shrimp season was even worse, leading to descriptions of “worst in memory” and “nonexistent.” This from the region that before the spill provided 40 percent of the nation’s seafood.
Dr. Patricia Williams, Ph.D., Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology, Associate Professor, Coordinator of Toxicology Research Laboratories, Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of New Orleans, spoke at the summit about what she sees as a failure to properly assess the impact of the spill on seafood and on human health. She said:
In 1996, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledged that direct measurement of tissue for PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) concentrations generally does not provide a useful indicator of exposure of fish to PAHs from petroleum spills. Regardless, an extremely expensive seafood testing program was launched using this method. Testing included only 13 PAH parent compounds out of 200 PAHs present in crude oil. PAHs act on each other resulting in greater toxicity than expected from a single PAH (synergism). The synergistic nature of the PAHs were ignored in interpretation of the results. Additionally, the Levels of Concern were calculated for a 176 pound individual. This does not address toddlers and children or the developing fetus and placental transfer. The public was not warned of these deficiencies in the seafood testing program.
Dr. Williams explained that “PAHs are endocrine disruptors that interfere with the normal blood-borne hormones (e.g., estrogen and testosterone) that are responsible for the regulation of reproductive and developmental processes. Only very low amounts of chemicals are needed to disrupt the normal endocrine balance of both humans and animals. Evidence of reproduction imbalance is seen in the second generation of white shrimp in the 2011 harvest. Shrimp were harvested with defective eye stalks, pleopods, and pereiopods. Such anatomical defects are occurring in the markedly reduced white shrimp population in the Gulf and warn of endocrine dysfunction that could result in the loss of the species.”
Furthermore, “The heavy metals known to be present in crude oil are being ignored in the testing of seafood. Metal toxicity can produce neurobehavioral abnormalities in sea life such as: alterations in avoidance or attraction responses; critical swimming speed; changes in social interactions (e.g. aggression), reproduction, feeding, and predator avoidance; food foraging with reduced feeding ability; loss or orientation in swimming and changes in schooling behavior. Heavy metal testing in BP Oil clean-up workers has documented increased arsenic levels in 24 hour urine specimens.”
Finally, Dr. Williams warned that “The future chronic health effects from consumption of contaminated seafood and biomagnification along the food chain are yet to be realized in both sea life and humans. Chronic effects may take years to present and may elude an analysis of their causal origins. ”
On the second day of the summit, a settlement between private plaintiffs and BP was announced in the press. This settlement does not resolve the government cases, either civil or criminal, against the responsible parties. But the settlement of the private case raises the question whether the government prosecutions will be resolved without a trial and without jail time for executives ultimately responsible for the deaths of 11 workers and severe and ongoing environmental and economic impacts on the region. The summit attendees were abuzz with speculation about what will happen in the federal and State of Louisiana cases.
In Louisiana, petroleum is king. This state is the third largest producer of petroleum in America, Louisiana is responsible for more than one-quarter of the nation’s natural gas production, and Louisiana is the third leading refiner of petroleum in the country. In addition, the state makes over 600 petroleum products making it the second in the nation in primary production of petrochemicals. The 20-mile stretch on the Mississippi from New Orleans to Baton Rouge known as “The Cancer Corridor” pumps out one-quarter of the chemicals made in America. Louisiana leads the United States in release of toxic chemicals into the environment. The seven-parish industrial corridor has the highest density of petrochemical industries in the nation and possibly the world.
All this money in petroleum has a huge impact on politics in Louisiana, just as it does on a national and international level. It’s probably impossible to get elected to any Louisiana office without courting petroleum dollars and making campaign promises to that industry. A visit to the petroleum friendly website for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources reveals the following section titled “Legacy Liability Reform.”
This “Legacy Liability Reform” is less likely to ensure any protection for Louisiana’s resources or its citizens than it is to assure petroleum companies that Louisiana and its resources are theirs for the taking. The reform is code for “don’t worry about liability because immunity for really bad stuff is all part of the deal for investing in Louisiana.” Oh, by the way, the Louisiana courts have been very protective historically of petroleum interests as well.
From the 1950s on, drilling for oil and gas on federal lands and waters has produced the second largest source of revenue for the federal government besides taxes. This has led to a rather cozy relationship between the federal government and those corporations that extract petroleum here. Let us not forget that since the inception of the Minerals Management Service (now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement to emphasize what it should be doing) has been involved in numerous scandals. For example, in 1990, MMS employees were linked to prostitution, and in 2008 the Department of Interior’s inspector general reported that MMS employees were engaged in both drug use and sexual activity with employees from the very energy firms they were to be regulating. This wasn’t just the foxes guarding the chicken coop, but the foxes actually in bed doing lines of coke with the chickens.
Clint Guidry, president, Louisiana Shrimp Association, spoke at the summit about the political ramifications of the spill and the unlikelihood of real justice coming from the government case. Mr. Guidry had worked for BP earlier in his career like so many Louisiana men have. He knows intimately both the oil industry and the fishing industry. When the spill happened, Louisiana shrimping was devastated. First, Guidry lobbied for jobs for all the shrimpers when the fisheries closed. Then he fought for job site safety for the workers and community residents impacted by the cleanup. Guidry’s role became that of witness to the harms on fisherman response workers when they began to suffer from being exposed to aerial application of the chemical dispersant and being downwind from burn sites of the surface oil. For instance, on May 26 seven shrimpers from the offshore response crew were admitted to West Jefferson Hospital with chemical poisoning. Two days later, after Obama’s May 27 visit to Grand Isle where he was photographed picking up tar balls, two more shrimpers were airlifted to West Jefferson Hospital for emergency medical treatment, also for chemical poisoning. Guidry met with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, and with other government representatives from the local to the federal including Secretaries Napolitano and Salazar and U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
Mr. Guidry still has the following unresolved questions:
- Why did we allow people who caused the oil spill to be in charge of the cleanup? Everything they did was to limit liability, not to protect the environment, the resources or the people.
- How could the government announce on Aug. 5, 2010, that suddenly 75 percent of the oil had disappeared? Corporations run this country and they operate under the Golden Rule: Who holds the gold makes the rule.
- According to statements made by Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves, BP is choosing the direction of the environmental damage assessment. Shouldn’t the Oil Spill Recovery fund be administered independently so it could fund real scientists like Dr. Whitehead?
- Oil companies are good at covering up spills and sinking the oil with additional chemicals, but they are no good at cleaning up spills. If we are allowing these companies to drill in the Gulf, shouldn’t they be required to have the technology to prevent disasters and to clean them up? They don’t.
- Even after the largest loss of life and oil, no laws have been changed. Eleven men are dead but I don’t believe anybody will go to jail. The government is the keeper of the record of the criminal investigation and if they settle the case, the public will never see that information. If the record is not made public in a trial, how do we learn from this spill?
- I’m a third generation fisherman. We were the first environmentalists because if you don’t take care of the environment, it doesn’t take care of you. I love wildlife. The spill has devastated wildlife. What price do you put on a dead dolphin?
- The head of Minerals Management Service at the time of the BP disaster came from big oil. She was fired by Obama and MMS was split up but no one else was fired. Is that enough house cleaning? Can these people keep us safe when they have failed in the past?
As the federal government and affected states including Louisiana move toward trial or settlement, we should all be asking these questions.
How will the government cases be resolved? Potential penalties of more than $17 billion for environmental violations remain on the books for BP. Peter Lehner, executive director of Natural Resources Defense Counsel writes in his blog, “How the remainder of the case pans out says a lot about the future of energy in this country. Will the government allow BP, and the rest of the oil industry, to continue business as usual with nothing more than a slap on the wrist? Or will the company be put on trial and held accountable for its actions? Will the penalties be severe enough to make the oil industry clean up its act? BP reported profits of $21.7 billion in 2011, nearly 3 times the estimated cost of its settlement with private parties in the Gulf.”
And one question looms even larger than the spill, the resulting legal cases or even BP profits: How can we establish a separation between the oil industry and our government?
“My clients don’t know,” he told me. How could they? My neighbor Edward (some names and some identifying details have been changed) doesn’t look sick. In many ways, he isn’t. He’s a dapper, graying-at-the-temples man with two young children, a consulting business — and a recurring cancer for which he’s currently facing another round of treatments. It’s hard enough drumming up business in this economy, Edward says. If a potential client’s choice comes down to the healthy 30-year-old and the middle-aged man with a tumor, well, who would you choose? So he presses on in secret, cleverly arranging his business schedule around doctor visits and scans. He’s in the cancer closet.
One of the first things you have to deal with when faced with a life-altering illness is the decision about whom you’re going to tell, and how. When I learned I had malignant melanoma a year and a half ago, I told my editor before I told my family. (OK, I was on a deadline at the time.) Two days later, I told the whole world in a cover story for Salon. Two months ago, Boing Boing writer Xeni Jardin live tweeted her first mammogram – and her stunning diagnosis of breast cancer – to thousands of followers. For some of us, the diagnosis is where we find our voice. For others that kind of candor isn’t an option, for either professional or personal reasons.
While a friend was going through breast cancer treatment a few years ago, few in our circle knew that her mother was facing it at the same time. Five years later, Ginger, a figure skating coach, says that “I knew if I told anyone, my students would immediately start looking for another coach.” Instead, she covered up surgery with a story of a vacation to Maine, and sandwiched months of afternoon chemo and radiation treatments in between early morning and evening coaching sessions – and weekends traveling with her team. “It took everything to get through it,” she says now. “There were times I was so exhausted I couldn’t see straight. A couple of times I had to leave the ice because I was so sick.” But she says she’s never regretted her choice to keep silent. On the contrary, sticking to her rigorous work schedule and maintaining the demeanor of health was “what got me through.”
In the midst of a health crisis, the routines of a career — the sense of purpose and obligation it provides — can provide motivation and escape, something that isn’t easy to pull off when everybody’s concerned about your condition. Chris, a doctoral student and teacher at an academic medical center, didn’t enjoy having his students popping in to check on him during his treatment after a lung transplant for his cystic fibrosis. He’s since switched his care to a different facility. Now that he’s no longer on oxygen – “when you can’t conceal a blessed thing” — he’s also discreet with his peers. “I don’t want people deciding for me what I’m able to do,” he says. “I’m pretty good at determining that for myself.” He knows first- and secondhand how damaging honesty can be. When his wife asked for a scheduling change around one of his procedures, her boss relieved her of her duties, telling her that “he’d decided she wouldn’t be able to handle her responsibilities.” Pretty bold of him to come out and say it. The ease with which employers can “restructure” or blame a termination on popular culprits “inconsistency” or “absenteeism” make it easy to conceal how often people with chronic conditions and their caretakers lose their jobs over them — and even harder to determine how great a role illness plays in hiring practices.
Thanks to our often punitive American healthcare system, the consequences of illness can be severe far beyond the illness itself. Linda, who was diagnosed with MS four years ago, says her friends know her condition but she rigorously keeps it from her co-workers. “It’s bad enough to live with this disease not knowing how it will affect me,” she says, “but I am terrified that it could also affect my employment prospects.” For Linda, like far too many of us in this country, “the thought of losing my job and thus my healthcare is probably my biggest nightmare.” The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn’t take full effect for another two years, when no one will be able to be denied coverage based on preexisting conditions. Currently, you can apply for a “high risk pool” if you’ve been uninsured for six months. That’s a lifetime for a person with a serious illness, and for those of us on ongoing treatments and drugs, an unfathomable expense.
There are other reasons beyond the fear of career repercussions for keeping illness a secret. Nobody wants to be viewed as an invalid, or the one who might be circling the drain. And as cancer blogger Katherine, who has metastatic breast cancer, says, “It’s often easier not to challenge people’s assumptions than to explain.” Linda agrees that “I am perfectly capable of working and living a mostly normal life. However, there is still an antiquated view of MS in our society, and many people automatically assume that once you are diagnosed, your next step is a wheelchair.” And Ginger notes that even in this day and age, when you can’t swing a cat without hitting a LIVESTRONG bracelet, “There’s such a death sentence that people put on cancer.” The reality of illness is that there are plenty of days when you’re going through the rigors of treatment and its side effects, that you just don’t want to be the official spokesperson and explainer for This Is What My Disease Looks Like.
Just as difficult as being pitied, though, is the risk of finding yourself scorned for a condition beyond your control. Bette, who has autoimmune disorders, says, “I’m very Type A, never miss a day of work or class or a deadline, even if that means having to go throw up in the bathroom in between meetings with clients. There’s a perception that people with autoimmune issues are weak, fragile, or delicate, which are characteristics I really try to avoid, especially as a woman. There’s also a ton of stigma about fibromyalgia. Someone in my office the other day actually made a comment about how so many women say they have fibro for sympathy, which strengthened my resolve to keep my conditions to myself. ” And Cheryl, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes after an initial misdiagnosis of Type 2, says, “Many people think I ate my way to diabetes, since I’m overweight, but that’s really not the case. I feel like my food choices are always silently (and sometimes not silently) judged. Look at the backlash that Paula Deen suffered. My reaction to that controversy? How awful that another person has to have this disease, no matter how she got it. It also feels somewhat embarrassing to be ‘sick’ — like a personal failure that one of my organs doesn’t work properly.” Now, however, she says, “I decided to become more public about it,” because among other things, “I’d rather do a shot in the middle of a crowded restaurant than in some dirty bathroom stall.”
As Katherine advises, “Every individual will have their own reaction and coping mechanism” for dealing with long-term conditions and sudden, sharp reversals of fortune. We all grapple with the physical changes and scheduling nightmares, with balancing our privacy and our secrecy, with the desire to share and the longing to be seen as our healthiest, strongest selves. We know that when we say we have cancer or we have diabetes, we have cystic fibrosis or lupus we’re HIV-positive, that you will not look at us or treat us the same way ever again. We just don’t know whether we’ll be met with compassion or a pink slip, with support or with judgment. There’s so much about illness we can’t control. That’s why we care so much about the one thing we always still have power over: the way we get to talk to you about it.
(Credit: Everett Collection via Shutterstock) 
This 2011 photo provided by Donald Waters shows a fish harvested from the Gulf of Mexico with unusual lesions and infections. Two years after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, touching off the worst offshore spill in U.S. history, the latest research into its effects is starting to back up those early reports from the docks: The ailing fish bear hallmarks of diseases tied to petroleum and other pollutants. (AP Photo/Courtesy Donald Waters) (Credit: AP) 
(Credit: iStockphoto/2StockMedia) 
(Credit: jcjgphotography and Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock) 
