Arresting Contagion

Science, Policy, and Conflicts over Animal Disease Control

Alan L. Olmstead, Paul W. Rhode

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674728776
• eBook ISBN: 9780674967229
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over sixty percent of all infectious human diseases, including tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, and hundreds more, are shared with other vertebrate animals. Arresting Contagion tells the story of how early efforts to combat livestock infections turned the United States from a disease-prone nation into a world leader in controlling communicable diseases. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode show that many innovations devised in the fight against animal diseases, ranging from border control and food inspection to drug regulations and the creation of federal research labs, provided the foundation for modern food safety programs and remain at the heart of U.S. public health policy.

America's first concerted effort to control livestock diseases dates to the founding of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in 1884. Because the BAI represented a milestone in federal regulation of commerce and industry, the agency encountered major jurisdictional and constitutional obstacles. Nevertheless, it proved effective in halting the spread of diseases, counting among its early breakthroughs the discovery of Salmonella and advances in the understanding of vector-borne diseases.

By the 1940s, government policies had eliminated several major animal diseases, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and establishing a model for eradication that would be used around the world. Although scientific advances played a key role, government interventions did as well. Today, a dominant economic ideology frowns on government regulation of the economy, but the authors argue that in this case it was an essential force for good.

1	An Enduring Struggle

AFTER A LONG BATTLE, victory. In October 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announced the global eradication of rinderpest, the most feared of all livestock diseases.¹ The systematic global eradication of a contagious disease had been declared only once before, with the conquest of smallpox in 1980. Rinderpest, a highly contagious viral disease, had long ravaged populations of cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats, and other animals. It repeatedly battered Europe, likely killing over 200 million cattle in outbreaks in the eighteenth century. The reappearance of the “cattle plague” in Britain in 1865 spawned that nation’s first systematic policies to combat animal diseases. The disease hit the horn of Africa in 1888 and spread south to the Cape Colony by 1896, contributing to one of the worst famines in that continent’s history. Rinderpest was not to be trifled with: during World War II, a joint U.S. and Canadian biowarfare team selected rinderpest as its weapon of choice. In a secret laboratory on a St. Lawrence River island, scientists worked with the live virus to build offensive and defensive capabilities.²

The threat of rinderpest played a vital role in the birth of U.S. livestock disease policy: in December 1865, Congress temporarily prohibited the importation of cattle, and a short time later the Senate directed Commissioner of Agriculture Isaac Newton to investigate claims that the contagion had jumped the Atlantic. He determined that the reports were unfounded, but called for new laws to contain and destroy infected cattle within a “military cordon” should the disease ever strike.³ Newton also recommended strengthening import controls and establishing quarantine stations. After the threat of rinderpest subsided, Congress lost interest in Newton’s proposals.⁴ The United States escaped the rinderpest epizootic, but other devastating livestock diseases did leap the nation’s ocean defenses. The spread of these new contagions along with the advance of diseases already enzootic in parts of the United States created serious health concerns.

Many present-day readers have likely never heard of rinderpest. The great cattle plague and other scourges that ravished livestock a century ago have passed from memory. Animal diseases still register in the public consciousness today, albeit more weakly, in the form of mad cow disease and other emerging risks. This book investigates the largely untold history of government interventions to combat livestock infections and contagions in the United States.⁵

Congress empowered a new agency in 1884 to fight livestock diseases. This move predated what is commonly considered the first significant federal thrust into economic regulation and also predated any sustained federal push to directly improve human health. The agency would make spectacular advances in both science and public policy. It is credited with creating the template for regional disease eradication that would be used around the world in fighting rinderpest and other animal and human diseases. This book shows how this agency evolved to overcome great obstacles, including ignorance, rampant disease denialism, constitutional impediments, knotty jurisdictional conflicts, and strong grassroots resistance. Its successes have led later generations to take these accomplishments for granted and to forget the scientific and political challenges that had to be overcome. Our story highlights how scientific advances interacted with public policy innovations to address serious animal and human health problems.⁶

Boundaries and Contagions

During the nineteenth century, the animal disease environment was growing worse in the United States. Contagious diseases were spreading unchecked in the country’s livestock populations, sapping their health and productivity. Increasing specialization and trade among producers and improvements in transportation were making matters worse. Contagions paid no heed to political boundaries. Many states responded by enacting livestock sanitary laws and blocking interstate commerce.⁷ This invariably incited charges that states were using health concerns as a ruse to protect their own producers from legitimate competition. Such charges were at times justifiable, but producers and their elected representatives in infected areas were also often in a state of denial. Furthermore, while the states bickered among themselves, many European nations restricted imports of U.S. livestock and livestock products. Clean states could not differentiate their products from those of infected states in international markets, so all suffered. For these and other reasons, state initiatives proved ineffective in the battle to control livestock contagions.

The increased threat of livestock diseases, coupled with the failure of state actions, increased the demand for federal intervention. At the same time, a small cadre of scientists defined the problem and created blueprints for action. These leaders emphasized that given the cumulative nature of contagions, interventions were more efficient before diseases became well established. Time was of the essence, but the political and legal institutions were slow to adapt. Step by step, Congress created a powerful national animal health bureaucracy, complete with authority to impose domestic and international quarantines, to advance scientific knowledge, and to conduct eradication campaigns within states. The federal courts increasingly upheld Congress’s assertions of power over what had been the exclusive domain of the states. This was a contentious process, which repeatedly pitted powerful ideological, regional, and economic interests against one another. These battles over livestock health helped redefine American federalism and shape economic regulation in the United States. The scientists who directed the new institutions would have a major impact on enhancing agricultural productivity nationally and globally.

One Health

Much more than agricultural productivity was at stake. According to a recent estimate by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 60 percent of all infectious diseases affecting humans (and 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases) are shared by other vertebrate animals. Other authorities estimate that the percentages are even higher. These shared and transmissible diseases—zoonoses—include anthrax, brucellosis, cholera, Ebola, influenza, mad cow disease, malaria, plague, rabies, salmonellosis, trichinosis, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and hundreds of other killers.⁸ The great fear of scientists who specialize in disease prevention is not if but when a new disease will emerge in animal populations and adapt to infect humans. Humans contract many zoonoses solely from other animal species. The most effective method of combating many zoonoses is to introduce more hygienic processing and distribution systems for animals and animal products, and to treat or cull the diseased animals. For these reasons, livestock sanitation policies, including those aimed at improving milk and meat hygiene, have had a significant impact on human health.

Animal health policies have contributed to preventing illnesses that otherwise might have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. There has been a close synergy between advances in animal and human medicine. Many scientific breakthroughs resulted from research that transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The ethics and constraints governing animal health policies have differed from those governing human health. Most people care more about their own health than that of their animals, and most consider a human life more valuable than an animal’s life. One might predict accordingly that human health would have advanced faster than animal health—but the reverse has often been the case. Law and custom have long prohibited using human bodies to conduct medical training and research, so much of what physicians learned in the past about human physiology was based on animal models. In addition, it has been easier to control livestock diseases because authorities can test and quarantine animals more indiscriminately, slaughter sick and suspect animals, and even depopulate entire districts.⁹ But all such actions required a legal system that permitted the interruption of commerce, the confiscation of dangerous goods, and at times the payment of compensation. It also required leaders with a will to act. Studying changes in animal disease regimes sheds light on health policy more generally. Because disease control for livestock is less encumbered by the ethical constraints that apply to humans, the links between science, policy, and results are often sharper for livestock.

Societies have confronted fundamental problems with respect to animal and public health: contagious diseases create negative externalities that are often hard to address without collective action, the presence of a contagion harms the common interest, and arresting contagions is a public good. Whereas individuals have incentives to protect themselves and their loved ones, the incentives are weak to invest privately in protecting strangers. The result is an underinvestment in precautions against the spread of contagions. The same logic applies to states vis-à-vis other states. In many institutional settings, a livestock owner has an incentive to conceal diseased animals in the hope of selling them or seeing them recover. In regions where a contagion is prevalent, the prospect of reinfection reduces the incentives for individuals to invest in cleaning up their own animal stocks. Unless one’s neighbors cooperate, such investments would likely be wasted.

In the past, decentralized efforts almost always proved ineffective. Those seeking to address contagions turned to government, which could exercise police power. There are economies of scale and scope in disease control. It is generally more efficient for a central entity to police one large, all-encompassing border (be it a county, state, nation, or continent) than for each political entity within the larger area to regulate its own frontier. Solving coordination problems has proved difficult everywhere, so it is all the more remarkable that the United States, with its cultural traditions of voluntarism, localism, and pluralism, was a successful pioneer in controlling animal contagions.

Building a Federal Bureaucracy

By 1900, the United States had emerged as a world leader in controlling contagious animal diseases, even though the nation was a laggard in human medicine and the biological sciences more generally. The principal organization that led the fight against livestock diseases was the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), which was created within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1884. For its first two decades, the BAI was energetically directed by the veterinary scientist Daniel E. Salmon. By the early 1940s, the BAI had led campaigns that eradicated seven major animal diseases in the United States: contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (1892), fowl plague (1929), foot-and-mouth disease (1929), glanders (1934), bovine tuberculosis (1940), dourine fever (1942), and Texas fever (1943). Its eradication campaigns were complex, large-scale policy experiments. The scientists who led the global smallpox eradication program acknowledged this precedent when they noted that the BAI’s campaign against contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) was the world’s “first planned programme whose stated objective was eradication.”¹⁰

The BAI represented a major institutional innovation. As pioneering historian of science A. Hunter Dupree noted, Congress “created whole at a single stroke a new type of scientific agency.” The BAI had an explicit scientific research mission, and it was to be headed by a scientist.¹¹ It soon would become a leader in transferring medical knowledge from Europe to the United States, and in generating original research aimed at understanding and solving animal disease problems. It established the “first significant microbiological laboratory in the United States in 1884”—several years before the founding of a hygienic laboratory by the predecessor to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).¹² Early BAI breakthroughs included the discovery of the Salmonella bacterium (named after Daniel Salmon), the first use of an artificially heat-killed culture to make a vaccine, the observations that led to the typing of distinct tuberculosis bacteria, and the first proof that an arthropod vector (in this case a cattle tick) transmitted a microorganism that caused an infectious disease (Texas fever). This latter discovery sped advances in the understanding of other vector-borne diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, typhus, plague, and African sleeping sickness. Other early breakthroughs included the development of practical methods to eradicate cattle ticks, the discovery of the virus that caused hog cholera, and the identification of the hookworm parasite, which afflicted people in the Southern states. BAI scientists made numerous other advances in bacteriology, virology, immunology, parasitology, and other emerging disciplines.

The BAI’s public policy innovations were as important as its research contributions. The science underlying its triumphs was readily available to animal health officials in other countries, but few nations were as successful as the United States in converting science into effective public policies to control animal contagions. Changes in legal interpretations and in administrative capabilities accompanied scientific progress as officials learned how to construct effective institutions. Disease control campaigns required building social capital. This involved creating coordinated surveillance systems dependent on farmers and local veterinarians to ring the alarm, gaining the trust and cooperation of state and local officials and farmers, educating stock owners about new and often alien scientific ideas, implementing incentive-compatible compensation schemes, organizing rural plebiscites, and much more. In designing programs, one size did not fit all; a process of trial and error was involved in tailoring policies to counter the specific disease threats and to ensure that the interventions actually worked in the field.¹³

The constitutional necessity to gain state support led to novel cooperative agreements that redefined the frontiers of American federalism by transferring police power from the states to the national government. These changes occurred earlier in animal health than in many other policy arenas. The BAI could deploy trained experts to hot spots and intervene with near-dictatorial power to nip problems in the bud. This policy of concentrating authority was dubbed the “one man principle.” The BAI’s quarantine system repeatedly blocked the entry of diseases into the United States. The United States and Canada both eventually adopted an “island-nation” mentality similar to that developed earlier in Britain. It was wiser to invest in eradicating existing diseases and to prevent their reintroduction than to employ more lax policies and coexist with diseases, as had been common in most European countries.¹⁴

Public Policy and Political Economy

Within the field of public economics, there are two contrasting views regarding economic regulation. One is the public choice school, whose adherents are generally critical of government regulations. In this view, rent-seeking interest groups and bureaucrats push interventions to limit competition, thereby creating inefficiencies. The polar view is the public interest school, whose followers advocate regulation to address market imperfections and business abuses. Both schools offer insights, but the merit of each argument in particular cases is often clouded by conflicting evidence. Assessing the motives of individuals and the effects of policies is apt to be controversial. The desires to protect special interests, redistribute wealth and power, and harm potential competitors are ever present, and all policy innovations have involved winners and losers. However, in the case of animal diseases, market failures were serious, and government-led research and collective action generated immense benefits fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1. An Enduring Struggle
• 2. Livestock Disease Environment and Industry Dynamics
• 3. The Battle to Create the Bureau of Animal Industry
• 4. The BAI in Action: Establishing the Area Eradication Model
• 5. Bad Blood: Deciphering Texas Fever and Confining Its Spread
• 6. Contagions and Crises: Foot-and-Mouth Disease
• 7. The Hog Cholera Puzzle: Controversy and Discovery
• 8. Trichinosis, Trade, and Food Safety
• 9. The Benevolence of the Butcher: The Creation of Federal Meat Inspection
• 10. Bovine Tuberculosis and the Milk Problem
• 11. The Eradication of Texas Fever: Conflict and Cooperation
• 12. An Impossible Undertaking: Eradicating Bovine Tuberculosis
• 13. Getting Off the Fix: Hog Cholera Eradication
• 14. The Mirror of the Past
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index