Putting Mad Cow Disease Into Perspective: A Top Ten List of Things to Really Worry About

Now that a cow in Washington State has tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, a somewhat predictable series of events has begun to occur. Fueled by media coverage, beef prices in the United States have ceased their recent Atkins-diet-stimulated increases. Foreign nations are refusing to accept beef exports from the US. There are widespread calls for the government to increase surveillance of cattle herds.

Although these effects are understandable and may have some as-yet-undetermined beneficial outcome, what they also do is to increase the public's anxiety over what is likely a very small threat.

In humans, the disease caused by eating the tissue from the nervous systems of afflicted cows is called Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, or CJD. The source of this disease is tissue from the brain or spinal cord of an afflicted cow, often used as a binder in meat processing. The historic rate of this disease in the US is about one case per million people per year. Although truly tragic for those afflicted, in reality one might have a better chance of winning the lottery than of getting this disease.

What concerns me is that while the hoopla on mad cow disease takes center stage, people are dying of preventable diseases by the hundreds of thousands. On a daily basis many of us take unreasonable risks with our health that are far more dangerous than the likelihood of eating contaminated beef.

Here is my "Top Ten List" of things that you really ought to worry about. The silver lining is that, if you choose to, these are all health issues that you can do something about.

1. Failing to identify and aggressively treat cardiovascular disease. Forty percent of all deaths in the US are due to this problem - to the tune of 950,000 people lost every year.
2. Failing to diagnose treatable cancers such as breast cancer, colon cancer and prostate cancer at an early stage. Cancer is our second most common cause of death; 550,000 people die from cancer every year.
3. Smoking: The number one cause of preventable deaths. There are 46.5 million American smokers. About 440,000 of them will die this year.
4. Accidental deaths claim over 100,000 lives per year. Note the recent news that 2003 was the deadliest year on Wisconsin highways since 1981.
5. Alcohol: There is an alcohol-related death every 30 minutes in the US.
6. Obesity: A major contributor to heart disease and diabetes, it afflicts 61% of all Americans.
7. A sedentary lifestyle: Sixty percent of Americans do not get enough exercise to gain any health benefits and 25% are not active at all during leisure time.
8. Sexually Transmitted Diseases: Although not usually fatal, chlamydia and herpes rates are on the rise, along with syphilis in gay men. There will be 40,000 new cases of HIV diagnosed in the US this year.
9. The flu: 36,000 Americans die annually from the flu - a rate that would be much reduced through higher vaccination rates.
10. Depression and loneliness: We tend to forget that these problems can be deadly. They contribute to self-neglect, substance abuse and suicide.

So if you really want to be afraid of something, get scared by the things you can do something about - the things that are killing us at far higher numbers than the latest threat du jour. If you feel overwhelmed by the breadth of these health issues and their potential for affecting your life, that's understandable.

It is my sincere hope that the readers of this column might put a check mark next to the items on this list that put them at risk not only for death, but the potential for real and preventable suffering. Make an appointment with your health care provider today and together do some risk stratification: Look at the things you are doing that are the most dangerous and generate a plan to do something about them. Quite literally, the life you save may be your own.

"Your Health" provides easy-to-understand information about common health conditions.