U.S., Europe Lock Horns in Beef Hormone Debate

For more than four decades, American ranchers and farmers have been injecting tiny pellets of hormones into the ears of cattle raised for beef.

The drugs, delivered with needle-tipped guns, are sex hormones sold under such names as Steer-Oid, Ralgro and Synovex, and they make the animals grow faster and produce more meat for every dollar spent on grain and hay.

The procedure, which is as quick as a vaccination, has become routine in the U.S., where three out of four cattle raised for beef are treated with one or more hormones.

But it won’t be routine in Europe any time soon. Not only is the practice illegal there, but the European Union has refused for a decade to permit imports of beef from hormone-treated cattle.

Now the transatlantic beef has brought the United States and the EU to the brink of a trade war, joining bananas on what is becoming a full plate of U.S.-Europe trade disputes.

Acting on behalf of the $36-billion-a-year U.S. cattle industry, Washington is threatening to retaliate with tariffs on selected European products unless the EU lifts its beef ban by May 13, as it has been ordered to do by the World Trade Organization.

The Europeans claim the ban is a matter of protecting consumer health; U.S. officials and cattle ranchers call it a pretext for old-fashioned protectionism.

Just how safe are these hormones used to bring steaks, roasts and hamburgers to American tables, at prices that European consumers would envy?

A number of international health bodies have reviewed the evidence and sided with the U.S.

But the hotly disputed issue illustrates how hard it is to sort out conflicting health claims when the science is complex and those interpreting it often reach conclusions that serve their own political and economic agendas.

Natural Hormone Levels Are High

The U.S. government insists that hormones, when used properly in beef production, are perfectly safe. Indeed, three of the six hormones that can legally be used to promote U.S. livestock growth occur naturally in humans and livestock.

The natural levels are so high that small increases in treated animals are almost impossible to detect and are likely to have no effect on health, federal officials say. That’s also the position taken by several international bodies, including the WTO and even a scientific panel assembled by the Europeans.

“What often is not recognized is that the [natural] levels that are found in other animal foods, such as eggs or milk or butter, are substantially higher than those that occur in animal tissue as a result of use of these hormones,” said Richard Ellis, director of scientific research oversight for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Plants also produce the equivalent of sex hormones--soybeans and wheat germ contain very high levels of plant estrogens.

Comforting as this may seem, all three naturally occurring hormones approved for treating cattle have long been on state and federal lists of chemicals known to cause cancer. Large doses increase cancer rates in laboratory animals. In women, increased exposure to estrogen--through birth control pills or treatment for menopause--does somewhat increase the risk of breast cancer and other tumors, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Samuel S. Epstein of the University of Illinois School of Public Health contends that adding small amounts of sex hormones to the human diet is cause for concern, especially for young children whose bodies produce relatively low levels.

Epstein has been a consultant to the Europeans and to several American public-interest groups that support the ban on hormones in beef production.

“The question we ought to be asking is not why Europe won’t buy our hormone-treated meat,” Epstein has written, “but why we allow beef from hormone-treated cattle to be sold to American and Canadian consumers.”

Combinations of sex hormones allow the animals to extract more nutrients from their feed and allow them to gain weight and add muscle faster than without the drugs. And the hormones have a calming effect on animals crowded into feedlots, where most of the 35 million U.S. cattle slaughtered each year are raised.

The Food and Drug Administration allows the use of natural hormones--estradiol, progesterone and testosterone--and their synthetic counterparts, zeranol, melengestrol acetate and trenbolone--to promote livestock growth. Most of the drugs are administered in slow-release pellets that are implanted under the skin of the animal’s ear so they won’t contaminate the beef itself. The one exception, melengestrol, is added to feed.

The treatments are relatively inexpensive, and treated animals gain an extra 2 or 3 pounds per week, cutting costs by as much as $80 per steer, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn.

American experts say U.S. practices also result in beef that is tastier, juicier and more tender than its European counterpart.

They say Europeans--who traditionally get their beef from aging bulls and dairy cows--are sometimes subjected to far higher amounts of natural sex hormones than they would get from U.S. cattle.

Americans point out that a slaughtered bull, for example, can have 10 times more natural testosterone in its flesh than a treated steer. (Most U.S. beef comes from castrated male cattle--steers--or from young females raised specifically for meat production--heifers.)

The USDA’s Ellis says that at worst, estrogen levels in beef from treated cattle are, on average, 3% higher than the meat from an untreated animal. For testosterone and progesterone, the differences are less than one-tenth of 1%.

U.S. groups that support the European ban cite industry studies submitted to the FDA that show estrogens and other hormones in treated meat are several times higher than those in untreated meat.

Ellis responds that these peak levels were measured 15 days after implantation--long before the hormone pellets were depleted and the animals slaughtered. “What is really going to consumers, that’s what counts,” he said.

Small Amounts Can ‘Disturb the Balance’

But Epstein argues that even small amounts can “disturb the natural balance by shifting pathways of metabolism.” It could have a marked effect “on a kid of 8 who consumes two or three hamburgers a day,” said Epstein, who chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition.

And he said the U.S. government has done little to monitor hormone levels in meat.

A USDA spokesperson confirmed that the agency has never tested for the natural hormones and has done only sporadic testing of the synthetic ones, almost all of it before 1990. Other officials say they choose to spend their limited funds monitoring pesticides and other chemicals they believe pose a bigger health risk.

Ellis says there is no point in testing for natural hormones, which are present in beef in widely varying amounts regardless of whether the animal has been treated.

However, when the department tested for zeranol in 1989, it found amounts in excess of permitted levels in 16 out of 134 beef samples tested, the USDA spokesperson said. But that same year, the FDA revised its calculations of how much residue would be safe--and concluded that the small amounts that might remain in beef posed no health risk.

A history of past assurances and miscalculations dogs the arguments of the beef industry and its defenders.

For years, diethylstilbestrol, or DES--a synthetic estrogen--was used to boost growth in cattle, sheep and poultry.

The same drug was widely used to prevent miscarriages in women until the late 1960s, when the drug was linked to a rare cancer in the daughters of treated mothers and to a possible increase in cancer in the mothers.

Low DES levels were found in beef, but the industry fought to keep the drug available on grounds that the amounts were low enough to be safe and that dropping the drug would be an economic catastrophe. In 1979, however, the FDA pulled it from the market.

But illegal use continued, despite the ban in the U.S. and most other countries. The drug showed up in baby food in Italy in 1980, for example. Infant girls who consumed the tainted meat reportedly developed breasts and began menstruating.

About the same time, there were prosecutions in the U.S. for illegal use of the drug in cattle.

Against that backdrop, the Europeans outlawed the use of all growth-promoting hormones in cattle raised in EU nations but delayed an import ban until January 1989.

The Europeans do allow U.S. beef that is certified as hormone-free. A few American producers sell about $40 million a year of beef to the EU. But without the ban, sales would be $500 million or more, said Dana Hauck, a Kansas farmer and cattleman.

Hauck believes Europeans would devour American beef because of its high quality and relatively low price. The cattlemen’s group cites USDA statistics showing that the cost of raising cattle is 30% to 100% higher in European countries than in the U.S.

“Basically, the controversy is about trade restrictions; it is not about health,” said John Keeling, vice president of the Animal Health Institute, which represents the drug manufacturers. “The Europeans don’t want our products and they will use whatever pseudoscientific argument they can come up with.”

Even the U.S. groups that support the European ban admit they can’t prove the hormones hurt consumers.

Said J. Martin Wagner, a lawyer with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, which represented several organizations before the WTO: “There is sufficient scientific evidence to support a finding that these things present a risk, which means a possibility of harm, and that should be sufficient for a government to take protective measures.”

Meanwhile, as the beef case heads toward a showdown in May, a transatlantic banana war has already begun. The WTO this week authorized U.S. tariffs on nearly $200 million worth of European products in retaliation for barriers against bananas grown by U.S. firms.