There should be much wider and more frequent testing for BSE, as several US scientists have already demanded, and the powerful “Big Food” lobby should not be allowed to prevent it. Regardless of any BSE, these improvements would benefit US food safety as a whole.A positive test on the Washington State cow might also have a longer-term benefit if, as a consequence, more of the vast resources of US scientific research were directed towards BSE. One side-effect of the 11 September terrorist attacks has been to make Americans more fearful, and so more vulnerable to scares. The British experience of millions of slaughtered cows, together with 130 deaths from human variant CJD, have been spectres hovering over American agriculture since the BSE epidemic here.Certainly, American regulations and their enforcement need to be reviewed; all existing loopholes must be closed.

The credit ratings of meat companies are already being reviewed; ranchers could face bankruptcy as prices continue to fall and loans are called in. Lost exports and falling meat prices at home could cost the US economy billions of dollars.Unlike Canada, the US is not a big meat exporter; only 10 per cent of its production is sold abroad. So the priority for the US must be to prevent domestic panic. In a worrying replay of John Gummer’s public assurances about the healthiness of British hamburgers, illustrated by feeding one to his young daughter, the US Agriculture Secretary, Ann Veneman, told Americans that their meat was absolutely safe and that she, for one, would be serving beef to her family for Christmas.Initial consumer and stock market reaction showed how hard this will be. Even a few isolated cases will undermine public confidence in the US meat industry as a whole and have a knock-on effect on the US economy. This is not, however, because it takes any more phlegmatic a view of the risk from BSE, but because an existing ban on hormone-treated meat has already reduced imports from the US to a bare and strictly tested minimum.Whether or not the Washington State cow turns out to have been infected, gloating about the misfortune of the United States would be not only unseemly, it would be wrong The market reaction on Christmas Eve was only the start.

The US has had stringent regulations on cattle-raising and cattle-feed for a decade; these should have been adequate to keep BSE at bay. The response to this one suspected case in Washington state has nonetheless shown that if anyone, from individual ranchers upwards, was guilty of hushing anything up, their instincts about what full disclosure could mean were not entirely misplaced.Within 24 hours of the first low-key admission by the US Department of Agriculture that a cow’s remains were being tested for BSE, the US meat industry was facing a catastrophe Trading in cattle futures was suspended. Meat giants, such as Tysons, and fast-food concerns, such as McDonald’s, saw their share prices plunge. The dollar, already in decline against the euro and the yen, registered another sharp drop at the news.So far, a dozen countries have introduced a temporary ban on imports of US beef The European Union is an exception. The temptation will be strong to greet the first suspected case of BSE in the United States with self-satisfied gloating and a rousing chorus of “We told you so”. There have been suspicions for years that the US was not, and could not be, free from the cattle disease and that it was only lax enforcement and the willingness of some ranchers to slaughter and bury the occasional “mad cow” on the quiet, that allowed the Americans to claim for so long that they were BSE-free.
Such base suspicions may have been unwarranted. They have sought to achieve something, and for that alone they deserve the highest praise..

Take bankruptcy: in Britain, the reaction to bankruptcy is shame; in the US it is seen as a sign that the one has tried to achieve something, and failed. It also tells us why, whatever the eventual outcome of Beagle-2’s Mars landing, we should regard Prof Pillinger and his team not as failures, but as role models. There is no sense of shame.That difference in attitude helps explain why the American economy remains more dynamic than ours. But it is a truism that, without failure, there can be no genuine, worthwhile success That maxim applies in almost every walk of life. Similarly, the decision to bid for the 2012 Olympics has been met with derision.Professor Pillinger’s vision was initially greeted in the same manner.