Europe’s Beef Scare

At first, Arnaud Eboli’s parents blamed his crying spells and screaming arguments on a tough bout of adolescence. Their 17-year-old had always been a normal boy, athletic and smart, fond of hanging out with his friends, practicing martial-arts moves and feasting on fast-food burgers in the suburbs of Paris. But by September 1998 the outbursts had gotten so bad the Ebolis took him to a psychiatrist, hoping therapy would help. It didn’t. THE CRYING JAGS GOT WORSE. Arnaud grew clumsy and forgetful. “I’m going crazy!” he would howl at his mother, Dominique. “I have mad-cow disease!” Arnaud’s doctors never guessed the diagnosis could be true—not even after they hospitalized him a year ago for a battery of medical tests. It was his mother who suggested checking for signs of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of mad cow. The doctors ordered a tonsil biopsy, one of the standard tests these days for CJD. The results confirmed his mother’s worst fears: Arnaud was suffering from the mysterious, incurable brain illness that has frightened Europe and baffled medical researchers for the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the toll keeps rising in France, where nearly 200 animal cases had been confirmed by last weekend (all of them dairy cattle), and doctors at a Paris hospital were examining a woman they worried might be the country’s fourth human victim. As neighboring countries frantically slapped bans on French beef, demand for the meat plunged at supermarkets and butcher shops across the continent, and farmers braced themselves for profitless times ahead.