THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM is that we have little to fear from mad-cow disease, and of course the conventional wisdom may be right. Lloyd deMause, editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, says it’s not unusual for societies to develop a cultural fear of poisoning at the end of a long period of prosperity — it’s a natural reaction to feelings of guilt over having experienced such good fortune. Seen in this light, last year’s media obsession with mad-cow disease — an illness never detected in this country — is similar to panicky news stories over West Nile virus, a rare, rather mild, flu-like illness, and this fall’s outburst of fear over anthrax, which, after all, killed just a tiny handful of people.

" Why poison? This is pre-verbal, " deMause says. " It goes way back to when you were still drinking milk from the mommy’s breast or from the bottle. " (It’s this same dark, guilt-ridden fear of the forces around us, deMause says, that explains what he considers to be our overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11. " I’d be glad to shoot bin Laden in the cross hairs myself. I’m not a pacifist, " he says. " But it seems to me that we’re going to go back and finish the job in Iraq and do all sorts of other horrible things that we should not do. " )

But even if fear of mad-cow disease somehow taps into our more primal cultural obsessions, there is the fact of mad-cow disease that must still be contended with. And the fact is that the seeming dearth of mad-cow cases in this country may be the entirely predictable result of our failure to look.

Michael Greger, a Jamaica Plain physician who is a nationally recognized expert on mad-cow disease (he’s listed in the acknowledgments of Mad Cow U.S.A.), blasts the US Department of Agriculture for what he calls a "  ‘don’t look, don’t find’ program of surveillance, " adding: " Every week in Europe they test 10 times as many cattle than we have tested in a decade. Europe has tested five million at this point. If the US had as high an incidence as Europe, the current USDA testing program would not detect it. It is irresponsible to assert that we have no mad-cow disease in the United States when we simply haven’t looked hard enough to tell. "

As for what the future holds, Greger replies that " no one knows what the risk of eating American beef is. And by the time we know for sure, it may be too late. I counsel my patients to err on the side of caution and stop eating beef. Better safe than sorry. "

For obvious reasons, mad-cow disease remains a big story in Britain. Last September, London’s Guardian newspaper published a harrowing two-part series on the small village of Queniborough, where five young adults had died of nvCJD over a period of several years. The reporter, Kevin Toolis, noted that all the victims may have gotten sick because of such antiquated butchering practices as mixing brains and meat. His description of the long, agonizing death of Stacey Robinson was particularly horrifying.

" The howling went on for five months, night and day, from the autumn of 1997 to the spring of 1998, a low, growling, demonic yowl that escaped her lips as if it came from deep within the earth; the cry of the damned, " Toolis wrote. " It could be heard halfway along the ward in Leicester’s Royal Infirmary as Stacey plunged into madness. She soon lost the power to walk, to eat, to clean herself, to use the bathroom. She turned aggressive, kicking, swearing and assaulting her nurses. She battered her forearm against the bed until it was black and blue. She held her hand under a scalding tap and felt no pain. In the end, the doctors turned her ordinary city hospital room into a padded cell. "

Mad-cow disease could be much ado about nothing; it could also turn out to be a scourge for the ages. To date, only 100 or so people in Britain (and just a handful in other countries) have died of nvCJD, even though some 60 million may have been exposed to BSE-contaminated beef. But because of the decades-long latency period, those who have died so far may merely represent the bleeding edge. According to some estimates, the worst-case scenario is that some 100,000 Britons could die the way Stacey Robinson did.

Last winter, when mad-cow disease was all the rage, both Time and Newsweek ran big stories on it. CAN IT HAPPEN HERE? asked Time. CANNIBALS TO COWS: THE PATH OF A DEADLY DISEASE was Newsweek’s lurid take. A search of the New York Times’ Web site turns up 114 references to mad-cow disease during the first three months of 2001 — but just 43 during the slow-news months of June, July, and August.

Three and a half months after September 11, the media are gradually returning to normal, however you want to define normal in a country scarred by terrorism and war. The New York Observer last week predicted that the Times may cease publication of " A Nation Challenged, " its special section on the war against terrorism, sometime after the New Year. How long will it be before Geraldo, back from misrepresenting his whereabouts in Afghanistan, treats his new viewers on the Fox News Channel to a special on JonBenét Ramsey?

The media have distinguished themselves this year, proving that — despite a decade of corporate downsizing and a growing obsession with celebrity and scandal — they can still provide sustained, in-depth coverage of vitally important news. If the reinvigorated media are looking for other important stories to cover in 2002, they should take another, longer look at mad-cow disease. They had the chance in 2001, and they walked away. But discerning the extent of this threat to our food supply is surely as important as describing the threat from Al Qaeda.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com