When, earlier this month, McDonald's announced an earnings shortfall, it became clear that the disease which has plagued the global economy for the past decade had finally hit Americans. It had hamburgled them where it hurts most: in their pocketbooks.

"Effectively, most of the European market for beef is gone," says Harvard University professor James Watson, who studies food and culture and edited a book about McDonald's international expansion efforts.

Mad cow disease and, more recently, the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease across Europe have exacted a staggering toll on McDonald's bottom line, cutting into profits and also paring off billions and billions of dollars from the global giant's stock value.

Not a single case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of BSE (also called mad cow disease) has been linked to the Big Mac. But the recent beef scares have apparently been enough to send Germans and French fleeing to their nearest kebab stands. European sales at McDonald's in January and February fell by 10 percent, no small amount considering the company derives as much as 36 percent of its overall operating income from the continent. The news was greeted with tears on Wall Street, and the stock quickly fell to its lowest in three years -- at $27.55 a share, the price was almost half of its all-time peak of $50 in 1999.

In a statement announcing the hit mad cow had taken on the company, McDonald's CEO Jack Greenberg wrote March 14, "The effect of consumer concerns regarding the European beef supply has persisted longer than we expected, despite the fact that McDonald's overall safety and quality standards lead the industry and provide the benchmark for safe food around the world."

Those venerated arches have been buckling under the intense pressure of a collapsing beef market in Europe. All those nightly newscasts of massive cattle burnings didn't do much to drive hamburger sales. In France alone, beef sales have plummeted 40 percent since BSE hit the mainland of the continent. The European Union's commissioner for agriculture, Franz Fischler, recently told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "BSE is the biggest crisis that European farming has ever had to face. It drastically changed the prospects for the farming market that we envisioned in 1999." As one of Europe's largest beef resellers, McDonald's has been hit in its core there. It's also forcing a company that has been associated with burgers and fries since the opening of its first store in 1955 in Des Plaines, Ill., to reckon with a new reality: The future of its staple product, the hamburger, is increasingly imperiled.

For a while now, McDonald's has been marketing nonbeef products like Chicken McNuggets and McRib sandwiches. It has also marketed vegetarian products, like Veggie Macs, in New York and Amsterdam. In London, it sells the McChicken Korma Naan, a nod to the local Indian and Pakistani populations. In India, where cows are sacred and beef eating is taboo among some groups, the lamb Maharaja Mac tempts local appetites. Now the beef scare is forcing McDonald's to fast-track the mainstreaming of these products -- its future may depend on it.

Visit the Golden Arches on Paris' Champs-Elysées or in Berlin's sprawling new Potsdamer Platz technopolis and you'll see that changes in the product lineup are already being made. Rather than focusing on the fare that's kept its profits humming for half a century, the company is conspicuously downplaying beef in special offers, extra-value meals and restaurant menu boards. Instead, the company is promoting its chicken and pork products, like the McRib and the newly introduced McToast, a sort of down-market ham and cheese croque-monsieur for the on-the-go set.

To gauge the magnitude of this burger culture shift, just try to imagine John Travolta's Vincent Vega character in "Pulp Fiction," who offers a sentimental tribute to the Hamburger Royal (they don't have Quarter Pounders in Europe; they use the metric system, after all) in the film, reminiscing fondly about a ham sandwich. While analysts see this latest beef crisis as only a passing problem, others, especially academics and journalists studying fast food, suggest that our hallowed symbol of the square American meal is on its way to the circular file.

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