Mad Cows

These are sane and rational cows.

USA Today published an editorial on the mad cow issue.


In case you haven't been following, the "firewalls" in effect are a joke. The USDA has a conflict of interest. They have to simultaneously protect the beef industry and the the consumers. If they truly wanted to protect consumers, they'd test every animal. Don't test, don't find.

Consider:
We only test downers, when many cows don't show symptoms (9 of the 20 BSE cows in Japan were completely healthy). Japan tests all of their cows.

US beef ranchers who want to test all of their animals are prohibited by the USDA. The government will not allow them to pay for testing their own animals.

The ruminant feed ban is not enforced. As it mentions in this article, calves are fed cow blood and chicken litter, after the chickens are fed cows. Birds are messy eaters, so they spill the raw beef. If they do eat it, the prions go through their digestive tract just fine.

Cows get BSE from contaminated feed. The feed that the mad cow born in the US ate was also consumed by other cows and calves. There is no way to track where the feed went or how many cows ate it.

Cows are shot in the head with a captive bolt gun (if they're lucky, some end up cut up alive, but that's another post). When the bolt smashes into the brain, pieces of tissue circulate through the bloodstream, even though the heart ceases to beat. So the muscle tissue is exposed to prions.

The prions can remain infectious even after an hour at the melting point of lead (680 degrees F). They withstand all antibiotics, bleach and formaldehyde. We know of no way to destroy them.

Prions stick to everything. If a BSE cow is slaughtered, that slaughterhouse equipment is contaminated and has the potential to conaminate thousands of pounds of meat. When they autopsy a human with CJD, they cannot reuse the instruments because they cannot be sterilized. Similarly, there is no way to sterilize slaughterhouse equipment.

In lab tests, we have found that both types of CJD, variant (beef induced) and sporadic (random occurance) can occur from eating bad beef. So the "random" occurances have a chance of being from bad beef.

GlaxoSmithKline is working on a treatment for mad cow. Being the pharmaceutical giant that they are, I doubt they're doing this for the few people who contracted CJD from the December 2003 cow (which entered the human food supply). There has to be money to be made by this treatment. And that means that many many people would have to contract CJD for this treatment to be profitable.

Alzheimers is indistinguishable from CJD until after an autopsy. In a study at Yale, people who had died of Alzheimers were autopsied. 13% actually had CJD. There are currently four million people with Alzheimers in the US. I'll do the math for you - 16% of 4 million is 520,000.

Added 8/29/05:
They're now developing a test to find CJD/BSE through a blood test. It'll work for humans or cows. If prions are in the blood, and blood flows through all muscle tissue, then prions will be in all the muscle tissue of an infected animal, albeit in lower concentrations than in the spine and brain. You eat the muscle tissue, and you will ingest the prions.

Added 11/5/05:
The prions are transmittable through milk.

Added 1/24/06:
The Canadian government has found another BSE cow. The language of the Powers That Be has now shifted to complete prevention and safety of the food supply to "acceptable limits."

Added 2/11/06 - The USDA Inspector General is now saying that downer cows are entering the human food supply.

Added 3/15/06- The US government has decided to reduce testing, claiming that the testing was never about making sure the food supply was safe. The USDA tells the public that the meat is safe, the public believes it, and thus the meat is deemed "safe" because the public perceives it that way.

Added 4/11/06 - Using the USDA's own statistics, 777 BSE-positive cows have now entered the human food supply.

*My appologies if some of the older links don't work. Some news sites take down their old articles, but feel free to google on your own.