Mad Cow Disease In America

What is the Mad Cow Disease?

BSE, better known as mad cow disease. It stands for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.  It is an infectious and incurable disease which slowly attacks the brain and nervous system of cattle. Spongiform encephalopathies are not confined to cattle. Scrapie is the sheep form of the disease, which is common in Britain for the past 200 years.   The human version, Kuru, was once epidemic in tribal New Guinea. In Britain people had died from another human version, Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD).

The exact origin of BSE is not known..  However, since the disease occurs spontaneously in all mammals, the practice of rendering animals of any species and feeding. Many scientists believe that British cows first acquired the disease by eating rendered sheep protein them back to their own kind creates a cycle likely to cause an outbreak of this cannibal disease.

BSE is an incurable disease caused by an infectious agent. The agent is not a virus or bacteria. The disease is caused by an abnormal form of a body protein called a "prion." Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a California neurologist who discovered the prion in 1982, believes that it will eventually be linked to Alzheimer, a widespread degenerative brain disease.

Prions survive heating and the rendering process, and as little as one teaspoon of feed derived from
infected cattle can transmit the disease to another cow. The disease occur naturally in all mammalian species at a very low rate of incidence, but innovations in rendering have amplified and concentrated this rare disease into a deadly epidemic.

Experiments have shown that most transmissible spongiform encephalopathies can pass from one
species to another if an animal gets a large enough exposure to prion-infected tissue, but it is especially easily transmitted when an animal consumes flesh from another animal of its own species.

What does it do?

The period between becoming infected and showing symptoms for spongiform encephalopathies is long in relation to the life span of the animal or human involved. For example, Kuru in humans can take as long as 30 years before the person becomes visibly ill. The disease bores into the brain and nervous system very slowly but once established it rapidly causes dementia and death. No treatment works. Post mortems show the brain to be sponge-like and full of holes, hence the name 'spongiform'.

In cattle, the first signs occur when the cow is put under any stress. Movement to a milking station might induce fear, panic and stumbling and the infected animal may stand away from the rest of the herd, holding it's head in an awkward posture.

As the muscles waste away, there may be twitchings, quiverings and shaking, and teeth grinding. The cow over-reacts and becomes very jumpy. Eventually, the cow will shake violently, stagger, then be completely unable to stand up.

It the cow does not recover, drops his milk production, and about to fall down, it is slaughtered.  The head and its nerve tissues are removed for examination.  The rest of the cow's body is supposedly burned,  but as many as 30% of infected carcasses end up in landfill sites.  As BSE is an extremely strong disease, it remains infective even after years in the soil where they could be disturbed by bulldozers, dogs,  rodents, or rats.

England's epidemic continues.

BSE became an epidemic in England as a result of  factories which melt carcasses and waste meat products into protein used in animal feeds, cosmetics, medicines and many other items. For the past two decades, increasing amounts of rendered protein have been fed back to living farm animals, including cows, to increase their milk and meat production.

The epidemic in British cattle has continued for the last ten years despite what the British government has done.   In June 1988, the government imposed a six-month ban on feeding animal protein to cows and sheep as it was thought this was the most likely way these animals would become infected. In December, the ban was extended for 12 months and laws stopped the sale of milk from cattle suspected of having the disease. Banning infected feed did not stop the rise of BSE. Cases rose from 500 per month in January 1989 to 900 per month in December 1989.

The prion that causes spongiform encephalopathies has been found in many of the organs and tissues of animals. For example, cells from the spleen, thymus and tonsils enter the blood and find their way to many organs including the liver and bones. The bones of old cows are one of the major sources of the protein gelatin, used in many foods from peppermints to pork pies. The greatest risk could come from bones because the procedures used to concentrate and purify gelatin could create a stronger source of BSE.

Most beef animals are slaughtered before they are old enough to show symptoms of the disease they are likely to have. When cattle are killed for food, the head, spinal cord, spleen and thymus are removed.  The officials unwisely believed that this is the only infected part of the animal.  The flesh containing infected nervous tissue is used for human food.  The  bones are made into gelatin which finds it's way into many products. It is now know that disease are being passed from mother to calf.

Domestic cats have died from a spongiform encephalopathy from eating pet food.

It is now known that regular eaters of veal and other beef products are 13 times more likely to die of CJD than those who don't.

Dr. Lacey predicts that the British government's failure to act sooner, combined with the disease's long latency period, could produce between 5,000 to 500,000 human deaths per year beginning sometime after the year 2000. "This is one of the most disgraceful episodes in this country's history," Lacey said. "The government has been deliberately risking the health of the population for a decade. The reason it didn't take action was that it would be expensive and damaging politically, particularly to the farming community who are their supporters."

Profit is the motive.

The cattle industry produce dairy products at the lowest possible cost which is paid by the suffering of these animals. Thus the cows are often fed protein rich concentrated food made from the carcasses of other dead animals.. Cows only produce milk when they have had a calf. After a nine month pregnancy, the calf is removed within a day or two of birth. A few months later, while still producing milk, the cow is artificially inseminated again. Cows have around three or four pregnancies before their milk yield begins to drop.They are eventually slaughtered at six or seven years old, even though its natural life span would be 20 years or more. Most parts of the cow are used to make burgers, sausages, pies, stocks and pet food.

Forcing naturally vegetarian animals to become carnivores, eating the remains of other animals creates the obvious high risk of different infections being passed.  This cannibalistic methodology is an economically essential part of the meat industry.  All the bits of animals from slaughterhouses unsuitable for human consumption are boiled up to produce fat and protein. The protein makes animal feed.  This is what caused the spread of BSE.

CJD and Kuru are the human form of the disease.

If BSE can be transmitted to humans then the resulting illness is expected to be like our own form of Kuru - Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). As a spongiform encephalopathy, this is again a disease of the brain and is always fatal.

A human form of the disease was rampant in South Sea cannibal cultures, where it was called kuru, a human form of scrapie. Cannibalism, especially by women hoping to increase fertility, was common until very recently. Kuru killed up to 80 per cent of women in some villages.  There is no accepted test for the disease in living people or animals until after after death when an autopsy shows songlike holes in the victim's brain tissue.

Having the CJD disease, patients first show symptoms of mental changes, such as problems with co-ordination, recent memory loss and slurred speech. Sometimes obvious twitching of muscles can be seen, the facial expression becomes fixed and the person may stumble and fall over. Over the next few weeks, the person becomes confused and unaware, unable to read or recognize even close relatives.

Towards the end of the illness the patient is unconscious and not reacting to anyone, often having fits or jerking spasms and is doubly incontinent, blind, deaf and speechless. Patients continue to be fed but are rarely placed on a respirator nor given antibiotics for infections, particularly of the lung. It is the latter which usually results in death.

Previous outbreaks in humans have also occurred among organ transplant patients and recipients of human growth hormone extracted from cadaver-source pituitary glands

Disease is very contagious

During the post mortem, extreme care must be taken because the disease is incredibly infectious. The pathologist wears a mask, goggles, gloves, boots and a plastic apron and any instruments that have been used on patients suffering from CJD have to be thoroughly sterilized, beyond the normal method. If contaminated instruments are used on another patient which they will be if the person was not visibly ill with CJD), the disease can and indeed has been transferred.

CJD is so feared by some people in the medical profession that they have refused to perform autopsies on patients suspected of dying from it. Some hospitals have even refused to admit patients suffering from it.

Mad cow disease in America

The mad cow disease  is by no means just a European problem. It is an underestimated and a concealed problem in the US.  In Europe BSE is a prevalent problem.  A U.S. version of spongiform encephalopathy already infects U.S. dairy cows according to research by Dr. Richard F. Marsh of the University of Wisconsin. This prevalent  problem exist as  Downer Cow Syndrome (DCS). Over 100,000 cattle die of it each year. Scholars have shown that there is a link between DCS and a BSE-like encephalopthy.

Marsh is an internationally recognized expert in the study of   spongiform encephalopathy.  In 1985, he discovered an outbreak  in mink in central Wisconsin. The mink had gotten the disease after being fed the remains of Wisconsin dairy cows. Over the years Marsh experimentally transferred the disease from mink into two Holstein steers through inoculation, then back from the cattle to mink, showing that it was both transmissible and fatal in both species.

This U.S. version of spongiform encephalopathy did not produce the behavioral symptoms of staggering and drooling that made the disease obvious in British cattle. Instead cows died by simply collapsing.  The U.S. version is called "Downer Cow Syndrome." Research by Dr. Richard F. Marsh at the University of Wisconsin indicates that a U.S. version of spongiform encephalopathy have already spread among dairy cows in the United States. Over 20,000 "downer" cows die each year in Wisconsin alone. A U.S. BSE agent could be hidden in this large cattle population.

Downer cows are typically rendered and fed back to living cows, which could concentrate and amplify the disease into an epidemic like the one that has devastated the British cattle industry, but harder to detect because the cows would not go "mad" before keeling over dead.

A form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease has already spread into the U.S. human population.   Despite denials from the U.S. government, at least two statistically alarming clusters of CJD have already been reported in the U.S.

CJD has been mistaken in the past for Alzheimer, a disease that afflicts some four million Americans. The beginnings of a CJD epidemic in the U.S. could therefore be occurring already, misdiagnosed by doctors and hidden within the country's huge population of dementia patients.

In the United States, each year billions of pounds of proteins from dead cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other animals  are shredded into feedable powder. A  high percentage of those DCS cattle are used in the animal feed.. Recently FDA banned  feeding this animal feed to cattle. Actually, the FDA regulation has numerous loopholes.  The ban did not exclude blood from disease cattle in making cattle feed.  Using spray dried bovine plasma and  whole blood as protein sources for  feeds is fully legal under the FDA's regulation. Cannibalistic practices continue on a wide scale with other livestock. Pigs and chickens are still routinely nourished with feed supplements derived from the bones, brains, meat scraps, feathers and even feces of their own species.  As research has shown these species can be carriers of disease without showing any symptoms.

Center for Media & Democracy