The downer dairy cow recently found stricken with mad cow disease in California was infected with an "atypical" strain. Such cases are thought to arise spontaneously, a notion the USDA seized upon to explain how the disease could arise despite their regulations. If anything, that fact highlights the weaknesses in the current feed rules. If mad cow disease can arise out of nowhere, then it's even more important to close the loopholes and stop the feeding of cattle blood to calves and chicken manure to cows to prevent it from spreading. And what the USDA didn't mention about the atypical strain found in California is that there's evidence it's a more dangerous form of the disease
The California cow died of a particularly virulent form of mad cow disease known as BASE, bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy, also known as L-type atypical BSE. Typical BSE was first documented in the '80s in Britain. Afflicted cows often became twitchy and aggressive, giving rise to the "mad cow disease" moniker, as their brains degenerated into a characteristic Swiss cheese-like appearance. Hence the scientific name, BSE: bovine (cow) spongiform (sponge-like) encephalopathy (brain disease).
Then cats started dying. Max, someone's pet Siamese, was the first non-bovine victim of the disease. Infectious pet food was implicated as the cause of Max's death from a never-before-described feline spongiform encephalopathy.
Then young people started succumbing to a human spongiform encephalopathy called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a relentlessly progressive and invariably fatal dementia, often involving weekly deterioration into blindness and seizures as their brains became riddled with holes. CJD appears sporadically in one in a million people, but typically strikes only the elderly. The new cases among teenagers were dubbed "variant" CJD, a disease now understood to be caused by consuming contaminated meat (or by getting a blood transfusion from someone who did).
Despite massive contamination of the food supply, no more than a few thousand people are expected to die, suggesting a robust transmission barrier between cows and humans when it comes to BSE. The same may not be true of the atypical forms of BSE found in California and in the last two mad cows in Texas and Alabama. Experimental models of human infection suggest that the type of mad cow disease discovered in the California case "is a more virulent BSE strain... in humans," with "higher transmissibility" and causing a swifter death.
Just as one in a million people sporadically get CJD, evidence suggests one in a million cattle get atypical BSE. The U.S. cattle population hovers around 100 million. Though there is evidence some of these sporadic human cases of CJD may be associated with infected cows or sheep, case control studies tie CJD more closely to the consumption of pork. A study co-authored by D. Carleton Gajdusek, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on these diseases, found that "consumption of pork as well as its processed products (e.g., ham, scrapple) may be considered as risk factors in the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease."
Though pigs have been proven susceptible to a porcine spongiform encephalopathy, the National Pork Producers Council claims that no naturally occurring cases of "mad pig" disease have ever been discovered. The Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, however, has petitioned the federal government to reopen an investigation into a case in which a USDA veterinarian may have found a cluster of suspect pigs in upstate New York.
New research just found that unlike the British strain, the atypical forms of BSE found in the U.S. cause animals to have difficulties in standing up, so instead of mad cow disease, it's more of a downer cow disease. Since we continue to feed slaughterhouse waste and blood to pigs, this raises the question whether any of the hundreds of thousands of downed pigs that arrive at slaughter plants every year in the U.S. may be infected.
It's ironic that this new case of mad cow disease was discovered in California where a law excluding downed animals from the food supply was recently overturned by the Supreme Court.
In 2008, an undercover investigation by The Humane Society of the United States of a dairy cow slaughterplant in California showing that downers were being dragged to slaughter for school lunch hamburgers prompted California to strengthen its laws to keep downer livestock out of the food supply. The meat industry, represented by the National Meat Association and the American Meat Institute, responded by successfully suing the state of California to keep meat from downed animals on people's plates on the grounds that only USDA had the authority to determine which animals should not be forced to the kill floor for humane or public health reasons.
Sick animals can lead to sick people. An unequivocal ban on the slaughter of any farm animal unable even to stand may reduce the public health risk of myriad threats from anthrax and E. coli to swine flu and Salmonella. Spongiform encephalopathies are a special case, though, as they are caused by infectious agents that cannot be eliminated by cooking, pasteurization, or the rendering process used to make pet food. In fact, infection can survive even incineration at temperatures hot enough to melt lead. It is therefore the meat industry's responsibility to prevent sick animals from entering the food chain in the first place, by instituting a "bright line" ban on the slaughter of all downed livestock. In the California case, the animal was killed before she could be slaughtered. Next time we might not be so lucky.
See also:
For more by Michael Greger, M.D., click here.
Follow Michael Greger, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nutrition_facts
Katherine Gustafson: Mobile Slaughterhouses Help Meat Go Local
If ever there was a case for buying local, humanely raised beef, pork, chicken and lamb, this is it. Know your sources. And anything produced by the U.S. Big Agra Corps. is suspect. They really don't care how many of us they kill. There will always be more people. People have to eat. And plenty of people are too poor to buy anything other than their cheap poison.
Children don't vote and have no money so they have no voice.
If i were a parent, I would not allow my child to eat any food from the cafeteria. Now when the USDA is working hand in hand with the Big Agra profiteers to poison the next generation.
The paper goes on to say: "The pathological prion protein isoforms in BASE strain-infected humanized Tg mouse brains are different from those from the original cattle BASE or sporadic human prion disease. Minimal brain spongiosis and long incubation times are observed for the BASE strain-infected Tg mice". Translation means the disease prion was different in the test mice and the disease developed slower with less "spongiosis" (holes in the brain). How this becomes translated into "swifter death" is a miracle of the biased believing mind.
Perhaps the PR objective of obtaining more power is far more important that the truth.
Nice 'end around', there, Dr. Greger. Jump immediately from "downer cows" at Hallmark to the SCOTUS overturning a ban on "downer animals". I suspect that you know full well that the "downer animals" included in the bill that was overturned included everything - not just cows. I also suspect that you know, full well, that it has been ILLEGAL to slaughter downer cattle for human consumption for over 8 years now. Did you also know that it is illegal to process "downer" cattle into feed for ANY OTHER ANIMAL if they are over 30 months old (globally accepted age before which BSE isn't an issue), and if under 30 months old specific-risk materials (SRM's) still have to be removed prior to rendering?
BTW, the people who were running Hallmark/Westland ought to be in jail, if they aren't.
You also appear mistaken about the 30 month cut-off. There have been dozens of cases of mad cow disease confirmed in cattle younger than that (http://vla.defra.gov.uk/vla/vla_ati_020205.htm). In Japan, where they test all cattle presented for slaughter, they've found cases as young as 21 months. In contrast, our USDA won't even allow private companies to test their own cattle at their own expense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creekstone_Farms), another case in which there were court battles on behalf of of the meat industry to weaken food safety rules.
You probably can't catch mad cow from chicken....
If I was a chicken farmer, I'd be posting that everywhere
"Industry" and "responsibility" simply don't make sense in the same sentence. This is the same kind of "responsibility" that sued to keep forcing us to eat toxic meat.
Good luck with that.
since they found one, statistically that means there should be 875 Mad Cows in the food supply.
That law was a load of garbage. It was another HSUS shill law that included things like pigs that refuse to walk all the time when they are perfectly healthy. You want a law banning livestock cannibalism, or the use of legitimately sick animals for meat, great, but you want to paint a law designed and intended to destroy meat business because you work for a vegan nazi law firm posing as a humane society as a health issue, go fish.
Have we had enough yet?
If I can't vote with a ballot I can vote with my wallet.
I stopped eating anything with HFCS. I notice more corporations are now discontinuing it's use, probably because I wasn't the only one voting with my wallet.
I'm buying organic ingredients and cooking from scratch to avoid GMO corn and soy. I will not buy farmed Atlantic salmon. I no longer buy products in cans lined with BPA.
Pink slime is just the beginning- please sign.
https://www.change.org/petitions/usda-stop-feeding-cattle-poultry-waste