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APOCALYPSE COW | 21.11.2001 |
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 You May Already Have the Human Version of "Mad Cow Disease"
It's the stuff of pulpy science fiction novels or doomsday sermons. An invariably fatal disease wrought by man's own arrogance, disseminated by an infectious agent impervious to all forms of neutralization. No treatment, no cure, not even a test that can be conducted on the living. The opportunistic pathogens first find a home in farm animals, ripping sponge-like holes in their brains until they go "mad." Then they jump species to be silently spread among humans via their own dinner tables. Could it be that the most lethal weapon in the twenty-first century human arsenal is the fork?
A Mad, Mad World
"Potentially, this is one of the most frightening diseases the world has ever known"
‹Edward L. Menning, DVM,
editor of the Journal of Federal Veterinarians
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has earned the caustic nickname "mad cow disease" thanks to the invidious symptoms presented in affected cattle, i.e. staggering, tremors, involuntary muscle spasms, bewilderment, hypersensitivity to auditory and tactile stimuli, and other examples of seemingly "mad" behavior.
"In 1985, cows in Britain began to die of a mysterious ailment that no one had ever seen before," explains environmentalist Peter Montague. "The symptoms were strange. At first the cows staggered and drooled, their ears twitching. Then they began to show signs of fear, grinding their teeth, acting aggressively toward other animals. Soon they died. Farmers named the condition Œmad cow disease' and the name stuck."
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is just one form of many transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) diseases.
"TSE diseases have now been identified in sheep, pigs, goats, cattle, deer, elk, mink, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, domestic cats, puma, cheetah, eland, kudu, Arabian oryx, myland, marmosets, macaques, chimpanzees and humans," Montague adds. "In addition, a TSE has been reported in ostriches in a German zoo."
Cases of BSE have been reported across the globe in France, Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, Canada, Italy, Oman, and the Falkland Islands. In the US, TSEs have occurred in sheep (scrapie), mink (transmissible mink encephalopathy), and deer and elk (chronic wasting disease). TSEs also affect humans.
Because they contain no genetic material of their own, TSEs are not viruses. According to Nobel Prize winner Stanley B. Prusiner in the January 1995 issue of Scientific American, BSE is "one of several fatal neurodegenerative diseases of animals and humans thought to be caused by prions‹[which are] infectious proteins."
Perhaps what is most disquieting about this hypothesis is the fact that, unlike viruses and bacteria, prions remain infectious even after being:
… baked at 680° F for on hour (enough to melt lead)
… bombarded with radiation
… soaked in formaldehyde, bleach, and boiling water
"Cooking infected meat does not completely eliminate its infectivity," states Montague. "Animals get TSEs by eating infected animals or parts of infected animals, especially nerve tissues."
All of this means, of course, that forks, spoons, knives, or any other eating or cooking utensil cannot be sterilized. Moreover, since standard autoclave sterilization does not neutralize infectious prions, the destruction of all surgical instruments is currently being considered in Britain. Here at home, USA Today has reported that patients who underwent brain surgery in hospitals in both Denver and New Orleans have been notified that they may have been exposed to the human variant of BSE through contaminated surgical instruments. Is this a false alarm or an omen of things to come?
"BSE represents a big risk to the health of the [human] population," warns Stephen Dealler, a British microbiologist specializing in mad cow disease. "It is no use pretending that the danger is not there."
Cow Chow
"Cows eating cows is alarming. It has stopped me cold from eating another burger."
‹Oprah Winfrey
Health experts believe that the principal cause of BSE is rendering, the practice of feeding ground-up animal remains to cattle, pigs, sheep, and other "food animals." The expired creatures used in rendering range from fallen cows to euthanized pets to roadkill.
Former-cattle-rancher-turned-vegan, Howard Lyman, is the author of Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat and the director of Earthsave.
"When a cow is slaughtered," Lyman explains, "about half of it by weight is not eaten by humans: the intestines and their contents, the head, hooves, and horns, as well as bones and blood. These are dumped into giant grinders at rendering plants, as are the entire bodies of cows and other farm animals known to be diseased. Rendering is a $2.4 billion-a-year industry, processing forty billion pounds of dead animals a year. There is simply no such thing in America as an animal too ravaged by disease, too cancerous, or too putrid to be welcomed by the embracing arms of the renderer."
At the rendering plant, the mix of assorted dead animals is ground up and steamed. "The lighter, fatty material floating to the top gets refined for use in such products as cosmetics, lubricants, soaps, candles, and waxes," says Lyman. "The heavier protein material is dried and pulverized into a brown powder‹about a quarter of which consists of fecal material. The powder is used as an additive to almost all pet food as well as to livestock feed."
Farmers call it "protein concentrates."
When the mad cow scare hit in 1996, within one year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a new regulation ostensibly to ban feeding "ruminant protein" (protein from cud-chewing animals) to other ruminants. While the enforcement of this ban is very much subject to debate, it has been used by those seeking to downplay the issue to proclaim that cows are no longer eating cows.
But are they telling us what's really going on?
"[Cows] are no longer eating solid parts of other cattle, or sheep, or goats," Lyman responds. "They still munch, however, on ground-up dead horses, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, and turkeys, as well as blood and fecal matter of their own species and that of chickens. About 75 percent of the ninety million beef cattle in America are routinely given feed that has been Œenriched' with rendered animal parts."
As Peter Montague clarifies, this means the FDA is "still allowing the feeding of pigs to other animals, and the feeding of blood and gelatin from rendering plants to all animals." Thanks to this loophole, calves are raised on "a diet of dried blood taken straight from rendering plants." Also, chickens and pigs are still being force-fed rendered animal products.
"There are sound scientific arguments why this policy represents a form of Russian roulette being played with the health of the American public," Montague declares. "Given that we are dealing with infectious diseases that invariably kill, the precautionary principle seems the only appropriate policy."
"Faced with the choice between possible damage to the public health and injury to the private industry, the government has thrown the precautionary principle to the wind," counter investigative journalists John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, authors of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?.
And it gets worse.
Roughly 1.6 million tons of livestock wastes are generated annually and another dazzling form of corporate ingenuity involves the use of animal excrement as feed.
"In Arkansas, for example," cites Lyman, "the average farm feeds over fifty tons of chicken litter to cattle every year. One Arkansas cattle farmer was quoted in U.S. News & World Report as having recently purchased 745 tons of litter collected from the floors of local chicken-raising operations."
The farmer mixed the litter with soybean bran before feeding it to his cattle, explaining, "If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feeds are too expensive."
As a result of the above farming practices, it is believed that those enduring agents of infection‹prions‹are being transmitted in the parts of dead animals: from roadkill or chicken litter to cattle feed to sirloin steak and then, some say, to humans.
The National Renderers Association and the Animal Protein Producers Industry contend, of course, that the connection between forced cannibalism and BSE is tenuous at best.
"The science just isn't clear enough," a National Renders Association spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. "There are a lot of theories, but there hasn't been any specific proof on how the disease is transmitted."
However, the American Red Cross is convinced enough to have banned anyone who has spent more than six months in England since 1980 from donating blood in the United States. Now, according to vegetarian activist Pam Rice, the Red Cross is exploring the option to severely tighten restrictions on blood, "to the point of disallowing donations from anyone who has lived or traveled anywhere in Western Europe over a period of three months or more."
"If you're a meat-eater in America," says Howard Lyman, "you have a right to know that you have something in common with most of the cows you've eaten. They've eaten meat, too."
Bad to the Bone
"Do you use bone meal on your roses? I wouldn't if I were you."
‹ D. Carleton Gajdusek, M.D.
D. Carleton Gajdusek, M.D. first became cognizant of human spongiform disease in the 1950s. George Johnson, in the New York Times Book Review, explained that "[Dr. Gajdusek] worked among cannibals in the New Guinea highlands. In solemn ceremonies, the women and children of the Fore tribe ate the brains and other parts of dead relatives, some of whom had found their way onto the menu after dropping dead of a neurological disease called kuru, meaning Œfear' or Œtrembling.' Previously healthy victims, some of them children, would begin stumbling, shaking, slurring their words. Within a few months, they would be incapacitated. Unable to swallow, many died of hunger or thirst."
Gajdusek, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work, postulated that prions should bear the blame for kuru, BSE, and, perhaps, others long-incubating diseases that can affect humans. And prions are not just ingested through eating. In his book, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague, Richard Rhodes tells of Dr. Gajdusek's concern that the bone meal used to fertilize flowers is made from dead cattle. "The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose," Gajdusek said.
Bone meal is a commonly used fertilizer, popular with‹ironically enough‹organic gardeners. While the British government has already banned the use of bone meal as a fertilizer in commercial agriculture, according to Roger Windsor in Spectrum magazine, it is feasible for infected bone meal to be imported to the U.S. from other countries with the disease.
"To be on the safe side," Windsor cautions, "experts recommend that gardeners handling bone meal wear masks and gloves, and take care not to become exposed to the substance through an accidental cut or splinter."
Another illustration of the durability of prions was "unearthed" when researchers found that prions were not harmed when buried in the ground for three years.
"In a recent conversation I had with a university plant scientist," recalls Windsor, "he said that it was theoretically possible for prions from contaminated fertilizers to be absorbed by plants. Given these facts, it might be prudent to avoid vegetables grown with bone meal until more is known."
A comparable warning might be justified when it comes to the dust rising up from your pet's dry food. Absorption of such dust‹from bone meal or pet food‹allows for easy access to the brain through the eyes or nostrils.
So, while poor little Rover consumes rendered roadkill until he is inevitably euthanized and rendered himself, now this gruesome process may bring Rover's human companion along for the very bumpy ride.
You are What You Eat
"The true prevalence of these diseases is likely to be underestimated."
‹from a1990 article in the British medical journal, Lancet,
In a society so devoid of empathy for so-called "livestock," it's predictable that a lethal condition like BSE and the cruelty that produces it would not hit radar screens until those disagreeable little prions reared their ugly heads among humans in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).
CJD is also a transmissible, invariably fatal spongiform encephalopathy with a prolonged incubation period that leaves sponge-like holes in a victim's brain. A newly identified variant of CJD, linked to BSE in British cattle, is what sparked the current "mad cow" furor.
"In humans," Montague says, "the BSE-like disease is called Œnew variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease,' or nvCJD for short. CJD has been recognized for a long time as a rare disease of the elderly‹very similar to Alzheimer's disease‹but nvCJD is different. It has somewhat different symptoms, a different pattern of disintegration in the brain, and it strikes young people, even teenagers. Between 1995 and early 1998, at least 23 people died of nvCJD in Britain and at least one in France, the oldest of them age 42 and the youngest 15."
When a 1999 study proved that nvCJD is, in fact, a human form of mad cow disease, all hope that a species barrier could protect humans was abandoned.
A species barrier does not exist, but there just may be a diagnosis barrier. Early symptoms of nvCJD include personality changes, depression, difficulty sleeping, withdrawal, fearfulness, and paranoia. Consequently, several patients were first referred by their doctors to a psychiatrist.
The New York Times reported that doctors were also fooled because "brain wave tracings of the patients did not show the changes that are usually observed in traditional cases of the human brain disease, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease."
"CJD robs victims of lucidity, control and life over a period ranging from six months to three years from the onset of symptoms, which can take from 10 to 40 years to manifest," writes journalist Gabe Kirchheimer. "Like all TSEs, CJD is 100 percent fatal. There is no treatment or cure. As no blood test for the living is available, CJD has been definitively diagnosed only through brain biopsy."
As reported by Stauber and Rampton in Covert Action Quarterly, "TSEs produce no signs of inflammation or fever, and no detectable antibody response. The disease usually goes undetected, therefore, until visible symptoms appear, by which time death is inevitable."
Under such circumstances, it is remarkably difficult to determine how far-reaching an outbreak of nvCJD might become. British epidemiologists assume somewhere between 75 people and 80,000 people will eventually die of the new disease. Considering that the meat from more than 1.5 million infected cows in Britain has been consumed, those numbers may appear optimistic.
"Only time will tell," says Peter Montague "More precise estimates of the size of the problem are not possible because no one knows for sure how long nvCJD Œincubates,' how much time elapses between infection and the appearance of symptoms."
Studies cited by Kirchheimer indicate it is likely that "tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are dying right now of undiagnosed or misdiagnosed CJD."
Government figures estimate approximately 200 to 300 cases of CJD have been diagnosed in the US. Before you take comfort in that modest figure, bear in mind the findings of Stauber and Rampton. The authors of Mad Cow USA learned that while some four million Americans have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, autopsies reveal that roughly 25 percent of alleged Alzheimer's deaths were caused instead by other forms of dementia. One percent of these deaths has been attributed to CJD. If this trend is extrapolated and one percent of the four million Americans with Alzheimer's actually has nvCJD, the nationwide estimate rises from 200 to 40,000 cases.
Have you heard anything in the corporate media about this possibility?
"It's very unfortunate that the news media in the United States has done such a poor job of covering this issue," laments Stauber. "It's unfortunate, but not surprising."
How safe are Americans from being exposed to the human variant of mad cow disease? In France, a nation with only 5.7 cows, 20,000 are tested each week with 153 found infected in 2000. Out of the 37 million US cattle slaughtered each year, only about 1000 are tested annually.
You do the math.
"The growing number of British victims of Œnew variant' CJD, mostly young people in their prime who contracted the brain sickness from tainted meat, is a grim precursor to an uncertain future," writes Kirchheimer
"It is impossible to predict the size of the epidemic," cautions microbiologist John Collinge, "it may only involve hundreds, but it could become a disaster of biblical proportions."
Apocalypse Cow?
"This was hardly our first glimpse of the bad side of beef. Research has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that meat is to your digestive tract what tobacco is to your lungs."
‹Neal Barnard, MD
Despite the ominous specter of 40,000 potential nvCJD cases at the very minimum and incalculable others presently in incubation, it would be prudent to bear in mind the far more prevalent results of animal consumption.
CJD is just the latest of many meat-related maladies.
Every 45 seconds, someone in the US has a heart attack. Every 55 seconds, an American dies from heart disease, a highly preventable illness and the nation's number one killer. Forty-five percent of all heart attacks occur in people under 65. Even more disturbing is the growing number of Americans (75,000 per year) under 40 who are now suffering heart attacks.
Every seven seconds, an American is diagnosed with cancer, the number two killer. One out of three in the US will get cancer and one out of four will die from this highly preventable disease. Seventy-five percent of the carcinogens in our bodies come from eating animal products.
Mad cow disease is a frightening new reality, but its emergence doesn't change the fact that the standard Western diet is answerable for widespread carnage and is at the root of the TSE scare.
"Mad Cow Disease is a horrible affliction that may one day reach epidemic proportions among humans," says Steve Lustgarden of Earthsave. "In the meantime, the ill-effects of a meat-based diet are already epidemic. Such a diet is clearly unnecessary, inherently unhealthy, and environmentally destructive. Study after study demonstrate that diets based on foods of plant origin enrich and extend life, and that beef and other animal products, even when untainted, help clog arteries, hospital beds, and cemeteries throughout the world. Given the overwhelming scientific evidence, eating an animal-centered diet is indeed madness."
"If you eat any animal product, from chicken to chops, you already have to worry about salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and cancer, as well as your weight. Now, you can add mad cow disease to the list," says PETA's Vegan Campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich. "The best way to ensure that you and your family won't get sick is to go vegetarian."
Or, as the Mad Cowboy himself, Howard Lyman advises, "To make our choices informed ones, we have to start with the facts."
Web Resources
www.madcowboy.com, www.mad-cow.org, www.earthsave.org, www.garynull.com, www.vivavegie.org, www.healthmall.com, www.vegan.com, www.stealthtechnolgies.com/satya, www.vegetariantimes.com, www.vegsource.com/klaper, www.peta-online.org, www.meatstinks.org |
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