Americans eat about 65 pounds of beef every year. As federal investigators try to determine how a cow in Washington state may have become infected with the brain-wasting illness, mad cow disease, some consumers are wondering if they need to take any precautions and change their diets. The following is from the Food and Drug Administration:

Q: Why is mad cow disease a concern?

A: A human disease related to mad cow is known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It is incurable and was blamed for 143 deaths in Britain, which suffered a mad cow disease outbreak in the 1980s. Humans can get it by eating meat that contains tissue from infected animals, specifically from the brain and spinal cord.

Q: Is it likely I will get sick from eating beef?

A: Mad cow disease, officially known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, (BSE) has not been found in beef muscle or dairy products. Scientists say the disease is found only in nerve tissue, specifically the brain and spinal cord. So experts say beef steaks and roasts are safe, along with hamburger ground from labeled cuts, such as chuck or round. Meat such as the liver and tongue also are safe.

Q: Are processed beef products riskier to eat?

A: Slightly. Meat such as ground beef, hot dogs, taco meat, and luncheon meats are made from several sources of meat. They are obtained by machines, known as "advanced meat recovery systems," that strip flesh from the spines and other awkwardly shaped parts of the cow. Some tests have detected tissue from the central nervous system in samples of beef products. However, many meat companies remove the spine and brain before processing.

Such tissues are not supposed to be in meat products in the United States unless they are labeled. Industry officials say Agriculture Department tests on beef products found incidental amounts of central nervous system cells.

Q: How can the government ensure that beef is safe?

A: In the case of the cow in Washington, federal and state officials have quarantined the herd on the farm where the animal came from. If tests in England confirm that the cow had BSE, then the herd will be slaughtered to prevent an outbreak. Investigators also are tracing where the meat from the animal was sent. Beef and cattle imported from countries with BSE are banned.

Also, the government has banned since 1997 cattle feed made with protein or bone meal from being fed to other grazing animals - cattle, goats and sheep. Farmers used to feed such meal to their animals because it helped them gain weight. Consumer groups argue there are too many loopholes in the system, though. They have demanded wider testing and better tracking of sick animals.

Q: The cow was a "downer" animal that was injured when giving birth. Why are these animals allowed into the food supply?

A: The Agriculture Department allows such animals into the food supply if they are not sick. Federal veterinarians check the animals for signs of illness before they are processed. If an animal is sick, it isn't allowed to be slaughtered for meat and tests are run to determine what ails it. Often, "downer" animals are processed for pet food because their meat is rendered, a process that basically cooks the meat and kills disease.

Q: Can my pets get sick with mad cow?

A: Mad cow disease is one of a family of illnesses that has only been known to infect animals such as cattle, sheep, elk and deer. The cow likely was sick from eating feed made from an infected cow, even though that type of feed is banned. If that's true, other cattle also might be infected and they might have been processed into food for humans by accident. Or they might have been ground into animal feed that could infect other livestock that people could someday eat.

The Food and Drug Administration is working with the Agriculture Department to determine the source of the illness.

A human disease related to mad cow is known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. It is incurable and was blamed for 143 deaths in Britain, which suffered a mad cow disease outbreak in the 1980s. Humans can get it by eating meat that contains tissue from infected animals, specifically from the brain and spinal cord.From an AP story earlier this year:

DENVER (AP) — Two patients have died at a Colorado hospital this year from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), an illness similar to the mad cow disease, and there is concern other patients may have been exposed, a hospital spokeswoman said Friday.

The patients, both over 60, died in January and February at Exempla St. Joseph Hospital, said Steve Krizman, a spokesman for Kaiser-Permanente, the health maintenance organization that cared for them.

Hospital spokeswoman Kathleen Ferguson said at least six other patients may have been exposed to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease through surgical instruments used while treating one of the two who died.

The instruments were sterilized after each use, but no studies have been done to show whether sterilization procedures are effective against the proteins that cause the disease, said Dr. Cathy van Blerkom, chair of the hospital's Department of Pathology and Infection Control. "There are a lot of unknowns in this disease," she said.

The Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease attacks the brain, killing cells and creating gaps in tissue. The brain takes on a sponge-like appearance. Early symptoms include memory problems, mood changes and lack of coordination. The disease progresses to shakiness and dementia. Victims are eventually unable to move or speak.

A separate form of the disease has been linked directly to eating meat from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. Nearly 100 people in Europe have died of the disease since 1995.

About two cases of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease are reported in Colorado every year, said Cindy Parmenter of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. "We had four in 2000 and two or three in years before that," Parmenter said. "It usually happens in people 60 and older. It's not totally unusual."

Mad Cow Case Has Not Choked U.S. Appetite For Beef: Industry

WASHINGTON (AFP) - U.S. authorities were racing to track down recalled meat linked to a cow infected with mad cow disease, as fast food operators across the United States insisted that the scare has not dented Americans hunger for beef burgers. As investigators scramble to locate recalled beef sold across eight western states, McDonald's - the world's biggest fast-food chain - said that as of Dec. 27, its domestic sales had been unaffected by the scare.

Wary of public fears, the White House has also stressed that President Bush continues to show a healthy appetite for beef.

Following tests, U.S. officials confirmed the country's first mad cow case Friday from an affected Holstein dairy cow in the northwest state of Washington. Meat from that and 19 other slaughtered cows was sold in Washington state, Oregon, California, Nevada, Alaska, Montana, Hawaii, Idaho, as well as the U.S. territory of Guam, according to Kenneth Petersen of the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service. Prior to Sunday, the recall was just limited to just four states.

Officials Saturday were unable to detail how much of the recalled meat had been found, and it appears possible some of the recalled meat has already been eaten by unsuspecting consumers. U.S. Department of Agriculture officials said meat from the affected animal represents a "minuscule" risk to humans, and that the disease primarily affects a cow's central nervous system. Chief U.S. Veterinary officer, Ron DeHaven, said Saturday, "there is no scientific evidence to suggest that milk or dairy products can carry the mad cow disease to humans."

Despite such reassurances, over 30 countries have halted U.S. beef imports in response to the mad cow case, but McDonald's says it's had no impact on sales. "We've noticed no reduction in the beef product being purchased. We continue to monitor this situation closely," said Walt Riker, McDonald's vice president for media relations. He stressed McDonald's has very stringent protections in place to protect its customers from tainted foods. "These policies meet, or exceed all government requirements, and have been reviewed by our International Scientific Advisory Council on BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy)," Riker said.

Neither has President Bush changed his eating habits in the wake of the case. "He has continued to eat beef, he has eaten beef in the last couple of days," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters earlier this week in reference to the president's reaction to the matter.

Despite Americans unabashed appetite for beef and official reassurances, activists and some lawmakers are calling for a tightening up of the country's food safety protections. Michael Hansen, with the advocacy group Consumers Union, said the United States should adopt the same stringent testing as Europe and Japan. Activists point out that although 37 million cows were slaughtered here last year, only 20,000 were tested for mad cow disease.

DeHaven said the first US cow infected with mad cow disease was imported from Canada. The cow was part of a lot of animals brought into Washington state from Canada in 2001, DeHaven told reporters, citing "very preliminary information." "That information would suggest that the infected animal likely entered the United States as part of a group of 74 dairy cattle that were imported through the border crossing at Eastport, Idaho, originating from a dairy herd in Alberta, Canada in 2001," DeHaven explained.

A case of mad cow disease was reported in Alberta, Canada, last spring, but Canadian officials have cautioned against a rush to judgement. The U.S. farm where the infected cow was kept before slaughter has put its remaining 4,000 head of cattle under quarantine.

The mad cow disease has been linked to a form of the fatal, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that affects humans.

Mad Cow Case Sheds Light On Beef Uses

By Stephanie Simon
LA Times Staff Writer

It was just one cow, one lame, worn-out Holstein dragged to slaughter in a corner of the country. But the discovery that she was infected with mad cow disease has forced broader scrutiny of the U.S. food supply. The positive test, disclosed just before Christmas, has pulled back a curtain on the alchemistic processes that convert every last scrap of slaughtered livestock into ingredients for consumer products: marshmallows and cereal bars, dog food and poultry rations, lipstick and hand lotion and garden fertilizers, tires and yogurt and breath mints.

Federal officials and most outside experts continue to reassure the public that the risk from the one sick Holstein is extremely minimal — "virtually zero," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the USDA has repeatedly noted, the mutant proteins, known as prions, that cause and transmit mad cow disease do not concentrate in the muscle tissue that provides steaks, roasts and ground beef. Instead, the deadly prions tend to group in the brain, spinal column, intestines and bone marrow.

Most Americans do not knowingly eat those parts of a cow. But in a process that is largely unregulated, the entire cattle carcass — including high-risk organs and tissues — is routinely recycled into edible fats, flavorings and thickeners used in a wide range of common products. Freeze-dried bovine brains and other organs also turn up in dietary supplements sold in health-food stores. And bits of spinal tissue or bone sometimes slip into the 45 million pounds of beef a year that is trimmed off carcasses in a mechanized process known as "advanced meat recovery."

Humans can contract a form of the mad cow disease - known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob - from eating infected animal products; the deadly prions cannot be killed by cooking, irradiation, sterilization, or even chemical disinfectants. The illness - which can incubate silently, causing no symptoms for a decade or more - eats holes in the brain. It is always fatal; more than 150 people have died of it worldwide, most of them in Britain, where a mad cow epidemic ravaged herds in the 1980s.

To minimize the risk of infection from beef byproducts, the USDA announced several reforms last week. It will closely regulate mechanical meat stripping. Cattle intestines, where the prions may first take root, will no longer be allowed in the human food supply. The USDA is also banning consumption of brains and spinal cord from older cattle, which are most likely to be infected and infectious. Up to 85% of the cattle slaughtered in the U.S. are young steers; their organs (except intestines) can still enter the food supply. Two recent cases of mad cow disease in young cattle have been confirmed in Japan. The brain-wasting disease is formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

The mad cow scare has exposed America's food supply as a complex chain ever twisting back on itself — a system in which nothing is wasted. The efficiencies help keep food cheap. They also solve a major environmental challenge; billions of pounds of animal brains, hides, bones, feathers and guts are used each year, rather than burned or buried. "Our ancestors used everything but the 'moo,' and we continue to try to do that," said Will Hueston, director of the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the University of Minnesota. That efficiency, however, may open the door for contamination, since one carcass is turned into so many products and recycled through so many paths.

Any livestock carcasses that pass USDA inspection at the slaughterhouse — they are not necessarily tested for diseases but are visually examined — can enter the food supply. Considered edible waste, the carcasses are processed into lard, beef tallow and gelatin; those ingredients are then used in a range of foods, from candy to canned ham, sour cream to frosting, lozenges to soups. Gelatin even turns up in the gel-caps used for some pharmaceuticals. The Gelatin Manufacturers Institute of America says that most gelatin made for human consumption is prepared from pigskins, but it is also sometimes made from cattle bones.

The USDA exercises no oversight over the animal carcasses once they leave the slaughterhouse. That's supposed to be the job of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA inspects all 239 U.S. rendering plants annually — but only for the limited purpose of making sure that any animal feed containing cattle parts is clearly labeled. "The agency does not audit the production of ingredients for human consumption. Nor does it check to ensure that gelatin, lard and tallow are made only from carcasses that have passed USDA inspection," said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

Indeed, Sundlof said the agency's lawyers are still looking into whether the FDA has the authority to set standards for the types of animal waste used in the edible rendering process. "We're still trying to look into what all comes out of that rendering stream," Sundlof said. The FDA is also researching whether it has the authority to take steps to ensure the safety of unregulated dietary supplements. Popular pills known as "glandulars" — marketed to boost energy and libido — often contain concentrated extracts from cattle glands and organs, such as the pituitary gland, liver, testicles and brain.

Experts say that rendering does not kill the prions that spread BSE. But they also say that the chance of infection from any rendered product is extremely low. Only the barest traces of cattle remains would be present in, say, canned soup or gummy candy. "I don't look at [rendered products] as being much of a risk at all, given that there's only been one infected cow found in this country so far," said Leon Thacker, director of the animal disease diagnostic lab at Purdue University. The FDA says all rendered products traced to the Holstein infected with mad cow disease have been put on a "voluntary hold," meaning the factories that made them are not supposed to release them for sale.

"Now that I know the byproducts of cattle can be in almost anything, I'm going to start reading labels," said Humberto Retana, 33, a stay-at-home dad from Oakland. Retana has been a vegetarian for more than a decade, steadfastly refusing the steaks his wife tries to tempt him with. But until the mad cow disease scare prompted him to start researching the meat industry, Retana had never realized how often he ate or used products made with rendered cattle parts. "The notion that every last bit of the cow needs to be turned into some kind of profit is just extraordinary," Retana said.

If the edible rendering market is largely hidden from public view, the parallel practice of inedible rendering is even more obscure. Plants that deal with inedible rendering take in all the livestock that the USDA deems unfit for human consumption, including cows that died from unexplained causes on farms, or arrive at slaughterhouses visibly ill, with tumors, wasted bodies, sunken eyes or clear neurological impairments. (Until a USDA reform last week, "downer" cattle, which cannot walk on their own, were still considered fit for human consumption as long as they didn't exhibit other signs of disease.)

Some inedible rendering plants also process dogs and cats that were euthanized in animal shelters, carcasses brought in by hunters, even road kill. They melt everything down at extremely high temperatures, sterilize it repeatedly and turn it into livestock feed, pet food, organic fertilizer and glycerine — an ingredient used in everything from crayons to cosmetics to toothpaste to fabric softener. In 1997, the FDA acted on concerns that animal feed containing rendered cattle could rapidly, and disastrously, spread BSE. The mad cow disease outbreak that infected more than a million British cows in the 1980s was spread in just that manner.

So the U.S. began insisting that all animal feed containing rendered cattle be labeled. American farmers were allowed to feed it only to poultry and to swine — species that are not known to contract BSE through infected rations. (Pet food containing rendered cattle can also be legally fed to cats, even though felines are susceptible to a brain-wasting illness very similar to mad cow disease.) Federal officials have repeatedly described the 1997 feed ban as a firewall protecting the U.S. from a Britain-style epidemic of mad cow. But the system is not airtight.

A report a year ago by the congressional watchdog, the U.S. General Accounting Office found flaws in the FDA's enforcement of the feed ban and widespread lapses at rendering plants and feed mills. The FDA says those problems have been fixed. Even so, some loopholes are built into the law. For instance: When feed containing rendered cattle is given to poultry, some of it scatters on the floor as the birds peck at it. The floor is also thick with excrement, feathers, dirt and bits of straw. Rather than throw all that waste away, farmers sweep it up and recycle it — by selling it as cattle feed. The FDA allows that practice, which is most common in the big chicken-producing states of the Southeast.

The ban on cattle eating cattle is circumvented in other ways too. It's legal to feed American cattle dry pet food that is past its expiration date. Yet that pet food is made from cattle carcasses. It's also legal to feed cattle supplements made from restaurant leftovers — including steaks and burgers. And calves are routinely fed formula, meant to replace their mothers' milk, that is made from dried cattle blood. Critics call it "the cannibalism circuit." Farmers reply that the practices not only prevent waste, they also save money — and keep food prices low.

A dairy cow, for instance, can more than double her milk output if she's fed high-protein supplements. The traditional bovine diet of grass doesn't provide enough calories for her to produce milk in the quantities that modern agriculture demands. The FDA issued a public notice 14 months ago that it was considering restricting the use of poultry litter, pet food and restaurant leftovers as cattle feed. It has not yet acted. Sundlof said the agency was still accepting public comment on the notice. "The challenge we face is that all these practices are tied together in one big system," Hueston said. "These are very complex issues, with social as well as biological and economic implications."

The issues clearly disturb some Americans; the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals reported receiving 10,000 requests in the last week for its free "vegan starter kit." That's triple its normal call volume. Overall, though, consumers continue to eat as much beef as always. McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants have reported no drop in sales. Interviews around the country confirm that most people are sticking with their favorite foods. "We're beefeaters - end of story," said Steve McCarthy, who was downing brisket and sausage at a Houston barbecue joint last week.

In a public show of confidence in American cattle, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley and North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven made it their New Year's resolutions to eat beef more often. Hoeven then invited Gov. Tim Pawlenty of neighboring Minnesota to dine with him at a restaurant of his choice — any restaurant, that is, where the menu features steak."

Blood Transfusion Linked to Second Human Case of Mad Cow Disease

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post

British researchers have found a second person who became infected with the human version of mad cow disease as the result of a contaminated blood transfusion. Reporting in the journal Lancet, the researchers said they had found the malformed proteins, or prions, that cause the disease in an unidentified person who died this year of unrelated causes.

The discovery of a second transfusion-associated prion infection, experts said, suggests that the risk of mad cow disease to the population is higher than they had realized, because it appears to confirm that eating infected beef is not the only way of spreading the disease.

The prions were found through an intensive autopsy, which was conducted because the victim was one of 17 people known to have received blood from donors who later developed the incurable disease.

Both the United Kingdom and the United States took steps several years ago to protect their blood supplies from mad cow contamination because of what was then a theoretical concern that it could be transmitted through blood transfusions. In 2001, the American Red Cross began to turn away donors who had spent three months in Britain, or six months anywhere in Europe, since 1980.

The first confirmed transmission of mad cow disease through a blood transfusion was reported in Britain late last year. The second case was in someone who had received the transfusion five years ago. The person showed none of the neurological symptoms typical of the disease.

Mad cow disease, or, in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, causes death by attacking the brain and central nervous system, but in the second case the infection had not spread to those areas. The prions were found in the spleen and in a cervical lymph node.

The second transfusion-infected victim also had a different genetic makeup than the approximately 150 people who had contracted the disease. That discovery led principal researcher James Ironside, of the British CJD Surveillance Unit, to conclude that more people might be susceptible to the disease. Researchers had believed that people with the second victim's genetic makeup, or genotype, were in some way protected from mad cow disease.

In an accompanying Lancet commentary, blood-policy specialists Kumanan Wilson of Toronto General Hospital and Maura N. Ricketts of Health Canada argue that aggressive and sometimes costly steps taken to protect blood supplies from mad cow disease have been proven to be well-founded and necessary. "The key lesson from this policy-making experience is that lack of definitive evidence should not preclude action for serious potential exposures," they wrote in support of applying the "precautionary principle" in medicine. They also wrote that "there now appears to be sufficient evidence that individuals without clinical signs of (mad cow disease) harbor, and therefore potentially transmit, the infection."

In another Lancet article, researchers at the University of Maryland reported that removing white blood cells from donated blood, called leucoreduction, reduces the risk of mad cow disease transmission, but only by about 40%. French scientists reported they had identified a new technique for disinfecting prion-contaminated medical devices.

if you do not eat beef then you are safe, right?

complex problem, simple solution.

nuts, fruits, grains, vegetables.

Tru dat, jfp...here is the latest:

Wide-Open Gaps May Cause Mad Cow To Strike Back

Associated Press
June 18, 2005

WASHINGTON - The Mad Cow disease, which was first spotted in the U.S. in December 2003, could very well affect cattle once again. With cattle feed being substituted with cheap alternatives like chicken litter, cattle blood and restaurant leftovers, the disease could once again start infecting the country's livestock.

Though the Bush administration had taken steps to keep the disease under check, it became business as usual when the cameras were turned off and the media coverage dissipated. John Stauber, an activist and co-author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? explained that "the entire U.S. policy is designed to protect the livestock industry's access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed."

The government is now investigating another possible case of the disease in the United States. The beef cow had been tested last November and declared disease-free, but when new tests came up positive, a laboratory in England started conducting more tests.

The Food and Drug Administration promised to tighten feed rules shortly after the first case of the disease was confirmed in the U.S. The FDA had promised it would ban blood, poultry litter and restaurant waste from cattle feed and order feed mills to use separate equipment to make cattle feed. But, it has still not done what it had promised.

Unlike other infections, Mad Cow disease doesn't spread through the air. As far as scientists know, cows get the disease only by eating brain and other nerve tissues of already infected animals. Ground-up cattle remains from slaughtering operations were used as protein in cattle feed until 1997, when an outbreak of mad cow cases in Britain prompted the United States to order the feed industry to stop doing it. Unlike Britain, however, the U.S. feed ban has exceptions.

For example, it is legal to put ground-up cattle remains in chicken feed. Feed that spills from cages mixes with chicken waste on the ground, then is swept up for use in cattle feed. Cattle protein can also be fed to chickens, pigs and household pets, which presents the risk of accidental contamination in a feed mill. Companies that process slaughter waste say that the restrictions would be costly and create hazards from leftover waste. "We process about 50 billion pounds of product annually. That is a convoy of semi-trucks, four lanes wide, running from New York to LA every year," said Jim Hodges, president of the meat-packing industry's American Meat Institute Foundation.

Cattle trade "should not resume unless and until" loopholes in the feed ban are closed, according to an internal Agriculture Department memo, written by its working group of experts in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America obtained the memo as part of its lawsuit against the department.

Even though the loopholes remain, the Agriculture Department late last year approved reopening the border. Only a federal judge in Montana is keeping the border closed. He sided with R-CALF, which fears that another infected cow shipped in might be carrying the disease, just like the lone U.S. case found in Washington state in 2003...

I believe Mad Cow's disease resulted from feeding cows the remains of other animals, especially other cows and that's how the disease spread.

Vegetarians have no business being fed meat.

And we as humans should only eat animals that eat vegetation, not animals that eat meat.


This is why the Islamic way of properly raising animals, ritually slaughtering them, draining their blood, chopping the meat up into small pieces, and cooking it well done is the most proper way to eat meat.

if i were a cow, i'd be pretty mad.

USDA confirms second case of mad cow disease (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8889861)


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A second case of mad cow disease in the United States has been confirmed after tests, the U.S. Agriculture Department said on Friday.

USDA said it was investigating where the animal with the brain-wasting disease originally came from. It also said meat from the infected cow was not sold to consumers or as animal feed.


Click Here To Read Entire Article (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8889861)

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They didn't mention what state this mad cow was found in. They are quick to say that none of the infected cow was sold or used ... but you can't help but wonder how many got sold and used, that weren't found.

Does cooking the meat at some certain, high temperature ... or beating the meat with a bat, or sump'n ... i mean does anything kill the mad cow stuff in the beef?

:heart:

Destee

we eat them, they kill us.
sounds like Karma to me.

I hear you, jfp...here's the latest:

How to Bury a Mad Cow

By John Stauber

Late Friday, June 24, is a perfect time to bury bad news in Washington, DC. That's when Mike Johanns, the United States Secretary of Agriculture held a news conference. He announced that a beef cow suspected last November to be positive with mad cow disease, and finally properly tested, was indeed positive. Even now the USDA is keeping secret which state the cow was from, but Texas has long been mentioned in media articles. The initially-botched finding of a second mad cow in the U.S. emphasizes the failure of the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to protect Americans from the deadly dementia called "mad cow disease."

The so-called "firewall feed ban" to prevent cattle from contracting the disease in the U.S. is a joke...more like pouring gasoline on a fire. Hundreds of millions of pounds of cattle blood, cattle fat, and the meat, blood, fat and bone meal from pigs and chickens are legally fed to cattle each year on U.S. farms and ranches and feedlots. American cattle are also being fed a million tons a year of chicken litter and feces contaminated with cattle meat and bone meal. These are practices that can spread mad cow disease and are banned in countries like England and Japan, where there is a real firewall feed ban.

The U.S. mad cow testing system seems designed to cover up mad cow disease rather than find it. Other countries test most or all of their cattle before human consumption for food safety purposes. The U.S. tests a small percentage of the 36 million cattle a year that are slaughtered and put into the human and animal feed chain. Most animals infected with mad cow disease will look healthy and be slaughtered and put into the food system without testing. Only testing millions of U.S. cattle a year will reveal how much mad cow disease there really is in the U.S.

Britain has announced two cases of human man cow disease spread through blood transfusions, and the U.S. is risking the loss of its own blood supply by not taking the measures Britain and other countries have taken to prevent the disease.

It is long over due for the U.S. to stop its cover-up and denial of mad cow disease and put in place the real firewall feed ban that is working in Britain and other countries. We must have a total ban on feeding any animal protein to livestock, coupled with a mad cow testing program that tests all animals before consumption.

Anything short of these proven measures is scientifically unsound and threatens both the human food supply and the blood supply in the U.S. Unfortunately, the Department of Agriculture is continuing to lie and deny about mad-cow risks in the U.S., while allowing the powerful livestock and animal feed lobby to continue turning their bloody slaughterhouse waste into supplemental feed for cattle.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0625-20.htm

i think i'll have a salad.

thank God i have not had beef since 91....sheesh

one love
khasm

Thank God I have not had beef since '91...^5 khasm...here is more info:

Mad Cow Disease Cover-Up?

Dr. Lester Friedlander, a former USDA vet, had been blowing the whistle on the USDA beef inspection practices before the latest case of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), was confirmed. Dr. Friedlander said that inspectors are allowed only 15 seconds of inspection and that unhygenic practices are common in the meat industry; practices such as cow-carcass abscesses being hosed off, wrapped up and shipped to the consumer.

The Organic Consumers Association reported last year that hundreds of people are dying in the U.S. each year from CJD (the human counterpart of BSE), and the deaths are being written off as "unexplainable." The disease causes holes in the brains of victims.

Dr. Friedlander also claims that some supervisors were more concerned about falsifying inspection documents than protecting consumers. He claims that on June 9, 2005, a cow in Texas with BSE symptoms was sent straight to the rendering plant without testing.

BSE, commonly known as "mad cow disease," is a fatal, neuro-degenerative disease of cattle, which infects by a mechanism that shocked biologists on its discovery in the late 20th century and appears transmissible to humans. While never having killed cattle on a scale comparable to other dreaded livestock diseases, such as foot-and-mouth and rinderpest, BSE has attracted wide attention because of its apparent transmissibility and lethality to humans, as well as for the nature of the mental decay it causes.

Unlike other kinds of infectious disease that are spread by microbes, the infectious agent in BSE is a specific type of protein. Misshaped ("misfolded") prion proteins carry the disease between individuals and cause deterioration of the brain. BSE is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE).

TSEs can arise in animals that carry a rare mutant prion allele, which expresses prions that contort by themselves into the disease-causing shape. Most TSEs, however, occur sporadically - in animals that do not have a prion protein mutation. Transmission can occur when healthy animals consume tainted tissues from other animals with the disease. In the brain these proteins cause native cellular prion protein to deform into the infectious state, which then goes on to deform further prion protein in an exponential cascade. These aggregate to form dense plaque fibers, which lead to the microscopic appearance of "holes" in the brain, degeneration of mental and physical abilities, and ultimately death.

http://www.juiceenewsdaily.com/0605/news/mad_cow.html

how long after you eat beef do symptoms start to show -- i heard that it was a couple of years -- is this true?

From the article:

Humans can contract a form of the mad cow disease - known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob - from eating infected animal products; the deadly prions cannot be killed by cooking, irradiation, sterilization, or even chemical disinfectants. The illness - which can incubate silently, causing no symptoms for a decade or more - eats holes in the brain. It is always fatal; more than 150 people have died of it worldwide, most of them in Britain, where a mad cow epidemic ravaged herds in the 1980s...

Cattle Confined at Site of First Homegrown Mad Cow Case

By David J. Phillip
Associated Press

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — Cattle will not be allowed to leave the Texas ranch that produced the nation's first homegrown case of mad cow disease, and government officials will work to find animals related to the sick cow, authorities said Thursday. Livestock are kept in a pen before auction in Texas. The state leads the nation in cattle inventory, which has a $14 billion impact on the state.

None of those "animals of interest" have yet been identified. If found, the cattle will be killed and tested, Texas animal health officials said. The 12-year-old beef cow was born, raised and used for breeding at the same ranch and had never left the property, authorities said. They would not identify the ranch or the size of the herd.

Agriculture officials announced Wednesday that the latest confirmed case of mad cow disease in the United States had been traced to the animal, which was a "downer" that could not walk. The cow was slaughtered last November at a pet-food plant in Waco, Texas, and never entered the nation's human food supply. It was the first time the disease has been confirmed in a U.S.-born cow. The other U.S. case was in a dairy cow imported from Canada.

The state Animal Health Commission put a hold on the ranch's cattle earlier this month when tests indicated a mad cow case among the herd. Officials have said the infection most likely started with contaminated feed eaten before August 1997, when the United States and Canada began banning cow parts in cattle feed. The cow was born about four years before the feed ban was implemented.

Officials also are trying to identify herd mates born within one year of the infected cow's birth, as well as any offspring born within the past two years and other related cattle. USDA Chief Veterinarian John Clifford said it is "highly unusual" to find the disease in more than one animal in a herd or in an affected animal's offspring.

The animal arrived dead in November at Champion Pet Food. An initial screening indicated the presence of mad cow, but more sophisticated follow-up tests were negative, and samples were sent to a British lab, which found that the animal had the disease. The carcass was later incinerated.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration will trace the feed history of animals born on the ranch around the same time as the infected cow, including any animals no longer on the farm. Investigators will also examine compliance records for plants that may have processed meat and bone meal from relatives or herd mates of the sick animal to see whether the companies complied with the feed ban regulations.

The Agriculture Department began monitoring cattle more aggressively after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease was discovered in December 2003 in Washington state. More than 400,000 cattle have been tested since June 2004. Texas is the leading cattle state in the nation, with 13.8 million head or 15% of the U.S. cattle inventory.

Mad cow disease, medically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is a brain-wasting illness that infects cattle. It is believed to be spread when a cow eats meal that contains spinal or brain tissue of an animal infected with BSE. Humans can get a related illness - variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - if they eat infected tissue.

New Unsettling Theory on the Origins of Mad Cow Disease

CBC News

A new and disturbing theory about the possible origin of "mad cow" disease has been published, and a Canadian scientist said it is "plausible." In a report in the British medical journal, The Lancet, Professor Alan Colchester of the University of Kent in England says BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) may have been caused by the tons of animal bones and other tissue imported in the '60s and '70s from India for animal feed that may have contained the remains of humans infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

Professor Colchester and his daughter Nancy, from the college of medicine and veterinary medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said the practice may still be taking place elsewhere. They said it is important to discover whether other countries are importing animal byproducts contaminated with human remains that are destined for feed mills. The authors admitted their hypothesis is based on a compilation of circumstantial evidence. They wrote: "We do not claim that our theory is proved, but it unquestionably warrants further investigation."

It had previously been thought that the brain-wasting mad cow disease passed to cattle through remains of sheep infected with scrapie - the sheep equivalent of BSE - that were added to cattle feed. The once widely-held theory was that humans who ate infected beef developed a human form of BSE. It became known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or vCJD, to differentiate it from the classic human forms of the disease, which can occur sporadically or run in families.

But the British authors have suggested a reverse scenario: the remains of humans infected with classic CJD were fed to cattle, which became ill with a bovine version of the human disease. The remains of those cattle would have been rendered and mixed into new batches of feed, infecting more animals. Eventually a new version of the disease passed back into humans and was dubbed vCJD. The first case of BSE was identified in 1986 in Britain. The first human case of vCJD was diagnosed in 1995, also in that country. Britain has borne the brunt of the vCJD epidemic, with more than 150 human cases.

The Colchesters disputed the scrapie theory by noting that scrapie prions - the highly infectious misfolded proteins that cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathies - would have been in the cattle feed chain for decades before BSE arose. (Scrapie has been endemic in Britain for more than 200 years, and sheep remains have been fed to cattle there for at least 70 years.) As well, cattle that are experimentally infected with scrapie develop a disease, but it is markedly distinct from BSE.

The Colchesters noted that hundreds of thousands of tons of mammalian remains - whole and crushed bones and carcass parts - were imported to Britain for use in fertilizer and animal feed during the 1960s and '70s. Nearly 50% was from the countries of the Indian subcontinent. They wrote: "In India and Pakistan, gathering large bones and carcasses from the land and from rivers has long been an important local trade for peasants. Collectors encounter considerable quantities of human as well as animal remains as a result of religious customs." Hindu doctrine instructs that bodies should be cremated and the remains deposited in a river, preferably the legendary Ganges. But because of the cost of a full cremation, many corpses are partially burned, then deposited in a river.

Canada's leading expert on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies - as mad cow and its sister diseases are called - says the unsettling hypothesis may be accurate. "All I can say at this point is it's plausible. It's not out to lunch," Dr. Neil Cashman said Thursday from Vancouver. Dr. Cashman, who teaches in the department of neurology at the University of British Columbia, agreed that many authorities have retreated from the scrapie theory. "It stands to reason that somebody scavenging material - animal material - from the Ganges or the banks of the Ganges would occasionally, accidentally or deliberately include human remains in their collections. In general, they're animal carcasses. But human remains find their way into these rendering batches," he said. He also believes the authors are justified in their concern that the practice of using human remains in animal feed may be ongoing.

The report's authors noted that in 2004 a group of volunteers working to reduce pollution in the Ganges retrieved 60 human corpses from its waters in two days over a six-mile stretch of the river. Based on standard rates of CJD infection, the authors speculate that a portion of the human remains that made their way into animal feed in Britain would have contained prion-laden tissue. Dr. Cashman said, "This is also not crazy. It's also plausible."

A Canadian government spokesperson said there is no evidence animal byproducts containing human remains would have found their way to this country. "We know that we never imported bovine material - meat and bone meal - from that part of the world," said Alain Charette, media relations officer with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. "We don't have trade channels open with them because of the animal diseases they have. The only country we trade with on meat and bone meal is the United States."

Two neurologists from India's National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore challenged the hypothesis in a commentary that accompanied the article - arguing that it's not clear that prions would retain their infectivity in putrified human remains. Susarla Shankar and P. Satishchandra also argued that any infectious material would have been heavily diluted, first by the other remains, then by the other ingredients of the animal feed. "Scientists must proceed cautiously when hypothesizing about a disease that has such wide geographic, cultural and religious implications," they warned. "Facts to support or refute their hypothesis now need to be gathered with urgency and great care."

But Dr. Cashman wondered if there was any way to prove or disprove the theory, noting it might require feeding infected human brain material to cattle - an experiment the public might not tolerate. "That is the experiment from hell. Can you imagine what kind of public response there would be if you or I started an experiment where we were feeding human brains to cattle? It's like Frankenstein," he said.

Truthfully, I have stopped eating meat for some time now - but exactly why are meat producers trying to tell you that meat is good for building muscle, strength, etc, but then it can also be deadly at the same time?

CD

Everything can be deadly, even water. I remember hearing about a mother and father who forced their child to drink so much water until he/she had a stomach rupture of which the child died from.

Everything can be deadly, even water. I remember hearing about a mother and father who forced their child to drink so much water until he/she had a stomach rupture of which the child died from.

This was a result of excessive drinking. I don't necessarily think that water is dangerous, until someone does something to it that draws on bacteria and what not.

CD

To Prevent Mad Cow Disease, FDA Proposes New Restrictions on Food for Animals

By Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed new rules yesterday to prevent the spread of mad cow disease by banning brains and spinal cords from older cows in all animal feed. "This reduces a very, very low risk to even lower," said Dr. Stephen F. Sundlof, the agency's director of veterinary medicine, in announcing the changes. But the rules are not as strict as those the agency proposed last year and never adopted, and critics promptly denounced them as inadequate.

The new proposal still allows chickens, pigs and other non-cattle animals to be fed material that some scientists consider potentially infectious, including the brains and spinal cords of young animals, and the eyes, tonsils, intestines and nerves of older ones. Cows can potentially ingest that material because they can be given chicken feed and droppings swept up from the floors of poultry farms, scrapings from restaurant plates, and a calf milk replacement made from cow blood and fat. In the rules proposed in early 2004, poultry litter and plate waste would have been banned.

The FDA and the meat industry are "totally committed to continuing the practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste to cows," said John Stauber, the author of "Mad Cow U.S.A." (1997) and a critic of the meat industry who has called for a ban on feeding all animal protein to livestock. The major meat processors that also own rendering plants, Mr. Stauber said, want to keep exporting cheap protein or feeding it to their own animals and have lobbied hard to keep the right to do so.

Michael K. Hansen, an expert on prion diseases at the Consumers Union, called the new proposed rules "completely inadequate." Britain, he said, "took many halfway steps in their efforts to eliminate mad cow disease and failed to stop it," and managed only to cut new cases to the low current levels by eliminating all mammal protein in the foodstuff of animals used for food.

Dr. Sundlof, of the FDA, said removing the brains and spinal cords of older cattle would remove 90% of potentially infectious matter from all animal feed. Since June 2004, he said, the United States Department of Agriculture has tested 484,000 cattle for the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and only one animal born in the United States has tested positive. His agency, he said, also considered the cost to industry. Getting rid of just brains and spines from older cattle, he said, would create only 64 million pounds of waste that renderers would have to burn or bury, and would cost only about $14 million.

Getting rid of the vertebrae, spines, spinal nerves, eyes, intestines and other potentially infectious parts of all cattle - including the meat that nerves remain attached to - would create more than two billion pounds of waste, which he said would be an environmental problem and a big expense for the industry. Tom Cook, president of the National Renderers Association, said he was disappointed by the FDA's proposal to ban brain or spinal cord from animals not seen by meat inspectors.

Renderers typically pick up dead or dying animals from farms for about $25, he explained, strip off the hide and cook all the rest down into meal and fat to be sold as animal food or even for paint or linoleum. A slaughterhouse can split a fresh carcass and vacuum out the soft brain and spinal cord, he said, but renderers pick up animals that are bloated or in rigor mortis. The extra costs of removing organs "may take away the economic incentive," he said, "and carcasses will be disposed of illegally."

In 1997, the FDA banned feeding ruminants like cattle and sheep to other cattle and sheep, with a few exceptions like calf "milk replacement" made from cow blood. But the ban is widely acknowledged to be imperfect. Some farmers deliberately or accidentally give their cows ruminant feed. Equipment used by rendering plants processes both ruminant and nonruminant feed, which can mix. The rules proposed yesterday, Dr. Sundlof said, will not be adopted until sometime next year, after a comment period ends on Dec. 19.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/health/05cow.html