RE: THE MAD COW DISEASE...

[jamesfrmphilly]

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

 

[Aqil]

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

 

[jamesfrmphilly]

i think i'll have a salad.

 

[Khasm13]

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

one love
khasm

 

[Aqil]

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