[892] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
BSE information, with references (long)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Krom)
Fri Apr 5 20:11:38 1996
To: vsg@MIT.EDU
From: krom@media.mit.edu (Matthew Krom)
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 96 20:09:49 -0500
If you found the recent press flurry over BSE to be lacking in facts, or if
you need good references or answers to questions, you're likely to find what
you're looking for in this thoroughly-researched article!
Some interesting side points are prevalent in the article... The USDA exists
to promote agriculture (and therefore beef production) -- it is *not* a
consumer interest group. Also, note that milk and dairy are not excluded from
the list of possible transmission culprits. The article notes that mice have
been used to test whether cow muscle can carry the disease, and of course the
results are inconclusive (since mice are not cattle) -- this is sadly
indicative of the general trend of animal use in research. Finally, the
feeding of cattle (and sheep) to cattle is just one of the many horrid factory
farming practices which, if abolished, would certainly lead to a better life
for all.
-Matt
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 96 21:05:05 -0500
From: dbriars@world.std.com
To: mclibel@facteur.std.com
Subject: Mad Cow Disease "Much More Serious Than AIDS"
Check out the links on this page:
http://online.guardian.co.uk/links/default.html
Mad Cow Disease
"Much More Serious Than AIDS"
by Michael Greger
Only three children died. Granted, they convulsed to death in a pool of
bloody diarrhea, but all in all the Jack-in-the-Box E. coli is a pretty
wimpy pathogen. After centuries of humans eating rotting corpses, you
would think that nature could cook up a more nasty microbe. Let's suppose
there was something in our food supply that wasn't affected by cooking or
antibiotics. Something new and undetectable, perhaps. Some ultimate
pathogen, practically indestructible, evading the immune system and maybe
causing some invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease. Science fiction?
Well, guess what...
A seemingly[59] new[50] disease popped up in 1985 among dairy cows[12] in
Great Britain. Dubbed Mad Cow Disease by the British press,[53] Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) claimed the lives of just under 20,000
cows by 1990[33] with up to 300 new cases appearing each week.[16] Only
months after the government concluded that the disease probably wouldn't
spread to other species[1], someone's cat died of a hitherto unknown
feline spongiform encephalopathy[26] of which infected pet food was
"overwhelmingly the most likely explanation."[36] And then zoo animals
started dropping dead.[4] Together, this sparked a public uproar[19] with
unprecedented media attention.[50] Fearing its spread into the human
population, hospitals[34], nursing homes[34], and over 2000 schools[21],
affecting over 750,000 school children[7], stopped serving beef or
restricted its consumption. An early 1990 survey showed that one in ten
people in England seemed to agree with Dr. Richard Lacey[43], a
microbiologist at Leeds University, that BSE "is much more serious than
AIDS."[18]
By May 1990, a quarter of the population refused to eat beef.[38] In six
months beef prices dropped 10[5]-25%[3], devastating the cattle industry.
Declaring beef farming unprofitable, many British farmers either moved to
other crops[59] or went bankrupt.[50] The final blow came when
Australia[43], Israel[43], and a dozen other countries[24] banned the
importation of British beef because of the BSE epidemic. The USSR went
even further, banning the importation of British milk[44] and leather.
In 1991 another fifteen feline companions succumbed[47] and a half dozen
more zoo animals perished[12], in all presumably from eating infected cow
parts. By 1992 the disease spread to all dairy and beef breeds[12] and
the number of histopathologically confirmed cases almost tripled to
58,000.[27] And the plague spread across the globe and into six other
countries.[2] France even pulled 32 over-the-counter drugs off the market
because of BSE, totally banning 19 and reformulating the 13 others
without cattle tissue.[51] Last year, the number of cases quadrupled in
Switzerland[12,60] and British beef consumption reportedly tumbled to 38%
below the norm.[65] The epidemic is growing steadily[12] and continuing
unabated[64] with at least 1% of all cattle in England infected8 and
estimates ranging up to 10%.[59] Trashing all official government
predictions of a plateau of around 20,000 cases[40], we are left with
over 100,000 lab confirmed[3] cases with 1,000 new cases reported each
week.[39]
Spongiform encephalopathies are invariably fatal[29]
neurodegenerative[17] diseases. There is no treatment[55] nor cure.[18]
The novel[3] infectious agents evoke no immune response[50] and
consequently slowly accumulate[14] for an incubation period of up to 30
years.[60] You can't detect them[28], isolate them[35], nor purify
them.[13] In fact, only an autopsy can tell if you ever even had
them.[45] They aren't viruses and they aren't bacteria.[66] The consensus
is that they are prions, or infectious proteins.[60] Without detectable
DNA nor RNA[41], not only does no one know how they replicate[6], but the
whole concept challenges the basic tenets of biology.[45]
Because of their unique makeup, they are practically invulnerable. They
can survive for years in the soil.[61] They are not adequately destroyed
by cooking[13], canning[14], nor freezing.[40] Chemicals or enzymes which
degrade nucleic acids[55], proteolytic enzymes of the digestive
tract[49], and usable doses of UV or ionizing radiation[48] are all
ineffective in destroying their infectivity. Even heat[40], domestic
bleach[59], and formaldehyde[14] sterilization have little or no effect.
In fact, the only way to ensure that your burger is safe is to marinate
it in Drain-O (or other concentrated alkali).[59] They are the
smallest[9], most lethal self-perpetuating biological entities in the
world.
A member of Parliament recently called BSE "the most serious threat ever
posed to British agriculture."[44] But so what? So some jobs are lost and
maybe a couple of hundred thousand cows perish. The real question is, are
people going to die? Lacey (MA, MD, PhD, FRC, Path, DCH) asserts that a
"substantial danger for man exists"[55] and further, that the human
health implications of BSE are "very grave."[1]
Others, however, do not share his prediction of a "very, very grim"[8]
future. After a $6.5 million advertising campaign touting red-meat
consumption from Britain's Meat and Livestock Commission[34] and the
Minister of Agriculture gamely munching burgers with his four-year-old
daughter for the press[16], the schools have put beef back on the
menu[50] and beef consumption has regained semi-normal levels.[38]
Despite continued warnings from scientists like Lacy, the European
community has lifted its ban and most other countries have greatly
relaxed their trade restrictions.[7]
The dismissals of human risk generally fall into four categories. There
are scientists who base their assertions that the danger is minimal on
the premise that none have yet died.[16,17,48,50,57,64,70] There are
others who try to quell public fears by claiming thatthere simply exists
no evidence that indicates a human health risk from
BSE.[21,46,56,62,65,70] And finally, there are those who doubt that the
infectious agent can enter the food chain in the first
place[13,15,32,46,48,57] and/or those who question whether BSE can jump
the species barrier.[10,20,21,32,36,37,56,57,60,61]
First of all, even the wishful thinkers who see the risk to human beings
to be trivial admit that we really cannot know, and will not know, for a
number of years. This kind of "sit and wait"[3] attitude is expressed,
for example, by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) which
has stated that "the safety of British beef cannot be demonstrated for 20
or more years."[21] Second of all, the aforementioned arguments are
flimsy, deceptive, based on blatantly false assumptions, and are at best
just unscientific. Before I elucidate, some background is necessary.
"BSE was 'almost certainly'[10] caused by feeding cattle ground up, dead,
diseased sheep"[18] infected with an ovine spongiform encephalopathy
known as scrapie.[20] But aren't cows herbivores? I hate to dispel your
urbanite mythology of fragrant hay and picturesque pastures, but this is
modern agribusiness. "Protein concentrates" (euphemism for mashed- up
bits of other animals left over from the slaughterhouse) are fed to dairy
cows[22] to improve milk production,[65] for example. The real problem
now, though, is not that we've made cows meateaters but that we've turned
them into cannibals as well; the recycling of the remains of infected
cows into cattle feed[60] has probably led to the epidemic's explosive
spread.[42] "In effect, BSE resulted from an accidental experiment on the
dietary transmissability of prion disease between sheep and cows."[57] A
subsequent experiment of this kind, with humans, probably occurred in
England in the late 1980's when meat contaminated with BSE entered the
food chain.[57] "The result of this experiment is awaited ['as we live
through the incubation period'] over the next decades."[57]
Sources that try to quell public fears by pointing out that no one has
yet [see Animal News] died do not seem to understand the term incubation
period, defined as the time span between actually acquiring the disease
and the appearance of the first symptoms. Studies of human prion diseases
like kuru, which attacked a New Guinea tribe which consumed the brains of
their dead, show incubation periods as long as 3 decades.[46] The
earliest we could even expect to see people dying from BSE is probably
around 1995.[39] Having said this, the incidence of Creutzfeld-Jakob
disease (CJD), the most common human prion disease,[37] has risen 100% in
Britain since 1989.[8] Two especially notable deaths were farmers who in
fact did have BSE infected herds.[11] This is surely coincidental,
though, as they presumably didn't have time to incubate it.[73]
The USDA has stated that, "To date, no scientific evidence indicates that
BSE is a human health hazard."[8] To this, one writer replied, "Of
course, to date no scientific experiments have been done on humans to
find out if this is so."[8] This isn't entirely true, but the experiments
that have been done, if anything, point to an increased risk. For
example, CJD has been epidemiologically linked to the consumption of
offal.[58] More ominously, though, is the finding that sheep inoculated
with CJD-infected human brain develop scrapie.[21] As retired professor
of clinical neurology WB Matthews put it, "Claims that British beef is
entirely safe to eat...are scarcely scientific when the question has not
been tested and is, perhaps, untestable."[28]
Others argue that humans would never be exposed to the disease. In 1989,
offal (tonsils, intestines, spinal cord, brain, spleen etc.) was banned
from meat products destined for human consumption.[24] Because British
omnivores could then only eat the muscles, the food supply was declared
safe.[36] First of all, before the ban took hold, the nervous lymphoid,
and gut tissues of an estimated 2 million cows reached human food.[59]
Secondly, it is possible that muscles do in fact harbor sufficiently
deadly numbers of prions; spongiform encephalopathies of goats, minks,
and hamsters can be transmitted through muscle alone.[55] A recent report
does show that cow muscles are not detectably infectious, but these data
are preliminary and based only on mice.[48] And frankly it doesn't matter
because beef is not just muscle; it's laced with peripheral nerves and
lymphoid tissue[39] which have both been shown to be infectious.[39] No
tissue, though, concentrates the pathogens more than brain or spinal
cord.[46] In the slaughterhouse, beef is recovered by mechanically sawing
down the corpse, which may splash brains (which at this stage have the
consistency of custard)[59] through the meat.[55] Although BSE is more
prevalent in dairy cows and milk probably is not infectious[46], dairy
cows are quickly retired into hamburger. In addition, the prions are
thought to continuously accumulate in one's system, so that even small
doses could build up.[14]
By far the most common faulty reasoning when marginalizing human risk
factors is the argument that since scrapie gave rise to BSE and scrapie
is not transmissible to humans, then BSE is not transmissible to humans.
This is "untenable."[39] As Heino Diringer of the Robert Koch Institute
in Berlin has said, "We cannot assume that because [eating] sheep is
relatively safe, ergo beef is safe."[36] This is because every time prion
diseases jump from species to species, the characteristics of the disease
may dramatically change, including the host range.[14] For example,
scrapie cannot infect cats, but it appears BSE can.[39] One also cannot
infect rhesus monkeys with scrapie, but as soon as scrapie jumps into
minks (causing "MSE"), then the minks can infect the monkeys.[59] Scrapie
can infect mice, though, and, when it's transferred to cows, it can still
affect mice, but when transferred from sheep to mink, the mink can then
not transmit it on to mice.[59] The bottom line is that we cannot predict
what species a prion disease will affect when it jumps to a new one.[39]
But what are our chances? BSE has been able to infect and (therefore)
kill cats, antelopes, and even ostriches from presumably eating infected
protein.[1] Experimentally, one can give BSE to monkeys[56], pigs, mice,
sheep, goats[1], and chimpanzees.[8] There is no reason to believe that
BSE will not similarly infect humans.[8] In fact, if you line up ten
mammals, on average you can infect eight with BSE.[39] We don't even have
the flip of a coin in our favor.
Susceptibility is not enough, though. The critical uncertainty is, how
small a dose is necessary to pass the disease along? Theoretically it
doesn't matter if BSE can infect humans if we never eat enough meat
within a lifetime. Last year, calculations were made to determine how
many people will have consumed a potentially infectious dose by 1997.[39]
The conservative estimate runs upwards of 34 million people.[39] Or as
Lacey put it, virtually a whole generation of people may die.[31] And we
are not talking a quick and simple death, either. If we assume the
disease runs a course similar to CJD, these people will wake up one
morning twitching and deteriorate weekly[67] into blindness and
epilepsy[59] while their brain perforates into a sponge.[43] If they're
lucky, they will be dead within three months; if not, it may take up to
five years.[59]
But what about the United States? Not only is there the ethnocentric
relevance, but we have 100,000,000 cattle[8] and the highest per capita
beef consumption in the world.[65] Traditional bovine spongiform
encephalopathy hit North America in 1993.[15] An infected dairy cow, one
of many imported from the UK before both Canada and the US banned the
importation of British cattle, was found on a ranch in Alberta,
Canada.[8] Of the 471 British cattle imported into the US before the 1989
ban, 188 of them have been melted down into lard and protein (presumably
for other livestock) and at least 66 are untraceable.[8] One of the
imported bulls slaughtered had a "central nervous system abnormality" of
which the USDA reported, "There is no definitive evidence that [the bull]
either had or did not have BSE."[8] Although the importation of British
beef has been banned from the US for a decade due to an unrelated
disease[7], over 13 tons of meat and bone meal, (which, if you remember,
was implicated in the birth of the British epidemic) has come into the US
from England between 1982 and 1992.
Indigenous conditions conducive to a BSE outbreak include the presence of
scrapie in 39 states.[54] The 40-year[52] USDA Scrapie Eradication
Program has been deemed a "dismal failure"[63] and even implicated in the
recent rise of scrapie-infected sheep.[54] Admitting defeat, the USDA
scrapped the Scrapie Eradication Program 2 years ago and replaced it with
an "entirely voluntary" control program.[21] The proportion of sheep to
cattle in the US is dramatically smaller than in the British Isles
though, which helps minimize the risk of an outbreak.[65] This is a moot
point, however, if BSE is already here.
Since 1947 there have been 25 outbreaks of Mink Spongiform Encephalopathy
(also called TME) on US fur farms.[22] This perplexed researchers who
were unable to orally infect mink with scrapie-infected sheep brains.[49]
A clue came in 1985 when TME wiped out a population of minks in Wisconsin
who hadn't eaten any sheep.[35] Their diet consisted almost exclusively
of dairy cattle called "downers,"[54] an industry term describing cows
who fall down and are too sick to get up. The possibility, then, that US
dairy herds were harboring some form of BSE intrigued University of
Wisconsin veterinary scientist Richard Marsh.[65] To test this, Marsh
inoculated US cattle with the infected mink brains.[49] As predicted,
they died.[49] And when he fed the brains of these cows to healthy mink
they too died of a spongiform encephalopathy[54] providing what he
thought was the missing link.[66] Marsh hypothesized that the proposed
BSE strain indigenous to the US manifests itself as more of a downed cow
disease than a mad cow disease.[49] With about 300,000 cows going down
for unexplainable reasons every year in the US[65], this has frightening
implications on a grand scale. The critical experiment came when Marsh
inoculated scrapie infected sheep brain into US cattle.[63] If you do
this in England the cows go mad, twitching[16] and kicking into a rabid
frenzy.[12] But in America, cows instead stagger to their deaths like
downer cows do[65], supporting the notion that a form of BSE is already
here in the United States.
By 1990 the USDA had 60 labs monitoring our country's cattle herds for
BSE.[7] In 1991 APHIS, the governmental agency which ensures the health
of the nation's livestock, concluded that the "possibility of BSE
appearing in US cattle is extremely low."[21] The assumption made by
APHIS and others[2], however, was that "scrapie infected sheep were the
only source of the BSE agent."[21] This is certainly questionable in
light of the evidence for an indigenous BSE agent. Likewise, the USDA
surveillance program (described as slow, clumsy, and ineffective)[66]
began looking for the rabies-like symptoms of the traditional British
strain of BSE[52], in effect ignoring Marsh's findings.[21] In June 1992
a USDA consultant group continued to disregard the available evidence,
deciding that changes in the research program to accommodate the
possibility that BSE was already present in the US were "not appropriate
at this time."[21] No surprise really, when one realizes that this panel
included representatives of the National Milk Producers Federation, the
National Renderers Association, The American Sheep Industry Association
and the National Cattleman's Association.[21] According to newspaper
reports last year the USDA has finally backed down and started testing
downer cows[65], but some doubt their resolve.[21]
For example, in Britain, when the monetary compensation given to the
farmer whose infected cows were incinerated by the government rose from
50% of market value to full compensation, the number of reported cases
shot up 73%.[59] Presumably, the earlier economic disincentive persuaded
farmers to overlook a few mad cows. Well, the USDA knows all too well
that a positive diagnosis in a single cow could put the entire dairy and
beef export business in jeopardy.[65] In Wisconsin alone this would mean
a loss of a half a billion dollars a year.[66]
With scientists like Marsh saying "The exact same thing could happen over
here as happened in Britain,"[35] and with beef consumption already at a
thirty-year low,[34] the USDA is justifiably worried. There was even a
complaint filed recently with the FDA from a woman with CJD who had been
taking a dietary supplement containing bovine tissue.[4] Like England, we
have been feeding dead cows to living cows for decades.[7] In fact, here
in the US a minimum of 14% of the remains of rendered cattle is fed to
other cows[49] (another 50% goes on the pig and chicken menu).[2] Partly
because of this, the USDA has conceded that "the potential risk of
amplification of the BSE agent is much greater in the United States" than
in Britain.[8] To make things worse, there has been a dramatic increase
in the use of animal protein in commercial dairy feed since 1987.[35,49]
The recent introduction of Bovine Growth Hormone will only increase the
need for rendered animal proteins in the rations of dairy cattle,[4] of
whom we eat 2.6 billion pounds annually.[8]
In June 1993 the Foundation on Economic Trends, a national consumer
advocacy organization, petitioned the FDA to ban all feeding of ruminants
(cows, sheep...) to other ruminants, because they felt that transmissible
spongiform encephalopathies "pose a serious potential health risk to both
the nation's cattle herds and meat-eating consumers."[8] Although the
European Commonwealth took this advice four years ago[23], the U.S.
Government still refuses.[8]
According to top encephalopathy expert Joseph Gibbs, one out of every
million cattle naturally develops BSE.[65] And because evidence exists
that prions are able to adapt to their hosts and become more virulent
with time[22], it is, in my view, absolutely necessary to enact the ban
and stop recycling this disease through US cattle. To make things worse,
a preliminary 1989 study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that
over 5% of patients diagnosed with Alzheimers are actually dying from a
human spongiform encephalopathy.[21] That means that maybe 200,000 people
in the US[21] are already dying from BSE each year.
So why is the government being so stubborn? Why don't they enact the ban?
An answer can be found in a 1991 internal USDA document entitled "BSE:
Rendering policy" which was recently retrieved through the Freedom of
Information Act.[21] It weighed the costs and benefits of a number of
preventative measures including a total ruminant to ruminant ban.[21] The
supporters of this option felt that this minimized the risk to public
health.[21] APHIS, however, goes on to explain that the "disadvantage" of
this approach is "that the cost to the livestock and rendering industries
would be substantial" and that such a policy "could pose major problems
for the US livestock and rendering industries."[21] After all, the
rendering, feed, and cattle industries do rack up annual sales of only
$1.2 billion, $20 billion, and $60 billion, respectively.[8] And since
when does public health ever take precedence over corporate interests
anyway? I just hope that, in the end, the profits are worth it.
Author's Note:
Do not take my word for any of this. Go to the library; check out
Agricola, Medline, Biosis, CAB Abstracts, the online catalog, anything.
Time is of the essence.
References
1. J. of Nutritional Medicine (1992) 3:149-151
2. Animal Health Insight (1992) Autumn:1-7
3. Moscow Indiana Daily News (1993) December 22:1A,3A
4. Consumer Policy Institute Testimony before Joint Meeting of FDA FAC
and VMAC (1993) May 6:5-6
5. J. of Agricultural Economics (1992) 43(1):96-103
6. Nature (1993) 365:93
7. New Age Journal (1990) Nov/Dec:8-9
8. In These Times (1994) Jan 24:12-13
9. Biological Science 5th edition (1993) by Keeton and Gould
10. Medical Laboratory Sciences (1992) 49(3):216-7
11. Nursing Times (1993) 89(38): 19
12. Proceedings American Association of Bovine Practitioners Convention
(1992) 24:19
13. Medical Laboratory Sciences (1992) 49(4):334-9
14. Ecologist (1991) 21(3):117- 122
15. Drovers Journal (1994) Jan:42
16. Discover (1991) Apr:69-74
17. Dev Biol Stand (1993) 80:15-23
18. Alternatives 18(3):9-10
19. Nature (1990) 345:280
20. Nature (1990) 343: 196
21. In These Times (1993) May 31:12-15
22. Economist (1990) Feb 3:89-90
23. Veterinary Record (1990) Jun 30:632
24. Lancet (1990) 335:343
25. Veterinary Record (1990) Jun 23:626
26. Lancet (1990) May 26: 1252
27. New Scientist (1992) Jun 13:9
28. British Medical Journal (1990) 300: 412-3
29. British Medical Journal (1988) 296:1581-2
30. New Scientist (1993) Mar 20:5
31. Nature (1990) 345:648
32. Sub-acute Spongiform Encephalopathies , edited by R. Bradly
(1991):179-186
33. Lancet (1990) 336:1300-2
34. US News and World Report (1990) Jul 2:44
35. Scientific American (1990) May:34
36. Science (1990) 249:1492-3
37. Economist (1990) Jul 28:69
38. British Food Journal (1992) 94(9):23-6
39. British Medical Journal (1993) 95(8):22-34
40. Veterinary Record (1992) Jul 4:2
41. Economist (1991) Jun 22:92-3
42. Veterinary Record (1992) Feb 15:146
43. New Scientist (1990) Jun 9:32-4
44. Veterinary Record (1990) Nov 3:440-1
45. Lancet (1988) Sep 10:607-8
46. Bulletin of the World Health Organization (1992) 70(2):183- 190
47. Advances in Virus Research (1992) 41:257
48. Dev Biol Stand (1993) 80:157-170
49. Dev Biol Stand (1993) 80:111-8
50. Prion Diseases of Humans and Animals , edited by Bradley, B. et al.
(1992):285-299
51. Wall Street Journal (1992) Jun 29
52. Dev Biol Stand (1993) 80:119-121
53. New Scientist (1993) Oct 9:50-1
54. Sub-acute Spongiform Encephalopathies , edited by R. Bradly
(1991):41-6
55. Nutrition and Health (1991) 7(3):117-134
56. Veterinary Record (1993) Apr 17:403-5
57. British Medical Journal (1992) 304:929-930
58. British Medical Journal (1992) 304:1509
59. Food Microbiology (1990) 7:253-279
60. Lancet (1993) 342:790-3
61. Sub-acute Spongiform Encephalopathies , edited by R. Bradly (1991)
:195-202
62. Nature (1993) 365:386
63. Sub-acute Spongiform Encephalopathies , edited by R. Bradly
(1991):272-274
64. Nature (1993) 365:98
65. Wisconsin State Journal (1993) Sep 26:1C
66. Capital Times (1993) Sep 11:6A
67. Mosby's Medical and Nursing Dictionary 2nd Edition (1986)
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