Coastal
Post Online
January,
2004
The Insanity of Mad Cow Madness
By Jim Scanlon
One sick mad cow in Canada last May
prompted the US, and other countries to immediately ban Canadian beef. Since
May, the Canadian loss to agriculture has been estimated at $2.5 billion. Now,
one sick "downer" cow in Yakima Washington testing positive for
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), mad cow disease, provoked a similar,
but much larger uproar. Within minutes of the announcement, country after
country, as if waiting anxiously to
act, banned US beef imports, stock prices of meat packers and processors
dropped, and urgent nervous, pathetic, appeals from governmental officials
began to "reassure" the meat eating public that the US food supply
was safe. President Bush issued an official statement urging Americans to
continue, as he was-eating beef!
What is so startling and awe inspiring is that the American people,
mostly oblivious to the corporatization of their food supply and farming over
the last few decades, and the resultant environmental destruction and threat to
public health, is instantly horrified by the infinitesimally small and remote
prospect that "eating beef"
that might have molecules of BSE, might result in crippling, spastic dementia
and death. Day after day, page after newspaper page, endless reports on radio
and television.
A nation with a
government in almost total denial regarding environmental pollution and climate
change, resistant to the most minimal measures to slow down the degradation,
aggressively and coercively resistant to attempts to regulate big business,
restricting pesticides or hormones in the food supply, suddenly is horrified
and paralyzed by global public hysteria and the godlike invisible punitive fist
of the stock market
Consider for
just a minute what this is hysteria is all about.
Over a twenty year period approximately 145 people in the United
Kingdom have died or been diagnosed with a new strain of Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease (CJD) a rare but common,
degenerative brain disease well known worldwide, with an incidence of 1 to 1.5
per million inhabitants. The new variant of CJD, usually referred to as vCJD or
nvCJD, is basically confined to the United Kingdom, which, with a population of
approximately 56 million, would be expected to have had a naturally occurring
death rate of from 960 to 1,300 victims in twenty years.
Diagnosis of both varieties is often
difficult due to the small number of cases, confusion with Alzheimer's Disease
and cases that may ignored and, or, masked as suicidal depression.
In the UK, as of November 2002, the
cumulative total was 129 cases of vCJD,
listed as 93 confirmed, 24 probable and 12 strongly suspected-but not yet
confirmed cases. In December 2003, the cumulative number of diagnosed cases is variously given as 140, 143 and
147. Even considering a potentially long latency, with billions of exposures
from "eating beef" over a twenty year period, 147 cases would suggest
an extremely low rate of infection and-at the very least-greater specificity
regarding what kind of "beef" eaten-or perhaps-some other manner of
exposure to the infectious agent such as medicines, cosmetics, transplanted
tissue (heart valves). made from slaughtered cattle.
The difference between the closely related
strains of vCJD and CJD seems real, with
slightly different effects on diseased brains and different age groups: the
average age for vCJD is age 29, CJD is 60. But the time from the first
appearance of symptoms until death is months, for both.
In 1988, G. Carlton Gaydusek was awarded
the Noble Prize for his work explaining Kuru, another transmissible spongiform
encephalopathy very similar to vCJD which was epidemic among a certain tribe in
New Guinea during the 1950s and 1960s. The disease disappeared without any
scientific or medical intervention when Australian Colonial authorities banned
a the religious funerary practice of the natives which involved in dismembering
the entire bodies of honored relatives and eating them in a ritual communion
meal. (Regulators take note!)
This native practice is commonly referred to as cannibalism, which it
is, but, Gaydusek did not stress the "eating," but the
"preparation" which explained the greater incidence of the disease
among women who in preparation of the dead body might expose a scratch to nerve
tissue, or rub her eye. Children who were often present might do the
same.
Exposure through
"preparation" and not "eating" would seem to be supported
by confirmed transmission of disease though medical procedures. Transplantation
of brain tissue (dura membrane), corneal transplants and contaminated brain
probes have been implicated
Since neurosurgeons have been infected, one
would think that farmers, meat packers and butchers would be vulnerable, but
that is not the case.
Between
1957 and 1980 approximately 2000 patients, mostly children, were injected with
an extract of Human Growth Hormone made from pituitary glands taken from
cadavers. The treatment was effective in promoting growth, but unfortunately
the treatment promoted infectious CJD particles. The exact number who died is
not known, but believed to be greater than 147. Some 220 court cases were filed
for negligence. (The production of Human Growth Hormone with Cadaver tissue was
abandoned in 1985.
Here is how
Nature, (25 April 1996) the International Journal of Science described the
process:
"Over the period
when hGH was extracted from cadavers, nearly one million pituitary glands were
used in the United Kingdom. Mortuary attendants removed the glands and at one
stage "received a nominal fee of twenty pence per gland". This system
was later changed and mortuary attendants were paid a flat rate for the extra
work involved in removing the glands."
It is something of a mystery how neurosurgeons could be
infected, but mortuary assistants sawing and hacking open a million skulls were
not. Also strange and unexplained is how a "Prion" protein could
survive a voyage through the gut and
pass the blood brain barrier.
The scientific literature contains another strange case of an epidemic
of a similar neurological disease on the Pacific Island of Guam attributed to
the consumption of the fruit of the false sego palm during the Japanese
occupation during World War II.
Since the 1700s sheep have been known to suffer from a degenerative brain disease called scrapie.
Although transmission to other species including man was not known, it was
suspected. Infection could be induced only by direct inoculation of infected
brain tissue directly into a healthy brain.
It is commonly believed that the practice of processing dead
sheep into protein supplements for cattle led to the development of BSE. The
use of processed animal carcasses in cattle feed was banned in the UK in 1988
and in the US in 1996.
The BSE
epidemic peaked 1992 when 138,000 cases were diagnosed. Overall some 3,500,000
cattle were slaughtered-an enormous waste! In 2002 the number of cases was down
to 755 in the UK and 291 elsewhere. Over all those years with all those
infected cattle and all those roast beef sandwiches there were apparently 147
diagnosed cases of vCJD-horrible tragedies for the victims and their families,
but hardly a public health threat.
Although most bans on its beef have now been lifted, the cost to
agriculture and society in the UK cannot really be imagined. Neither can the
effect the disaster has had strengthening regional nationalism and weakening
the European Union.
Although the
US has banned the use of recycled cow
carcasses in cattle feed, it is allowable in chicken and pig feed.
Paradoxically chicken and pork are recommended to replace beef. The recent
spate of articles on the food chain has revealed a few of the odd practices of
the factory farming. Cattle blood is processed as a feed supplement for calves,
thus seeming to evade the cattle to cattle food chain. And when chickens are
fed feed with ground cattle protein, the residue, when swept up swept up from
the floor, presumably with chicken excrement, can be fed to cattle.
One of the big winners in this affair would
appear to be Dr. Stanley Pruisner of UCSF who won the Noble Prize for his work
on "prions" the putative infectious agent in transmissible
encephalopathy. There was great resistance among many scientists to the idea
that an infectious protein molecule, without DNA or RNA could adapt or evolve
into different strains and Pruisner was viciously attacked in the New Yorker
magazine of all places.
Dr.
Pruisner, who rigorously avoided contact with the media (in the late 1980s he
never returned, or taken, telephone calls from the Coastal Post) was featured
on the front page of the New York Times before Christmas. He seems to have lost
his shyness now that he has developed a diagnostic test for BSE, which could
net him and UCSF a fortune in royalties The next day the stock price of the company
that markets the r test jumped.
The US Dept. of Agriculture tested 20,526 of the 35,000,000 cattle
slaughtered last year. Any increase in the number of tests obviously seems to
be a good for business, and, after all, that's what counts today.
Genetically modified tofu anyone?