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Edited on Sun Jan-04-04 11:13 AM by Venomous_Rhetoric
Often it is miss- diagnosed anyway. A study done in the UK showed that many cases were missed- shown as Altzhiemer's and later found at autopsy to be nv.CJD.
It doesn't matter if your a veggie or not, beef products are everywhere. Insulin, the lipstick you wear, other cosmetics, the heart pills I take to control my heart rate, blood pressure pills.
BSE type disease exists naturaly in all species. In cattle it is about 1 per million animals, or 30-40 cows per year in the usa. That in itself is not a problem, you just have to watch for them.
But when you feed cow bits back to cows, you multiply the problem far beyond what nature intended, like england did.
The USA strain is also different than the UK strain.
It was discovered in the USA way back in '63. This mink farmer was feeding dead cows he collected localy to his mink. they all came down with TME, thats what the spongiform encephalopathy in mink is called.
At fisrt, they thought it was caused by the spongiform encephalopathy carried in sheep, called 'scrappies' but the farmer never fed sheep bits to his mink, just 'downer cows, and horses'
A doctor Marsh studied the case. He tried to induce the sheep scrappies into test mink, but found that the sheep scrappies would not jump the species barrier.
Failing to induce TME in mink from sheep brain, -Marsh theorized that maybe there was another strain out there, a strain he hadn’t yet tested, that was better at jumping the species barrier. It was a puzzle, though. At the ranch where the outbreak occurred in 1963, the rancher said that sheep had never gone into his feed. The 1963 outbreak had occurred simultaneously on two separate USA ranches, sharing a common feed source that was limited to dead and "downer" cows-animals unable to stand which were therefore deemed unfit for human consumption. This prompted speculation that a spongiform encephalopathy might exist in U.S. cattle as early as December 1964. At a conference organized that year by Carleton Gajdusek and Clarence Gibbs, scientists presented the first research documenting the existence of spongiform brain disease in mink. "It would appear that these mink were fed beef, and it is conceivable that the disease is caused by a virus which is commonly present in cattle," commented one scientist at the conference. "This possibility of a silent host may also help to explain the varied epidemiological patterns which are found in scrapie; in sheep, the silent host may actually be cattle."He said.
The disease did not appear again in the United States for over
two decades.
Then, in April 1985, a phone call came from the owner of a mink ranch
in Stetsonville, a tiny town in north central Wisconsin. He was calling to report that many of his animals were behaving abnormally and some had died. Marsh and Hartsough visited the ranch and quickly recognized the telltale signs.
Approximately 400 animals were sick, and more cases were emerging every day. Over the course of the next five months, 60 percent of the 7,300 animals on the ranch came down with the disease and died. Analysis of feeding and breeding records showed that all of the infected animals had been exposed to the infectious agent sometime between the dates of June 1 and July 17, 1984-approximately seven months before they started showing symptoms. Marsh and Hartsough questioned the Stetsonville rancher carefully to find out what the mink had eaten, and were struck by the parallels to the outbreak 22 years earlier. In both cases, the ranchers insisted that they had never fed sheep to their mink, and the Stetsonville rancher had good reason to be certain, because he was not using rendered feed products. Instead, he was a "dead stock" feeder who used mostly dairy cows and a few horses which he collected daily within a 50-mile radius of his mink ranch. He told us that he had fed 17 "rabies-negative" cattle. He showed us his record-keeping system, and every one was precisely entered. This guy knew what he was doing. When you’re using dead stock in your feed rations, you’d better know what you’re doing, or disease will put you out of business before you know it.The 1985 case at Stetsonville involved one of the few dead stock feeders left in the state. His major source of meat for his mink was downer cows, Marsh said. "He never fed sheep. Here was a fellow who formulated his own diet; he was not using any by-product mixtures at all, so he knows what he’s putting in his feed. His farm was the only one infected. He had no reason not to tell us the truth. For the first time we thought, ‘Maybe this is coming from downer cows.’ "
If the disease did exist in cows, Marsh realized, there was a potential new danger on the horizon. "I went to the meeting of the U.S. Livestock Association later that year and reported that there is strong epidemiological evidence that mink encephalopathy is caused by feeding infected dairy cows to the mink. I tried to put them on the alert to look for such a disease in dairy cows."
So you see, the government KNEW about this years and years ago, but never stopped the practice of rendering cattle and feeding them back to cattle, thus spreading the disease. Worse, this stuff is getting into the human food chain as well. The think about this strain, is the cows don't behave like the UK version of BSE, they act normaly till they drop, as Dr. Marsh proved in a later experiment. It is more like altzhiemer's humans develop. "LIKE" not is. the transferrence changes it into a nvCJD type spongiform encephalopathy, and worse, cattle seem to be the animal that enables these things to jump species barriers.
John Wilesmith a veterinary epidemiologist in England, established
that BSE is associated with the feeding of meat and bone meal. Wilesmith believed BSE had originated when scrapie-infected sheep were rendered and fed to cows. After the initial infection occurred, the practice of cow cannibalism through the rendering process became the decisive factor enabling the disease to multiply.
October 31, 1987. The Veterinary Record published a two-page report by Gerald Wells, titled "A novel progressive spongiform encephalopathy in cattle."
Most people, of course, do not read the Veterinary Record, and the public at large remained unaware of the disease.
April 1988. Writing in the British Medical Journal, T.A. Holt and J. Phillips called for an end to the use of feed from rendered animals, noting the similarity to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and the likely resistance of the infectious agent to high temperatures and other normal sterilization methods. "Many infected cattle have been used to make meat products, and the reported numbers only represent those animals with well established clinically manifest disease," they
warned. They also advocated an end to the use of bovine brains and spinal cord in cooked meat products such as pies.
BSE originated with the practice of "recycling" cows and sheep into feed for cows. The obvious implication was that this practice should be stopped, but this was easier said than done.
Rendering had become so entrenched within the meat industry that ending it would have serious economic implications all by itself. Rendered animal protein wasn’t simply a cheap food supplement. It helps solve a nasty waste disposal problem. Political and economic factors became the determining factors shaping the government’s policies.
Bovine byproducts that did not end up in human stomachs are routed through rendering plants which transforms them into tallow, meat and bone meal, gelatin and other ingredients used in the manufacture of everything from facial creams to medicines to pie fillers to industrial lubricants. A problem for the beef industry means problems for every link in this chain of production and consumption.
Government knew, and never told us, and worse, they won't stop the practise.
Therefore, people should start sueing these rendering plants, and cow feed producers and the government until they STOP.
Canadian cow farmers fed American feed to their cows. They should sue as well
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