A Worker from the Mad Cow Meat Plant Speaks Out (for real)

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/louthan01202004.html

They Are Lying About Your Food
By DAVE LOUTHAN

My name is Dave and I work at Vern's Moses Lake Meats.

I did until the day the mad cow test results on the Sunny Dene cow came back positive for BSE. That was Wednesday, December 24. On Friday, December 26, the KXLY news crew was at the end of Vern's driveway, locked out by a cable gate.

The USDA had told the world that the mad cow had been slaughtered here, but it was not in the food chain. A blatant lie.

It was one of many. I walked out with the news crew at lunch time because I can't stand a government cover-up. They asked me "was the cow in the food chain?" I told them of course it was, it's meat. Where else would it be? They asked me if the cow was a downer. I told them no, it was just an old cow.

-snip-

And just so the folks in Moses Lake don't feel left out, the beef head, tongue, liver, kidneys and tail were sold right here in the Columbia Basin. It's way past time for everybody to stop thinking with their bank accounts and start trying to find a way to stop the spread of BSE.
-snip-
----------------------------


today, when I was at the grocery, people were loading up on meat. guess it's the thrill of living dangerously.

[Hubert Flottz]

1. You won't believe the buzz you can get on a Big Mac nowdaze!

Money is more important than people's lives in Bushdom!

[ElsewheresDaughter]

2. my family have been meat free for over a year now....i only pray we are

MADCOW FREE ....i am scared :scared:

[mmm]

3. Love that Counterpunch

[FormerOstrich]

4. Yet, just yesterday I read...

where the federal government is changing the employee drug testing program to include hair, saliva, etc.

So we want to make sure the nation's workers didn't smoke a little weed over the weekend but we can't be bothered with ensuring that our food supply won't kill us.

Profits over all else...

[denverbill]

5. It's not the thrill of living dangerously for me.

The law disallowing the feeding of byproducts was only implemented in 1997. Therefore, for god-knows how many years, I was exposed to meat which may or may not have carried the prions. I may already be infected for all I know.

Also, I'm a long-time Altoids eater, and they were made in Britain, using gelatin, which also could have carried prions.

We are trying to switch to organic beef, but I'm sure we'll still eat ordinary beef from time to time.

[htuttle]

6. One point I read long ago during the British BSE 'scourge'

There was a lot of conjecture that the BSE prions had a cumulative effect. In other words, you can have a certain amount floating around without a problem, but when they reach a critical mass at some point, they start to form the destructive chains that cause BSE.

So I don't think it's quite like a disease where you either have it or you don't. More like a toxin where you can tolerate a certain amount without damage, but that builds up over the long term.

[denverbill]

11. I do wish they knew more about it.

I'm inclined to agree with that theory, or that perhaps it has something to do with lack of a correct immune response, i.e., if two people were identically infected, one shortly comes down with full CJD, while the other lives another 40 years before coming down with Alzheimers.

[Piltdown13]

18. I don't think it's exactly an immune response,...

prions being a rather unusual type of pathogen (basically just a misfolded protein). What does appear to be the case, however, is that people with a certain genotype at a single locus are much more likely to acquire vCJD -- everyone in Britain who has died from vCJD thus far has carried that genotype, which IIRC is present in about 40% of the British population (I haven't read any info as to why this should be the case). This could mean that the other two genotypes possible at that locus are protective, or it could simply mean that folks with the other two genotypes will have a longer incubation period, perhaps even so long that almost all of them will die of something else first. BTW, the most current estimate I've seen of the incubation period is something like 12.6 years, so the people who have been dying lately were probably mostly infected in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of them likely as children.

It's also important to keep in mind that so far, there have been about 150 human cases in Britain since 1995, despite the original predictions of tens or hundreds of thousands of cases. Of course, a huge outbreak could still happen, but case numbers have been declining the past few years. Even one case is one too many from a public health/food safety perspective, but from a personal standpoint it's probably best not to worry too much about it, just to stay sane. That's what I try to do -- I spent the Spring 1996 semester in London, long enough to be on permanent blood-donation deferral, and I have to keep reminding myself that it's very unlikely that I was exposed, given that my beef consumption was limited to half of a single roast beef sandwich. :-)

[Lizz612]

19. It IS a disease you have or don't.

Prions have biologists scratching their heads, they are proteins, but they "reproduce", like thing that are alive. They can change the normal protein, that naturally occurs in you brain, into a prion a "bent" protein. Its still made of the same amino acids, in the same order, but the tertiary structure is different, its folded in a different way.
And while getting one prion wont strike you dead, neither will one virus or bacteria. When it replicates, thats what kills you.
I love this stuff. Bio geek here.

[treepig]

26. a picture (and some words thrown in for good measure)

Prion diseases are caused by an entirely novel and even heretical life form called a Prion (preeon). In 1997, Stanley Prusiner, a University of California at San Francisco neurologist and researcher who named them, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for delineating their basic structure. Unlike all other known life forms they do not contain DNA or RNA ....they are merely self-replicating rogue protein. Animals and humans normally have "good prions" on all nerve cells and on certain white blood cells. The function of these "good prions," called PrPC - for prion protein "cellular," has not to date been confirmed. They are merely a protein that is 253 amino acids long. But as usually happens in proteins, the chain of amino acids are not in a straight line, but twisted into a unique shape or "conformation." In the case of PrPC it is mostly in the "alpha helix conformation". (normal PrPC the stucture on the left in the diagram)



This shape is very structurally weak, and therefore, normal cellular prions can be broken down quite easily by normal means - by heat, or proteases, for example. The "bad prions" are notated as PrPSc - for prion protein "scrapie". So named because the first prion disease ever know was called "scrapie" in sheep due to the animals' fierce "scraping" against fence posts to relieve severe itching. These disease causing prions, PrPSc, have the identical chemical formula of 253 amino acids but much of the alpha helix shape is replaced by a different shape: the "beta sheet conformation" (Like Dr.Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde - see image at right - the prion on the left is the "good" prion: PrPC. The structure on the right in the picture is the pathogen:PrPSc. The blue sheets are the beta sheet content, the purple spirals are the alpha helix content). This beta sheet content renders the protein extremely stable and virtually indestructible. When an animal or human is infected, the "bad prions," PrPSc, "convert" (abaracadabara!) the "good prions", PrPC, into their shape by linking up with them. There is probably an as yet unknown mediating protein - "factor X" - that "chaperones" or helps this event. (Proteins frequently can change shape with the aid of chaperones, as they are called - you can think of them as catalysts for the event).


http://cloud.prohosting.com/lzambeni/prions/prion_structure_function.html

[Lizz612]

20. Dupe

I only hit it ONCE!!

[treepig]

21. you're basically correct about the mechansim of BSE prions

in leading to disease symptoms. more specifically, a prion is a mis-folded protein, which can act as a scaffold to trigger the misfolding of a second protein; then the two misfolded proteins can in turn act as scaffolds to cause two more to become mis-folded. the resulting four cause four more to misfold, and so on. basically, what you have is a geometric amplification of the disease-causing form of the protein, which can stay below a disease-causing threshold for substantial periods of time (for example, if a billion misfolded proteins are needed to cause the disease to be manifest, it takes a long time to produce this number going from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 (etc)). however, once you get to 100 million (lets say), then it doesn't take long to go to 200 million, then 400 million, 800 million, and then 1.6 billion, and pronto, you have the disease.

your comparison with a toxin is badly misplaced however. a toxin is by definition a toxic protein. a toxin everyone has heard of is ricin. the way a toxin such as ricin harms a cell is quite different from the way a prion does. that's because ricin is an enzyme, and its catalytic activity be re-used over and over:

just a single ricin molecule that enters the cytosol can inactivate over 1,500 ribosomes per minute and kill the cell.

http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/toxicagents/ricin/ricin.html

in this case there is no threshold of safety, a single molecule of ricin can be deadly to the cell by inactivating all or most of the several hundred thousand ribosomes within the cell over the period of a few hours. however, it is possible that the ricin molecule will be detected by protective mechanisms within the cell and degraded before it can inactivate enough ribosomes to actually kill the cell. in this case there may be some acute toxicity, but the cell will recover (quite the opposite of the long-term effects you correctly postulate for prions).

[Lizz612]

23. Ooooo! I love it!

Thats really cool! In a purely academic way mind you.

[denverbill]

25. That makes a lot of sense.

If a cow develops a prion in nature, most likely, the disease won't ever manifest itself because it doesn't have time to reproduce in great enough quantity to show symptoms. However, a cow being fed a cow which was infected would start with a big head start (no pun intended). Instead of starting with 1 prion, it might start with 10,000. If that cow is then fed to another cow, the concentration of prions increases and increases with each succeeding generation. Same with humans. Either you eat one highly contaminated cow, or you eat many lightly contaminated ones over the years.

[Lindacooks]

7. Yep, organic is the way to go,

The problem with the 1997 ban is that many corporate farms didn't follow it, and some didn't even know it was implemented. That 'ban' is not at all strict, and was obviously violated over and over and over again. I'm sure there are still cows being fed cows, pigs, chickens, etc.

[denverbill]

13. Yes, I'm sure you are correct.

And the laws aren't real strict anyway. You can't feed cattle to cattle, but you can feed cattle to chickens, and vice versa.

We were already eating RedBird chicken, and little pork. We are going to start shopping at Wild Oats for our meat too.

[HFishbine]

8. Oh puhleeze

I meat eat many days a time. Reel men meat eat with no prablem.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

9. I resent that

what's a "real man"?

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

10. Oh I get it !

I missed the joke - must be the prions!

[HFishbine]

12. Mmmm, prions good!

Is meeter eater!! I meeting eat at lunch and dinner and breakfist and lucnh and atimes just before I feel like a meet snack. Meet has to me no harm. My mind is fyne, yur weclome for asking.

[PVnRT]

14. OK, so it was slaughtered there

I have no doubt that that was covered up, as the Bush administration has gotten the USDA to essentially stop being a regulatory agency anymore.

What I want to know is, did material from the brain stem and spinal cord get into the stuff that was shipped out? You can eat the meat from a cow with the disease, as long as it's not brain stem/brain/spinal cord, as I understand it. Did that get into the mix, or not?

At any rate, this case should point out to everyone just how co-opted the USDA is now, completely beholden to big-time slaughterhouses and factory farms, and not obeying their mission of guarding the American public from contaminated food.

[shanti]

30. no more oxtails for me!

dang! :-(

[DrWeird]

15. They've destroyed the plant, right?

Prions aren't like bacteria or viruses. You can't kill them with antibiotics or bleach. Pretty sure even your standard autoclave won't get rid of them. They're notorious to work with in the laboratory because you just can destroy the damn things.

The machines they used to butcher the animal are probably covered with infection.

[htuttle]

16. I don't think they've found anything to 'kill' them...

For one thing, it's not at all clear they are 'alive' by our current definition. They are pretty much just protein molecules.

Bleach, anti-biotics, heat, flame, radiation, burying -- all nada. Nothing seems to prevent the ability of the molecule to make copies of it self, given appropriate resources. I *thought* I'd heard that they thought they might have found one way to neutralize them this year, but am not sure (don't remember the details).

[Piltdown13]

17. That's pretty much true

I did read somewhere that one subset of processes used to make gelatin can neutralize just about all of the "infectivity," though there's not much evidence as yet as to whether the materials that are commonly used to make gelatin are highly infective in the first place (the study I heard about was a test to see if those processes could deactivate the prions, not to actually find out if prions were present in hooves, bones, etc.).

[Lizz612]

22. I would think that some sort of radiation would do it

I mean, you have to knock the amino acid chain apart to destroy any protien. Radiation of the right energy/wavelength can knock atoms apart, there must be some that can knock the amino acids away from each other.

[PVnRT]

24. Actually, you just need to get it to unfold

That's the key with proteins - fold them one way, dangerous, another way, no effect, another way, beneficial, and so on. Many proteins will simply denature (unfold) at higher tempeartures, but these apparently do not - that, or they refold very quickly.

[treepig]

27. you're being a tad hysterical here

there are many ways to "kill" a prion. for example, bleach, heat, flame, and radiation will all do the trick, provided conditions are harsh enough. and therein lies the problem - such harsh conditions cannot be used to treat either human disease (or render meat safe) because they would kill everything (the goal would be to selectively target the prion, while leaving surrounding healthy molecules untouched. that's the beauty of antibiotics, they kill bacteria in your body, but not your own cells, by contrast, heating your brain to 1800 C will kill any prions therein, but would also have rather nasty side effects)

[sendero]

29. I thought bleach...

.... (or equiv) would oxidize any organic matter. ???

[Postman]

28. De-regulation comes at a price - YOUR health is below THEIR profits..

thank your Republican "leadership"