Out of the nearly 40 million U.S. cattle slaughtered annually, only about 1000 are tested for mad cow disease.
The March 21, 2007 edition of the New York Times featured an article called “Prevalence of Alzheimer’s Rises 10% in 5 Years.” It began: “More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, a 10 percent increase from the last official tally five years ago, and a number expected to more than triple by 2050.” Alzheimer’s disease, it seems, now afflicts 13% of people 65 and over, and 42% of those past 85.
The piece also reported “the startling finding that 200,000 to 500,000 people younger than 65 have some form of early onset form of dementia, including a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease that strikes people in their 30s and 40s.” The Times adds: “Apart from early onset cases, the primary risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is age.”
But, dear reader, there’s a cow-shaped risk factor sitting in the corner-ignored by the newspaper of record (and essentially all major media outlets). And it’s a very mad cow.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has earned the pithy nickname “mad cow disease” thanks to the invidious symptoms presented in affected cattle, i.e. staggering, tremors, involuntary muscle spasms, bewilderment, hypersensitivity to auditory and tactile stimuli, and other examples of seemingly “mad” behavior.
Like BSE, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) is also a transmissible, invariably fatal spongiform encephalopathy with a prolonged incubation period that leaves sponge-like holes in a victim’s brain. CJD, however, is the human version and this includes a newly identified variant of CJD, linked to BSE in British cattle.
“In humans,” says author and environmentalist, Peter Montague, “the BSE-like disease is called ‘new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease,’ or nvCJD for short. CJD has been recognized for a long time as a rare disease of the elderly–very similar to Alzheimer’s disease–but nvCJD is different. It has somewhat different symptoms, a different pattern of disintegration in the brain, and it strikes young people, even teenagers. Between 1995 and early 1998, at least 23 people died of nvCJD in Britain and at least one in France, the oldest of them age 42 and the youngest 15.” (Yet the Times is “startled” by the rise in dementia in younger and younger people.)
“CJD robs victims of lucidity, control and life over a period ranging from six months to three years from the onset of symptoms, which can take from 10 to 40 years to manifest,” writes journalist Gabe Kirchheimer. According to Nobel Prize winner Stanley B. Prusiner, fatal neurodegenerative diseases of animals and humans (like BSE and CJD) are thought to be caused by infectious proteins called “prions.” Perhaps what is most disquieting about this hypothesis is that, unlike viruses and bacteria, prions remain infectious even after being baked at 680° F for on hour (enough to melt lead), bombarded with radiation, and/or soaked in formaldehyde, bleach, and boiling water.
“CJD is 100 percent fatal,” adds Kirchheimer. “There is no treatment or cure. As no blood test for the living is available, CJD has been definitively diagnosed only through brain biopsy.”
Studies cited by Kirchheimer indicate it is likely that “tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are dying right now of undiagnosed or misdiagnosed CJD.” Government figures estimate approximately 200 to 300 cases of CJD have been diagnosed in the U.S. Before you take comfort in that modest figure, bear in mind the findings of John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The authors of Mad Cow USA learned that while some four million Americans (at the time) had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, autopsies revealed roughly 25% of alleged Alzheimer’s deaths were caused instead by other forms of dementia. One percent of these misdiagnosed deaths have been ultimately attributed to CJD. If this trend is extrapolated and one percent of the now five million Americans with Alzheimer’s actually have CJD (or nvCJD), the nationwide estimate rises dramatically from 200 to 50,000 cases.
“It would be rather straightforward to design and execute significant studies to answer the urgent questions of which dementia diseases people have, and in what numbers, but to my knowledge no one in the scientific, medical or public health communities are even proposing this,” says Stauber. “Especially now that we have found mad cow disease in the U.S., along with mad deer, mad elk, and mad sheep disease, we should be launching ongoing studies nation-wide to aggressively search for cases of CJD in the human population. We should be testing our human population for CJD; CJD should be made a carefully reported disease nationwide.”
How safe are Americans from being exposed to the human variant of mad cow disease? In France, a nation with only 5.7 million cows, 20,000 are tested each week with 153 found infected in the year 2000. Out of the nearly 40 million U.S. cattle slaughtered annually, only about 1000 are tested. You do the math.
Kirchheimer concludes: “The growing number of British victims of ‘new variant’ CJD, mostly young people in their prime who contracted the brain sickness from tainted meat, is a grim precursor to an uncertain future.”
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
this wouldnt be a problem if they would just let us eat horses.
I love stories like this because they remind me why I became a vegetarian after too many years of eating a lot of meat. I’m not trying to preach because I know it’s not for everyone, but I’ve lost 40 pounds of flab and feel better than I have in my entire life. But it’s something you have to want to do, if someone went in a time machine 5 years ago and told me I should become a vegetarian, I would have laughed in their face.
That being said, if you are able to, PLEASE try and support your local small-scale meat producers. I grew up in ranching country and I know that the little guys treat their animals much better than the industrial factory operation. They also usually raise their livestock on free-range feed, instead of that crap that the big producers use. Eating meat isn’t that bad as long as you stay away from the supermarket slop. If it’s a money thing, it’s far better to eat good, local meat 2 or 3 or 4 times a week instead of eating that shitty supermarket meat 7 days a week. Unless of course you’re lucky enough to have a grocery store committed to bringing in locally produced food. If it’s a convenience thing, try and take the extra few minutes a day to support the good guys. It’s better to have your food dollars end up in the pocket of a local farmer or rancher instead of the hands of one of those companies like Tyson. The big meat packing guys give huge dollars to the Republicans, so try not to support them.
2 or 3 years ago, Prusiner gave a seminar at UC Berkeley when I was a student there. The most interesting thing he said from a public health standpoint was that the BSE incidence rate started rising around the time that meat and bone meal became a common cattle feed. Essentially, cattle were being fed “rendered” bits of other cattle that were not suitable for human consumption. Not surprisingly, this generally includes nervous tissue, which is how you propagate prion diseases of the nervous system. So, there is something to the idea of choosing meat from farmers that don’t use industrial feeding methods.
Yeah, in theory they have rules about feeding ground up cows to other cows. However, there are loopholes. For instance, you can feed chickens meat and bones from cows, since diseases can’t pass between the two species. However, you can feed “poultry litter” (chicken shit, feathers, bedding and spilled feed) to cows. Since there’s spilled feed in the poultry litter, there’s a chance of contamination.
Personally, I think the rules should be a lot simpler. Any animal that is naturally a vegetarian should only eat vegetation, no meat at all. If you can’t make money feeding an animal their natural diet, you shouldn’t be in business. Same goes for pumping animals full of steroids, hormones and antibiotics. Apparently 70% of all antibiotics used in the United States are consumed by livestock. God only knows what eating all that crap does to people.
I’m not a vegetarian yet, but am heading that way. I’m increasingly finding that I’m more energized by a couple of handfuls of nuts and seeds or a couple of pieces of fruit than I’ve ever been by a steak or any kind of dairy product.
Regardless of the prion issue, there just aren’t as many vitamins or trace minerals in the animal products.
startling finding that 200,000 to 500,000 people younger than 65 have some form of early onset form of dementia, including a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease that strikes people in their 30s and 40s.”
I’ve been waiting for this, ever since I learned in 2003 how the USDA does its “testing.” (In essence they sample, rather than test, except for cows that are already too sick to walk. This GUARRANTEES that some sick cows end up packaged as meat.) Nearly one American in thousand is already suffering from mad cow. One might say ONLY one in a thousand, since exposure to the prion is obviously much much greater than that. Nevertheless, I think you have to be crazy to eat this stuff.
Note the timeline: Cases age 30 to 40 means lethal exposure age 20 to 30.
It will get worse.
The Times adds: “Apart from early onset cases, the primary risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is age.”
All lies, all the time. May the editors and the owners rot in hell.
Thanks, mickeyz, for finding AND deconstructing this.
BSE and CJD are caused by infection from a prion. Prions are not “living” in the same way that viruses are (and viruses barely qualify as “living”), therefore they are almost impossible to “kill”.
I remember reading an article a few years ago by a CJD researcher who suspected that gelatine (made from connective tissues of animals) may ultimately prove to be the biggest source of CJD infection in humans.
I haven’t eaten red meat in 28 years, but if I’m not very careful I can end up eating gelatine every week. Especially now that I live in Australia, where because of the lack of a kosher market, gelatine is found in most ice creams and in a lot of soft candies.
Yikes, not only that, but a lot of the pills I take have a gelatin coating…I never even thought of that.
Yeah, it’s taken me a long time to find vitamin E capsules that are labled “suitable for vegetarians”, i.e. in non-gelatine capsules.
Gelatine might not be a CJD risk, but on the outside chance it is, and because I really don’t want to eat animal products, I read lables very carefully. It’s kind of scary when you find out just how much “contamination” of food occures with things you’d never have thought of. It was only about four or five years ago, due to the outrage of the kosher community, that manufacturers of tin cans stopped using low-grade animal fats in the process of coating the inside of the cans.
Food’s gotten almost “soylent green” scary, at times.
Infectivity in gelatin would be negligible even from an infected cow. The prion proteins aren’t soluble so they wouldn’t come out in the rendering process. There might not even be a meaningful amount in the starting materials – hooves don’t have nerves.