International Meat CrisisCOWS AND THE DAIRY INDUSTRYWhat about milk cows? BSE has affected all breeds including, significantly, Jersey and Guernsey cattle on their respective islands. Jersey and Guernsey are the best breeds of milk cows that money can buy. The black and white Friesian Holstein (beef) cows are the most commonly affected, simply because there are far more of them in Britain than any other breed. But dairy cows have also been affected. The youngest case so far recorded of a cow showing the symptoms of BSE was 20 months and the oldest 18 years. The cattle industry in Britain is under constant pressure to produce more milk and dairy products at the lowest possible cost because the public demands it. To provide as much milk as possible, cows are often fed protein-rich concentrated food made from the carcasses of other dead animals that have been sent to stockyards (called knackers yards in Britain) or rendering plants. Cows only produce milk when they have had a calf. After a nine month pregnancy, the calf is removed within a day or two of birth. A few months later, while still producing milk, the cow is artificially inseminated again. Cows have around three or four pregnancies before their milk yield begins to drop. Each cow is eventually slaughtered at six or seven years old, even though its natural life span would be 20 years or more. Most parts of the cow are used to make burgers, sausages, pies, stocks, and pet food. Until 1989 in Britain, this also included the brain. More than 90 percent of BSE cases have been in cows rather than bulls, simply because cows live longer. Beef animals are usually slaughtered around three years old and veal calves at six months. As BSE appears when the animal is around four to five years old, most beef animals are slaughtered before they are old enough to show symptoms, although they may have the disease. WHAT HAPPENS In cattle, the first signs of the disease occurs when the cow is put under any slight pressure or stress. Movement to a milking station might induce fear, panic, and stumbling; and the infected animal may stand away from the rest of the herd, holding its head in an awkward posture. Despite a good appetite, the amount of milk she produces may drop and she usually loses a lot of weight. As the muscles waste away, there may be twitchings, quiverings, and shaking. Strange behavior can occur, such as grinding teeth; and sometimes the moo is odd. The cow over-reacts to touch and becomes very jumpy. Eventually, she will shake violently; stagger; and, in the end, be completely unable to stand up. It is the combination of a drop in milk and the fear that the cow will fall and be unable to stand again that makes the farmer call in the vet. If the animal does not recover, it is slaughtered and the head (with its nervous tissue) is removed for examination; it is "officially" believed that this is the only infected part of the animal. This is unlikely, as flesh also contains nervous tissue. It also ignores the possibility of the disease being passed from mother to calf. The rest of the cow’s body should be burned, but as many as 30% of infected carcasses end up in landfill sites—where they could be disturbed by tractors, bulldozers, dogs, or rodents. BSE is an extremely strong disease; it remains infective even after years in the soil. (Recent disclosures indicate that burning bodies could send prions into the air.) When cattle are killed for food, only the head and some other parts (such as the spinal cord, spleen, and thymus—"specified offal") are removed. The rest is sold to the public. The official position of the government is that people will not be at risk when they eat cows. So the flesh (containing infected nervous tissue) is eaten, and the bones are eventually made into gelatin which finds its way into many products. People can contract CJD from eating the flesh of baby calves. This is another proof of transmission of the disease from the cow to the calf through the blood. Those who regularly eat veal (baby cow meat) are 13 times more likely to develop CJD than those who do not eat calf meat, according to the British Department of Health newsletter (BUAV Newsletter, April 1995). During the postmortem, extreme care must be taken because the disease is incredibly infectious. The pathologist wears a mask, goggles, gloves, boots, and a plastic apron; and any instruments that have been used on patients suffering from CJD have to be thoroughly sterilized. For example, the silver needles used for the EEG (brain examination) must be treated with high pressure steam for prolonged periods of time or put through six successive heat cycles in a sterilizer. Even then there is no guarantee of destroying the infection. If contaminated instruments are used on another patient (which they will be if the person was not visibly ill with CJD), the disease can be (and indeed has been) transferred. CJD is so feared by the medical profession that they have refused to perform autopsies on patients suspected of dying from it. Some hospitals have even refused to admit patients suffering with it. They find it far easier to just diagnose the victim as having Alzheimer’s, without doing an autopsy. WHY THE PROBLEM WILL GET WORSE IN AMERICA There are some reasons why this problem is going to keep getting worse. Here are far more than a dozen of them. Others are explained elsewhere in this study: The "mysterious agent" that causes spongiform encephalopathies is not just found in the brain! It has been found in many of the organs and tissues of animals. For example, cells from the spleen, thymus, and tonsils enter the blood and find their way to many organs, including the liver and bones. Blood can also contain the disease. Confirmation in 1993, that the disease can be passed from the cow to the calf—established that transmission can be by blood. You can get BSE from any part of an animal. Mammals contract BSE, scrapie, and CJD by eating the flesh of other infected mammals. Blood, corneal transplants, and hormonal injections can also transmit it. This would include pituitary, thyroid, and insulin injections. The bones of old cows are one of the major sources of the protein gelatin, used in many foods from peppermints to pork pies. The greatest risk could come from bones because the procedures used to concentrate and purify gelatin could create a stronger source of BSE. U.S. and British sheep were infected at the same time. Both U.S. and British sheep were infected simultaneously back in the 1950s from research waste discarded by scientists trying to figure out the cause of Kuru. As early as the 1970s, both the U.S. and British scrapie sheep were being fed to cattle. Scrapie appeared in sheep in both the U.S. and Britain by the 1970s. In both countries, the dead sheep were sent to rendering plants which turned them into protein powder, which was fed to cows. That spread the disease widely. Cattle are not checked for the disease before they are slaughtered. The USDA in America only studies the brains of 100 cows per every 100,000. That is an extremely small sample. BSE/CJD cannot be detected during incubation. BSE and CJD cause no antibody response. When infection enters an animal or human, the victim’s immune system shows no sign of fighting the infection as it does with bacteria, germs, and viruses. This is because the immune system can neither detect nor fight it. Scientists cannot use the antibody-search method to see if someone is sick, as is done with AIDS. No scientist can tell if a cow or human is in an incubating phase of BSE/CJD. The only exception is brain biopsies, and that is not done until after death occurs. There are no tests, no genetic markers. Prions are not reliably found in urine. Prions can be seen in brain tissue, but you cannot open the skull of a live mammal to scoop them out. It can take years before the full-blown disease appears. CJD disease takes between 10 and 50 years to eat away the human brain. In cows, death strikes as early as one year after exposure, as late as 8. If a cow whose milk you are drinking has it, her calf, sent to be a veal chop last winter had it when you ate him. An older cow may fall over dead with it, but meanwhile her infected calves have long since been slaughtered and served at dinner tables. The long incubation period means the farmer cannot see that the animal is ill. BSE can be transmitted to offspring. That fact was established by researchers in Britain. Sheep and cows pass it to offspring. Chickens can put it in their eggs. Could CJD, the human form, also be transmitted to your descendants? This is a very serious matter. The FDA has demanded that all donors to the blood supply answer the question, "Has anyone in your family died of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob?" We dare not wait longer before warning the public that it is no longer safe to eat these foods. They must be told that they must stop eating infected meat. People have been dying faster from CJD than earlier. It was once thought humans could incubate the disease for up to five decades without going into the final dementia stage, but lately British teens have been dying of it. Farmers make too much profit selling dead cows for animal feed, for them to stop. Farmers have to pay $500 in order to have an autopsy made of a dead cow. But they can sell it to a nearby rendering plant for $100. Then it is processed into cow food. The U.S. ban on animals in feed is being ignored. In America, there is now a ban on putting animals that died into feed. But it is well-known that it is being done anyway. The USDA has not banned blood in animal feed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture banned diseased meat in animal feeds; but, to date, it has not banned putting blood from dead animals into the feedstocks. That link is contaminating the cattle of America today. It is extremely difficult to kill prions. BSE and CJD prions cannot be killed the way we fought the plague, cholera epidemics, or ebola—which is generally done by burning bodies. BSE/CJD is passed on by means of prions, which are proteins that degrade at 800o F. That is far higher than the temperature which would reduce them to ash. Infected meat should not be burned. Burning is a bad idea, as prion molecules go up in the smoke, airborne and fall back on the land. Britain is now considering burning 5 million cows soon, which will loose the prions into the air, to fall back on the land and into lakes and rivers. Prions infect every part of the body, not just the brain. Although BSE/CJD attacks brains, it is in every part of the victim. Therefore every part of the cow is affected. None of it should be eaten. This contamination cannot be removed by cooking. Do not use blood meal in your garden. A British vegan woman caught CJD simply by dusting her roses with blood meal. Thousands of cows are mysteriously dying in America. Since 1981, the United States has had thousands of "downer" cows. These are cows which have died mysteriously. Dr. Richard Marsh, a virologist on the Veterinary staff at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says he has seen 100 cases of BSE in America between 1981 and 1989. If the prions entered U.S. beef 15 years ago and have been multiplying ever since, a million cows could be infected. In order not to disturb the public, the fact that so many cows are dying is being kept from them. More on the "downer cow" syndrome in America. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institutes of Health first explored a connection between BSE, animal foods and dementia as far back as 1981, when American cows began to come down with a mysterious disease known as "Downer Cow Syndrome," suspiciously like BSE. Many of the downers had previously exhibited symptoms of the jitters, others just suddenly dropped dead. Their brains were fed to mink who quickly manifested Mad Mink disease. In any case, downer cow corpses revealed BSE brain pathology; yet not a peep came from these scientists, not a whispered word to the farmers to stop rendering sheep into cattle feed, not a warning to the public to stop feeding beef to children. Since then, American farmers were allowed to sell sheep corpses for 28 years and cow corpses for 17. CJD deaths are occurring now in America, but they are being mislabeled as Alzheimer’s. CJD mortality figures hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer’s. Some U.S. doctors know the truth yet haven’t blown any whistles. The U.S. veterans hospital in Pittsburgh autopsied 53 sequential Alzheimer’s victims. Sampling #1 showed 5.5% had died of CJD; sampling #2 showed 6.3% had died of CJD. Alzheimer’s death tolls are doubling and tripling in America, but this is not characteristic of a genetic disease. The rate of genetic diseases does not continually increase. People dying of CJD are being diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s. That is why, supposedly, there are no CJD (mad cow) human deaths in America. A related problem is that labs will not test patients suspected of having CJD. Private labs are afraid to let CJD tissue in the door to be examined. They would have to burn down the lab in order to be certain they had cleansed it of the prions. Dr. Richard Deandrea, a Los Angeles physician, who has studied CJD and BSE extensively, tells of his first CJD patient. After her death, which featured symptoms atypical of Alzheimer’s (fingers numb, blindness, slurred speech, weak knees), Deandrea dogged the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta for a pathologist who would provide him with an autopsy to see if it might be CJD. CDC evaded his phone calls for three weeks. Finally, a female CDC staffer told him that off the record—she would deny it later—"CJD is an issue no pathologist will deal with, a virtual death sentence to a lab. A well-trained pathologist knows the quarantine would never be lifted. You couldn’t sterilize the lab to OSHA protocols. It would have to be gutted, incinerated. Forget it. Your patient died of Alzheimer’s." So there may be CJD deaths, but there are not likely to be many CJD death certificates. If you die of CJD, you will officially be listed as an Alzheimer’s victim. Because no laboratory in America will knowingly do an autopsy on anyone suspected of having died of CJD. That Pittsburgh hospital would not have made those autopsies if the staff had known they were working with CJD! The problem is that the prions cannot be eradicated by normal methods. One researcher said that, while we keep eating our burgers, officially on all our death certificates we are going to die of Alzheimer’s, not CJD. That Pittsburgh veterans hospital sampling never hit the major news wires. Beware! BSE cow parts could be in more products than you thought possible. Gelatin capsules, used to enclose vitamins and minerals, come from cows. Break them in your mouth and immediately spit out the gelatin. Glandular supplements from animals come from cattle or pigs. The glue on your envelopes and postage stamps comes from dead cows. Even more than AIDS, BSE is the most prevalent, virulent disease to hit this planet since the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. You can only avoid it by refusing to eat anything which contains meat. Forget ebola which kills you so fast you can’t move ten feet and give it to anyone else, an epidemic which trained medical personnel can rather quickly eliminate. Sick scrapie sheep are ground up and fed to dairy cows and beef cattle. That is how the USDA gets around the prohibition on feeding scrapie sheep to the cows you eat! Ted Koppel interviewed Dr. Richard Marsh on Nightline a year ago. It went like this. Koppel: "But we (in the U.S.A.) don’t feed sheep brains to cows, do we?" Marsh blinked. "I don’t know where your information comes from, but we do." He was instantly cut off by a commercial and did not reappear that night. The truth is, Virologist Marsh, a seasoned veterinarian, knows of what he speaks. He observed this problem in Wisconsin, from 1981 to 1989. Dead sheep were fed to cattle, which, after fattening, was used to feed thousands of other cows who have bred thousands of animals. Pigs and chickens are also fattened on blood and diseased, dead animals which have been ground up into pellets; so ground-up cattle are sold to farmers, to fatten up their livestock. Prions like it in America. All the same, the beat goes on. On March 20th, 1996, the very day that Minister Dorrell lit the fuse on the Mad Cow bomb in London, a Florida man died of CJD. His wife gave a TV interview describing his shaking knees, his lack of co-ordination, quick slipping into a vegetative state, followed by death and said that her husband had never traveled abroad in his life. Why would he have to? Prions enjoy the American climate. How to silence the media. The beef industry frightened the TV networks into a news blackout on the subject. They are now afraid to discuss the subject. The Oprah Winfrey Show interviewed an ex-beef rancher who had seen U.S. sheep and cows dying of BSE. Immediately, beef dropped 150 points on the commodities market; and the beef industry, under the guise of "Texas cattlemen," sued Oprah for daring to openly discuss the subject. Even though she was found not guilty by a Texas jury, no television network is likely to talk about mad sheep and cows for awhile. But the beef industry actually won. They got their message across to the major networks: Tell too much about mad cow, and we will see you in court. Small stations are more likely to reveal death toll statistics. In California, KCAL-TV News reported two recent CJD deaths, one in Stockton and the other in San Francisco. Dr. Richard Deandrea knew of a death in Lancaster, California, and another in Minnesota—all in the previous few weeks; yet the NIH claims it knows of only 11 CJD deaths since 1994. Bypass protein animal feeds are deadly. Scientists who invented the "bypass protein" method of feeding livestock (taking the rendered corpse of a dead animal, grinding it into meat meal, and mixing it in with grains) have turned an attractive planet into a potential graveyard. Scientists who turned healthy herbivores into cannibals may have shot themselves and humanity in the collective hoof. In order to make a lot more money in the short term, the meat industry will eventually destroy itself. Feeding diseased animals to grazing stock also produces other diseases in the people who later eat that livestock. Even if there were no prions lurking, when you feed an herbivore protein, its body produces ptomaines, which cause lesions or tubercles in its body. That means tuberculosis. In 1989, the National Association of Federal Veterinarians decided to create a "test-balloon" state. They allowed California to sell meat infected with tuberculosis, a practice illegal since 1906. TB immediately went up 36% in the sunshine state. We do not need any more test balloons. Hormones sicken the livestock you eat. Bovine immune systems have been destroyed by several other common practices. One example is the massive daily injections of synthetic growth/lactation hormones which exhaust the cow who is chemically stimulated to give 40% more milk. It costs the dairy farmer $400 a year for all the drugs and chemicals he has to inject or feed his cows. They are walking chemical plants. Antibiotics are given to keep the weakened livestock alive. All those medicinal drugs are necessary to ward off the multiple infections caused by the other chemicals given to the livestock. One problem leads to another. And there is more. Consider the painful mutilation of cows with more than 4 teats. (Many have 8 teats; extras are amputated without anesthetics.) Then there’s dehorning, also done without anesthetics. Keep in mind the hormones of grief created in Bessie when her offspring is calf-napped on its second day of life. This is followed for 305 days while the milk intended for the calf is stolen by the farmer. That ends with a two-day starvation period (no food or water), to dry up her milk and get her ready to "calve" again. A happy cow would live 25 years on a happy farm. A dairy cow is exhausted at 3 to 5 years of age. Her reward: She is slaughtered and her poor, suffering corpse is eaten by humans as burger. The Prusiner Report. The definitive U.S. report on prions was written by a leading prion researcher, Dr. Stanley Prusiner. He is a professor of neurology and biochemistry at the University of California School of Medicine, in San Francisco. Although his large study goes into some depth on the habits of prions, he never once mentions the danger of eating meat. Unlike Dr. Lacey, Dr. Prusiner remained politically correct. Hiding behind Alzheimer’s. The puzzle pieces have stayed in the box; because, since the 1970s, CJD has been able to hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer’s. The Alzheimer’s Foundation itself seems to be clueless, saying that if current trends continue, 14 million people will have Alzheimer’s by the turn of the century. No mention of CJD from them. Extrapolating from Pittsburgh figures. It is possible to estimate the number of people who eventually will contract CJD. If, as the Pittsburgh veterans hospital disclosed, 6% of Alzheimer’s cases are really CJD, in the next 4 years, 840,000 U.S. humans could die of CJD. If they were of childbearing age when they caught it, there is the possibility that millions of their offspring could carry it in their genes. Many people could eventually go into spasms, then idiocy and comas, costing their families and the health system $120,000 per patient. Likewise with all their descendants, forever. Prions are not something to play around with. Yet Western governments have done it for nearly 30 years. A different estimate, based on the percentage of Kuru deaths. Among the Fore, the tribe of cannibals who got Kuru in New Guinea, only about one percent of the population seemed affected. This one percent figure suggests a genetic bias, and some genetic biases have been detected. This may serve as a model for predicting human death rates. Evidence suggests a one in a million rate of spontaneous occurrences among susceptible species. Once inserted into a food chain that recycles animal protein, one in a hundred may get it. In America, that one percent would translate to well-over two and a half million slow, expensive deaths, a far worse epidemic than AIDS! Genetic diseases do not double and triple their rate. Alzheimer’s is a genetic disease, which is apparently doing something today that genetic diseases do not do: It is doubling and tripling its death toll. But it is so handy to blame Alzheimer’s. Doing so helps the labs, because they do not want to autopsy anything savoring of mad cow disease. It helps the meat and fast-food industries; they can keep selling more burgers. It helps the television stations, because they do not want any more lawsuits. It helps the government, because they want it always said of them that they do everything right. Silence is golden, even though it can be fatal. Admittedly, if even a whisper of prions in America was voiced, huge losses could result to the $50 billion-a-year meat industry in America. In Britain, five days after Dorrell’s admission that CJD was caused by BSE and there was the faint possibility of danger in prime ribs, the entire European Union ordered its second ban on British beef exports (the first had expired). A $6 billion-dollar-a-year beef export market collapsed in a single day. Loose lips sink world economies, but silences go before apocalypses. Getting rid of the whistle-blowers. Dr. Richard Lacey was not the only warning voice. There were others: Haresh Narang, a microbiologist employed by the Public Laboratory Services in New Castle, said CJD in humans came from BSE. Microbiologist Dr. Steven Doeller said scrapie, CJD, and BSE were the same thing. But all the cries of the whistle-blowers were ignored. Then, in 1995, when Dr. Lacey’s book was printed, both the British Medical Journal and New Scientist, two of the most respected professional journals in England, declared the book unfit for the reading public. His book made the beef industry so nervous that, in December 1995, three more articles were planted in prestigious British journals: The Economist, Nature, and New Scientist, declaring that there was nothing to worry about; Lacey was dead wrong. Interestingly, all three articles were written by "Anonymous." U.S. sheep are still fed to cows. The FDA and public health officials all know that diseased sheep that die are fed to cattle. In the U.S., approximately 200,000 animals are slaughtered daily. Thyroid, insulin, and other medicinal hormones. As of late 2000, questions are being raised about medicinal thyroid, insulin, and other hormonal extracts,—nearly all of which are extracted from pork or beef. Natural thyroid extracts include Armour Thyroid, and synthetics include Cytomel and Synthroid. The natural ones are taken from the thyroid glands of animals, such as pigs. Rendering only legal in America. In all other countries the "cash for corpses" practice is illegal. In the U.S.A., until 1997, it was entirely voluntary whether a farmer renders corpses; so, because they could not ignore free hundred dollar bills, they regularly sold their dead cattle and sheep to the feed companies. It was not until January 3, 1997, that the practice of rendering bodies and using them for animal feed was finally stopped. On that date, it was announced that offal could no longer be used to feed animals eaten by humans. A stricter ban was laid down soon after. But every part of the ban is known to be ignored by rendering plants. More on this later in this book. U.S. chickens. In reply, the USDA said that they have never found a chicken sick with BSE. But the reason for that is the fact that U.S. chickens are killed before they are old enough to openly manifest the symptoms. No U.S. fryer lives long enough to manifest dementia, but it has lived long enough to give the disease to the person who eats it. U.S. hunters dying of CJD. Between 1998 and the end of 2000, three young hunters in Western U.S. died from CJD. Other deaths are suspected. Blood donors banned. On January 17, 2001, the FDA ordered a ban on blood donations in the U.S. from anyone who has lived in Britain or Ireland longer than six months, between the years 1980 and December 1996. But it is still legal for renderers to put sick/BSE animals (with the blood in them) into the feed pellets. IS MAD COW IN AMERICAN CATTLE? We do know that cattle were imported into the United States for breeding purposes until 1987. We also know that the earliest known cases of BSE in British cattle were confirmed in 1986. (Prior to that time, the disease was in the cattle, but not confirmed by research tests until 1986.) It was not until 1987 that the British Government permitted the news about that finding to be published. Over 400 cases of mad cows were confirmed in Britain that year, but the actual number of cases may have been far higher, as the disease was not yet "notifiable"; that is, there was no legal requirement that veterinarians be notified when a cow fell dead with the disease. In order to reduce the number of BSE animals reported, the government said it would pay half the price the farmer could get from the dead cow if, instead of reporting it, he sold the BSE-laden animal to the rendering company, to be made into animal feed. Yet, the next year, 1988, over 2,000 confirmed cases were reported. So is BSE in American cattle? We know that there is an ever-increasing number of downer cows in the U.S., but the government refuses to conduct autopsies of their brains to see if they have spongiform. Instead, they are sent to the rendering plant, so the meat animals you eat will fatten up quicker. Is this mass production insanity? The proper name for it is raw greed. America changed when abortion was legalized in early 1973. Human life is no longer valued as it once was. Although cases of CJD have not substantially increased in America, it should be kept in mind that (1) autopsies are rarely performed on people who died of CJD symptoms, and (2) those symptoms are similar to Alzheimer’s (a totally different disease), and (3) deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s are rapidly increasing. Here is an indication of what is actually happening: • Physicians at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Pittsburgh autopsied 54 patients who died of dementia. It was found that three had actually died of CJD! (Journal of Neurology, 1989, 39 (1): pp. 76-79). That is a shockingly high ratio. • Consider the number of CJD cases that have occurred in the northeastern corner of Texas in two recent years (1996-1998). Eight cases were diagnosed in this 23-county area with a population of about a million. The victims were between 46 and 65, averaging 57. Based on the assumption that there is only one CJD victim per million people, there should only have been one death. But eight cases would make it one in 125,000. That would be equivalent to 1,500 CJD deaths throughout America, per year. Will the ratio get worse with the passing of time? Is this why so many more people are "dying of Alzheimer’s"? (Texas Department of Health, August 25, 1997). It is now known that prion-induced disease, in animals (BSE) and humans (CJD), has for centuries existed as an extremely rare disease in various parts of the world. WHO says CJD may have spread worldwide. On December 22, 2000, on behalf of the World Health Organization, Dr. Maura Ricketts issued a statement warning that "exposure worldwide" to BSE and CJD may have already occurred. The statement went on to say the WHO is going to convene a major meeting of experts and officials from all regions to discuss this problem. It will be held in Geneva in late spring 2001. This announcement followed a review of scientific evidence of several experts. "Concerns center on British meat and bonemeal exports in the 10-year period between 1986, when BSE surfaced in Britain, and 1996, when an export ban was imposed on British beef" (Reuters). Over 90 deaths from CJD in Europe. Since October 1996, alone, over 90 people are acknowledged to have died of CJD, with more dying each year than the year before. Stealing from the zoo. The January 28, 2001, press reports that people are sneaking into the Berlin Zoo, at night, and stealing geese and other animals and eating them! They are afraid to buy meat at the grocery store. (But, very likely, zoo animals are fed the same rendered rations.) If the situation wasn’t so miserable, it would be funny. Read this: "Nothing seems sacred any more as Germans, confronted by empty shelves at the supermarkets, go foraging for food. With BSE beef already off the menu, followed by sausages and now pork, filling a German belly is becoming nearly impossible. As hunger grips, no one, not even the dedicated Kreuzberg zookeepers, will object to a bit of theft" (AP, from Berlin, January 28, 2001). "Everyone must get used to elk, reindeer, ostrich, crocodile and other exotic meats which have recently turned up at the shops, or go hunting" (ibid.). Two different strains. It appears that there are different strains of BSE in America and Britain. But both are killers. The difference between the symptoms of American downer cows and British mad cows could possibly be explained by different strains of scrapie in the two countries. Cattle injected with U.S. strains of scrapie develop a neurological disorder, but their brains do not show the spongiform pattern which is characteristic of BSE cows in Britain (Reuters, September 23, 1997, citing Dr. Paul Brown of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes). Based on that technicality, the FDA is able to declare that there is no "mad cow disease" in America. But the cows are still dying of a similar brain disease, and those cows are still being fed to other cows which you are eating. Shipping mad cow everywhere. Here are some facts gleaned from the March 12, 2001, issue of Newsweek: • British exporters shipped the remains of BSE-infected cattle to 80 nations all over the world as cattle feed. Millions of people in Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia have eaten cattle raised on it. • Massive amounts were shipped. For example, between 1980 and 1996, Indonesia imported 600,000 metric tons of cattle feed that was probably infected. Thailand, 185,000; Taiwan, 45,000; Philippines, 20,000. • Between 1987 and 2000, in addition to other countries, Britain had 180,401 reported BSE livestock; Ireland, 587; Portugal, 509; Switzerland, 366; and France 241. • Prion diseases in animals include the following (dates indicate when first noticed): scrapie in sheep, 1970s; elk, 1980; deer, 1980; minks, 1981; cattle, 1985; cats, 1990; zoo monkeys, 1992. What about cooking the meat or milk? The pasteurizing of milk, at 150 degrees, makes the prion think it’s a sunny day. The cooking of meat at 212 degrees makes him think he’s in a pleasant sauna. Raising the heat to frying in the 320 range might make him even blink; but you must reduce the prion to total ash at 340 degrees Centigrade (in our American Fahrenheit system that would be 800 degrees), to immobilize him and take away his ability to replicate. What about the BSE/CJD spore? There is no solvent known to immobilize the Mad Cow spore. This kind of microbial tenacity is so far-fetched that it frightens the medical community. If you ask a doctor to do an autopsy of a patient who died of CJD, he flees, knowing that if he exposes his lab to this disease, the lab will be closed down by government officials. He cannot clean his sink without burning it up! By the way, when asked about this by worried reporters, Paul Brown of the NIH reassured them. He said he could clean prions off his hands with Ivory soap. We welcome him to try it in public. Any other solution? The medical community has no cure for CJD. It is—very simply—fatal. There is no drug or surgery which can cure it. But Dr. Richard Deandrea says that if you think you’ve been exposed, enzyme therapy might work, seeing that proteins can be dissolved by enzymes which are found in raw foods. But Dr. Prusiner has written that this protein molecule laughs off all the enzymes he tried on it. More than just meat is infected. If Mad Cow is in meat, it could be in dairy products and eggs. It is in mayonnaise. It’s in the gelatin, in candy, or wrapped around a vitamin pill. It’s in blood meal fertilizer, urea fertilizer, and the manure clinging to store-bought mushrooms. Animal derivatives are used in vaccines; pharmaceuticals, like Premarin; and in glandular substances used in remedies, such as melatonin. It is in pet food, gloves, film, plastics. British leather was banned by Egypt a week after Minister Dorrell’s admission. The only answer is to go vegetarian. Choose vegetarian proteins like tofu, nuts, or beans. You will be healthier in every way, as these proteins do not tax the immune system as much as flesh. Immune systems love a whole, live, raw food diet; so eat raw, dark-green salads with nuts, sprouts, and seeds. Cleanse with enemas or colonics. Take periodic raw juice fasts. Besides a vegan diet of vegetables grown on organic soil, take "good fat" supplements like flaxseed. The oils and proteins found in nuts and seeds are good. Be wary of dairy products; they could be infected with prions. Make almond milk, brown rice milk, tofu milk. Take multi-vitamin supplements. Blue green algae, spirulina, chlorella are complete foods with B-12. Animal source of B-12 is dangerous now. Get rid of other eco-hazards that stress the immune system, such as fluoride toothpaste, perfume, and solvents like propyl alcohol (used in all soap, detergent, shampoo, and cleaning solutions for all factory food and juice machines). Go 100% natural. Become a vegetarian. In this study, you have learned a lot of facts. If you want to take the situation seriously, you ought to decide right now to make some changes in your diet! But you should be warned that some of the media right now has a different message for you: "Everything is peace and safety; there is no danger. Eat as you please; the meat is as disease-free as ever. Government and industry reports confirm that there is no CJD in America, no diseased animals are now being fed to cows, and the U.S. is totally sealed off from the problems in Europe. American meat is as disease-free as it has ever been." Decide for yourself whose advice you will follow. Do you want to believe the eminent scientists quoted or referred to in this report, such as Drs. Pattison, Lacey, Prusiner, Dorrell, Alsleben, Marsh, Narang, Deandrea, Merz, Doeller, Gajdusek, and Ricketts? Or do you want to believe the Southwood Committee, the Tyrell Report, the British Medical Journal, The Economist, Nature, New Scientist, the British Department of Agriculture, the USDA, the NIH, the U.S. beef industry, and what you hear on television? This is your life. Do what you want with it.
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