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International Meat Crisis
COWS AND THE DAIRY INDUSTRY
What 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
TO THE DISEASED COW?
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).
MEDICAL PERSONNEL FEAR CJD
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 800 o
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.
ADDITIONAL U.S. FACTS
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.
ELSEWHERE IN 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.
TOWARD PERSONAL SOLUTIONS
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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