Mental Health Update

On January 30th the Humane Society released undercover video content of "downer" dairy cows - too sick or injured to be able to walk - being mistreated to get them onto their feet and into the Hallmark Meat Packing Co (Chino, CA) slaughterhouse. "Downer" cattle are at increased risk for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease") and other foodborne pathogens, and so the USDA regulations prevent the slaughter for human consumption of crippled cows.

Before the authority expired, trade negotiators were able to sign a new trade agreement with South Korea. Although the deal with South Korea reduces many tariffs, certain types of U.S. beef will not be allowed into South Korea because of concerns about mad cow disease (note to the USDA: if mad cow testing was mandatory, South Korea probably wouldn’t have this concern).

In general, I try to avoid beef products (my concerns: synthetic hormones, antibiotics, fecal contamination, E. coli, mad cow disease, etc.) and MSG, but this consumption preference did not dissuade me from spending money on these Doritos to satisfy my curiosity. It’s a very good advertising gimmick.

I used to read all kinds of research on bovine spongiform encephalopathy - BSE or mad cow disease - and one of the places where you can find information is on the cdc website. The cdc maintains a list of countries and the results of their monitoring programs. At some point I read about Portugal and how they have had quite a few positive tests and that their monitoring program is too under funded to be effective. While in the UK I have avoided beef to avoid bse and I certainly wasn’t going to stop being paranoid in Portugal so I avoided it there as well.

Sad but true. In Holland there has been an infection with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. This is the second time somebody has been infected here. Doctors think it happened after eating meat from cows infected with mad cow disease. A definite diagnosis is possible after analysis of the persons brain tissue when he is death.

The ‘You need meat to stay healthy’ argument is increasingly hard to defend. When the effects on humans who ate cows infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or ‘Mad Cow Disease’ as most people know it, began to be made public, most people suddenly began to feel they’d be a lot more healthy if they didn’t eat red meat. And, according to most doctors nowadays, they’re right.

Chinese scientists claim to have successfully cloned a calf that is resistant to the infamous mad cow disease (more properly known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy).

On to more chicken topics. What would you all rather die of: mad cow disease or the chicken (avian) flu? As for me, I’ll probably die of both since I eat steak every other day and if I’m not eating steak I’m having chicken or pork. Plus, I’ve been to Viet Nam seven times and I might go in May.

The BBC is back with more downer news. (See You may already be a downer for the previous mad cow disease news.) Though the headline is about blood transfusions, there’s no evidence in the article that the newfound risk of subclinical mad cow disease is restricted to human-to-human transmission. Up to 90% of people who have chowwed on mad cows in the past could be sleeper cases right now.

Amazing. The USDA is not fighting for more stringent oversight — it’s not even remaining neutral. It’s telling companies that want to voluntarily maintain higher standards that they aren’t allowed to do so. It might make the others look bad!

I have since learned that downer cows or cows that are so sick they can no longer walk, are rendered for animal feed, since they are not suitable for human consumption. Yet they are fed to animals we also eat: chickens, pigs, farm raised fish. The FDA just ordered the destruction of a whole trout farm because of whirling fish disease (the equivalent of mad cow disease in fish). Though I applaud their resourcefulness, recycling and reusing sick cows is one recycling project of which the green guru does not approve.

So should we not continue to eat poultry and fish due to flu strains and mercury and eat beef? Well, there’s this little problem of mad cow disease they can’t seem to diagnose until the food is just about in the food chain and then everyone goes nuts for awhile until they tell us all is fine. But is all fine or are they just pacifying us?

Let's be honest, this really is nothing more than protectionism disguised as a health issue. There has NEVER been a case of mad cow disease from eating US beef. There was ONE cow, yes ONE, found in the US to have mad cow disease and that cow was traced back to Canada. Knowing this, the ban that Japan has imposed on US beef is ridiculous. It is protectionism for Japan's cattle producers. Nothing more. The US has FINALLY recognized this and will not take it any longer!

We know exactly where one cow with ’mad cow disease’ is located among the millions of cows in America but we haven’t got a clue as where thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.

I see somebody agrees with my position that the USDA and the big meat packers are in bed together.

Lastly. We have newspeople and governments who are extremely enthusiastic about warning us about just about everything. They sound the sirens and start getting hysterical about things that haven’t happened but may happen. They react to possibilities like like dogs react to squirrels. The focus on them and chase them without thought of where they’re being led. Think about the dire warnings that have been made over the last decade. The deadly dangers that were stalking our existence; SARS, West Nile virus, Mad Cow disease. All these things petered out. The predictions of death and the destruction of civilizations never happened. The predictions weren’t accurate at all, were they?

According to the York Dispatch article, the "Bush administration yesterday proposed to eliminate cow brains and spinal cords from feed for all animals, including chickens, pigs and pets." With aspirations of Mad cow prevention, the Food and Drug Administration says that not utilizing cow brains and spinal cords to feed any animal will reduce the risk of contracting the disease by 90 percent. That is a pretty substantial reduction! Despite this new discovery, the stipulation for producing animal feed will not take effect until sometime next year.

… donated to Katrina relief will soon be incinerated because prevailing FDA regulations prohibit importation of beef from Great Britain due to fear of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis ("mad cow disease").

Next, we need a database of everything ever made for all time. When archeologists thousands of centuries from now uncover the remains of a cow, I want them to know the name of the cow and who owned it. This wiki database will be publicly readable, modifiable, and monitored. Your refrigerator will be able to access it over the Internet. When the cow is discovered to have died from Mad Cow disease, your refrigerator will be notified.

Fears of another case of mad cow disease in the United States have faded for the time being because tests on the most recent suspect animal came back negative. But that is no reason to feel confident about the American beef supply. American cows still eat food that can potentially infect them with mad cow disease. American meatpackers use dangerous methods that other countries ban. And the United States Department of Agriculture does not require enough testing to ensure that American beef is completely safe.

Thanks in part to mad cow disease, we may soon see chicken feathers incorporated into circuit boards. Our love of chicken burgers and drumsticks has created a rather large demand for chickens which in turn has produced huge quantities of feathers each year. Currently these feathers are used in low-grade animal feed but that may soon come to an end as authorities review the practice of using animal byproducts in feed. So what will become of all of these feathers?

The USDA says that despite the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE-Mad Cow Disease) in another US cow the "threat to humans in this country is so remote that there's a better chance you'll get hurt crossing the street to get to the grocery store than by the beef you buy in the grocery store," said Agriculture Secretary, Mike Johanns.

This case of domestic mad cow disease in Texas is worrying mainly because of the cow’s age - 12 years old - meaning that it could have ingested feed before the 1997 ban took effect. How many more cows with mad cow are out there? If one lot of feed was infected, how many more were there? One encouraging bit of news was that the authorities were quick on the trigger here, swiftly jumping on this and investigating. Can we still have faith in red meat? Of course we can, but even if you are worried there are other meats such as chicken, pork and so on, that are grown and produced domestically.

Dr. Mike Heiser has recommended a new book called Brain Trust by Colm Kelleher, which purports to establish a link between mad cow disease and Alzheimer’s. If Kelleher is right, and he’s got the credentials to make his claim plausible, it makes this news especially ominous:

Instead think back to last year after the first (documented) case of mad cow disease in the U.S. Remember the sweeping new rules announced by the USDA and FDA that were supposed to further restrict the use of animal byproducts in cattle feed? Well it appears that those rules are passing quietly into the night.

Senior congressional Democrats on food and farm issues asked Monday why the Agriculture Department suddenly ordered new tests on tissue from a cow declared free of mad cow disease seven months ago.

The US government’s elaborate cover-up of mad cow dangers in the United States has begun to unravel. Twenty-four hours after our successful protest (with Organic Consumers Association) of the US Department of Agriculture’s mad cow dog-and-pony show in St. Paul, USDA Secretary Johanns was forced to admit that a cow tested last year and declared safe in fact DID have mad cow disease, or at least has tested positive on the definitive Western Blot test recently administered by USDA and considered the 'gold standard' for BSE testing.

A cow suspected of having mad cow disease has been found in northern Japan in what may be the nation’s 20th case of the illness, an official said Saturday.

The USDA has recently been accused of been covering up cases of mad cow disease for over a decade. Now a deceased California man’s family and doctor have announced they believe Patrick Hicks, aged 49, died late last year from variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, or vCJD. The fatal disease is contracted from eating beef contaminated with mad cow disease. Dr. Ron Bailey, a neurologist at Riverside Medical Center, believes this will be the first documented case of vCJD in the U.S., and in order to bypass the hand of the USDA, is sending brain samples...

Europe's policy is, in part, a reaction to a series of disturbing revelations about dioxins in chicken, mad cow disease, toxic substances in diapers and baby toys, all of which have made many Europeans more averse to taking risks with chemicals.

Think of the advantage of being able to trace where an animal or some produce has been in its lifetime. Given the mad cow disease scares of the last couple of years, this may be an attractive solution.

*Estonian doctors have diagnosed a woman with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as mad cow disease. Since more than one case has not been diagnosed, the doctors do not believe it is a contagious form. Estonian health officials confirm that the woman did not get the disease from eating flesh of an animal. The last case was diagnosed in November 2004 in central Estonia.

The report's most controversial finding is likely to be that profits from overseas markets would have more than paid for testing for mad cow disease, the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

"Prions enter brain cells and there convert the normal cell protein PrPC to the prion form of the protein, called PrPSC. When normal cell proteins transform into prions, amino acids that are folded tightly into alpha helical structures relax into looser beta sheets. More and more PrPC molecules transform into PrPSC molecules, until eventually prions completely clog the infected brain cells. The cells misfire, work poorly, or don't work at all. In mad cow disease, for example, with their brain cells running amuck, the mad cows wobble and stagger and appear fearful--their "madness" is craziness, not anger. Sheep and goats with the disease scrapie, which is like mad cow disease, become so uncomfortable and itchy that they frantically rub up against anything they can, finally scraping off--hence, the name of the disease--most of their wool and hair (2)."

Early this month in Billings, Mont., a federal judge, Richard Cebull, blocked the Bush administration's plans to resume imports of Canadian cattle and beef. Those imports ended in late May 2003 after mad cow disease was discovered in a Canadian cow. Since then, Canada has discovered three more cases of the disease. The United States Department of Agriculture argues that there is a "very low" or "minimal" risk in reopening the border to live cattle under 30 months of age and to certain cuts of beef. But that argument is based on a hope and a wish.

Two cows in northeast Japan's Miyagi Prefecture have been tentatively tested positive for mad cow disease earlier this month, Kyodo News reported Tuesday.

A group of farmers on Monday filed a $7-billion class-action lawsuit against the federal government, alleging its failure to protect against mad cow disease led to a crisis in the cattle industry.

Under certain conditions, incorrectly folded proteins can transmit diseases from one individual to another. This is the mechanism in diseases caused by prions, such as mad cow disease or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In principle prions are normal proteins, but they have an abnormal three-dimensional structure. Prions bring about infections by prompting other normal protein molecules to assume the abnormal form. These lumps then aggregate into a chain, which starts a chain reaction that ultimately causes a fatal disease.

The United States has covered up cases of mad cow disease in the past eight years, a former U.S. agriculture inspector said Tuesday at a House of Commons committee.

Thanks in part to Stephanie Herseth, Japan has now made it clear that it, too, would prefer to not import beef contaminated with mad cow disease.

Exactly what part of importing unsafe beef inspires confidence in foreign markets is unclear, as Byron Dorgan pointed out: “Somehow, you’re going to give Japan confidence by allowing Canadian cattle to come into this country on the heels of four examples of mad cow disease in Canada? I don’t think so.”