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Jahnu
 
Posts: n/a
Default No need for farm animals.

On Sat, 3 Jan 2004 12:50:50 -0500, "rick etter"
> wrote:


>snippage of more AR/vegan BS, lys and delusions. Too bad that's all you've
>got, killer.



How Now Mad Cow?

by Professor Richard Lacey
The risk of mass infection of BSE in humans is very real.

Richard Lacey is Professor of Clinical Microbiology at Leeds
University. He has a degree in medicine from Cambridge University and
a Ph.D in clinical microbiology from the Faculty of Medicine at the
University of Bristol. As well as publishing over 200 papers in
scientific and medical journals, Professor Lacey has lectured
extensively overseas and broadcast frequently on radio and television.
His work has won him a number of prizes, including the Evian Health
Prize for Medicine and the Caroline Walker Award for Science.
Professor Lacey has been an advisor to the British Government and is
widely recognised as a world authority on mad cow disease.

What is BSE and how did it start?

BSE, better known as mad cow disease, stands for bovine spongiform
encephalopathy, an infectious and incurable disease which slowly
attacks the brain and nervous system of cattle. Spongiform
encephalopathies are nothing new and are not confined to cattle.
Scrapie, the form of the disease found in sheep, has been common in
Britain for the past 200 years and a human version, Kuru, was once
epidemic in tribal New Guinea. By late 1994, a handful of people in
Britain had died from another human version, Creutzfeldt Jakob disease
(CJD).

BSE has been epidemic in British cattle for the last ten years. The
first confirmed cases were reported in late 1986 but it is believed
that the first case may have occurred in Hampshire in 1985. By early
1995 it had been identified in almost 150,000 cattle and more than
half of all British herds.

The exact origin of BSE is not known, but simplistic claims that it
came from sheep are now discredited. BSE is an incurable disease
caused by a mystery 'infectious agent'. The agent is not a virus or
bacteria - nobody knows what it is. It has broken the most basic rules
of biology. Any cure still lies at the very limits of present-day
science.

What does it do?

The period between becoming infected and showing symptoms for
spongiform encephalopathies is long in relation to the life span of
the animal or human involved. For example, Kuru in humans can take as
long as 30 years before the person becomes visibly ill. The disease
bores into the brain and nervous system very slowly but once
established it rapidly causes dementia and death. No treatment works.
Post mortems show the brain to be sponge-like and full of holes, hence
the name 'spongiform'.

In cattle, the first signs occur 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 it's 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 behaviour 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 it's nervous tissue) is removed for examination as 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 burnt but as many as 30% of
infected carcasses end up in landfill sites where they could be
disturbed by tractors, bulldozers, dogs or rodents. As BSE is an
extremely strong disease, it remains infective even after years in the
soil. When cattle are killed for food, the same procedure applies -
the head (and some other parts such as the spinal cord, spleen and
thymus - 'specified offal') is removed. The Government say that people
will not be at risk when they eat cows but the flesh (containing
infected nervous tissue) is eaten and the bones are eventually made
into gelatine which finds it's way into many products.

How widespread is BSE?

By late 1994, the disease had been identified in nearly 150,000
animals and in just over half of all cattle herds in Britain. Some
scientists including myself believe that the only way to tackle the
problem would be to destroy all herds with cattle incubating the
disease. BSE has affected all breeds including, significantly, Jersey
and Guernsey cattle on their respective islands. The black and white
Friesian Holstein cows are the most commonly affected simply because
there are far more of them in Britain than other breeds. 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 we,
the public, demand it. The price of our daily pinta is paid for dearly
by the suffering of animals. 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 knackers yards 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.They are eventually
slaughtered at six or seven years old, even though its natural
lifespan would be 20 years or more. Most parts of the cow are used to
make burgers, sausages, pies, stocks and pet food. Until 1989, this
also included the brain.

More than 90 per cent 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. Is BSE a danger to
humans?

All the evidence so far suggests that humans are not immune from
infection. The Fore tribe live in Papua New Guinea, a place unexplored
by Westerners until the second half of the twentieth century.
Cannibalism, especially by women hoping to increase fertility, was
common until very recently, and this led to an outbreak of 'Kuru', a
human form of scrapie. Kuru killed up to 80 per cent of women in some
villages but how it first started is unknown. Because it occurred
within families and mostly amongst women, it was first thought that
Kuru was inherited genetically. Scientists have since proved beyond
doubt that Kuru is infectious and that the disease was transmitted by
eating meat, in this case human meat. If BSE can be transmitted to
humans then the resulting illness is expected to be like our own form
of Kuru - Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). As a spongiform
encephalopathy, this is again a disease of the brain and is always
fatal.

Like Kuru, patients first show symptoms of mental changes, such as
problems with co-ordination, recent memory loss and slurred speech.
Sometimes obvious twitching of muscles can be seen, the facial
expression becomes fixed and the person may stumble and fall over.
Over the next few weeks, the person becomes confused and unaware,
unable to read or recognise even close relatives. Towards the end of
the illness the patient is unconscious and not reacting to anyone,
often having fits or jerking spasms and is doubly incontinent, blind,
deaf and speechless. Patients continue to be fed but are rarely placed
on a respirator nor given antibiotics for infections, particularly of
the lung.

It is the latter which usually results in death. During the post
mortem, extreme care must be taken because the disease is ncredibly
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 sterilised. 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 steriliser. 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, and indeed has been,
transferred. CJD is so feared by some people in 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 from it.

What is the connection?

It is now known that regular eaters of veal (and other beef products)
are 13 times more likely to die of CJD than those who don't. The
prospect of a huge number of people dying from BSE as CJD next century
is very real; that is, CJD and BSE are one and the same. What is being
done? Very little. The British Government has hidden the facts and
fiddled the evidence at every stage of the investigation into mad cow
disease. It has told expert scientists, including it's own advisors,
to keep quiet in case the hugely profitable meat industry suffers. In
May 1988, the government set up The Southwood Committee to examine the
risks of BSE to both animal and human health. Extraordinarily, it had
no experts on spongiform encephalopathies and none were consulted.
Although experts in their own areas, none of the members of the
Southwood Committee had done any research into spongiform diseases. A
month after the first meeting, the Government, on the advice of the
committee, ordered the compulsory slaughter and destruction of
carcasses of all affected cattle. It was already too late. Between
the date of the first known case of BSE in late 1986 and the middle
of 1988, at least 600 obviously diseased cows (plus an unknown number
of animals not yet obviously ill) had been slaughtered and their meat
had found its way onto supermarket shelves.

Half the normal price of carcasses was paid in compensation, which
encouraged farmers not to report suspect cattle. The real extent of
the problem remained unknown. The second recommendation of the
Southwood Committee was to set up another committee to do more
research, which simply admitted that the problem was too big. The next
meeting of the committee was five months later, some indication of how
serious the Government regarded the problem. The report admitted that
spongiform encephalopathies are a danger to humans and stated: 'With
the very long incubation period of spongiform encephalopathies in
humans, it may be a decade or more before complete reassurance can be
given.' The Southwood Committee went on to say how they thought the
disease was passed on, saying that eating was low down on the list of
possible reasons. While admitting that all cows had got the disease by
eating, they were suggesting one rule for cattle and another for
humans. It was easy for a cow to get BSE through eating but very
difficult for humans to get CJD by doing the same.

Two other general conclusions of the Southwood report were that the
risk of vertical transmission of BSE (passing the disease from mother
to calf) was non-existent (since proved incorrect) and that cattle
would prove to be a 'dead-end host', which means the disease would
stop at cows and not infect other species. This introduces the
revolutionary biological concept of a non-infectious infection. Cattle
are not a dead-end host. BSE has been spread to other species and this
was known at the time of the report. The Southwood report stated that
'...if our assessment of these likelihoods (of possible human
infection) are incorrect, the implications would be extremely
serious.'

Their assessments have been shown to be incorrect. We do have a
terrible crisis on our hands. Who cares? Evidence that the Government
was less than concerned about the risk to the British public comes
from the Tyrell Report, produced by the research committee set up as a
result of the Southwood Report. For example, this said that the brains
of cattle normally sent for slaughter should be checked to see if some
animals had BSE and were not yet ill with it. This would have shown
how big the problem really was. Not surprisingly, this has never been
done, despite numerous requests from the UK Parliament, because it
would have been 'too expensive'. Too expensive for the meat industry,
that is.

Once consumers realised that they were eating infected meat, profits
would have plummeted. The report also recommended monitoring all UK
cases of CJD over the next 20 years (as a matter of 'urgency'!) to
reassure the public that there was no link with BSE. At present
'monitoring' means that a researcher checks death certificates for
CJD. That's it as far as the UK Department of Health is concerned. Of
course, a real investigation was not planned because it would admit
that the government was scared of a major public health problem.
It finished by saying that more research was needed and that the
controls at that time to prevent the disease spreading were not
enough.

Overall, the report was an excellent analysis of the situation as it
was in 1989 but many of the proposals it made were ignored by the
government. This report, dated June 1989, was not released until
January 9 1990, showing just how urgent the Government thought it was.
By this time they had accepted that they did not know whether the
disease could pass from cow to calf whether it was possible other
species could get BSE, or that the recent suggested increase in sheep
scrapie was the cause of the rise in BSE cases. In April 1990, the
Tyrell Committee became 'permanent', a surprising development as,
according to the government, BSE was about to disappear. The feed ban
As part of the cannibalistic merry-go-round that is an economically
essential part of the meat industry, all the bits of animals from
slaughterhouses unsuitable for human consumption are boiled up to
produce fat and protein. The protein makes animal feed.

Apart from the obvious high risk of different infections being passed
on, it seems strange that nobody had actually questioned the
biological sense of forcing naturally vegetarian animals to become
carnivores, eating the remains of other animals. This is probably what
has caused the spread of BSE.

In June 1988, the government imposed a six-month ban on feeding animal
protein to cows and sheep as it was thought this was the most likely
way these animals would become infected. In December, the ban was
extended for 12 months and laws stopped the sale of milk from cattle
suspected of having the disease. Banning infected feed did not stop
the rise of BSE. Cases rose from 500 per month in January 1989 to 900
per month in December 1989. The 'mysterious agent' that causes
spongiform encephalopathies has been found in many of the organs and
tissues of animals. For example, cells from the spleen, thymus and
tonsils ('specified offal' banned for use in animal feed in 1989)
enter the blood and find their way to many organs including the liver
and bones. The bones of old cows are one of the major sources of the
protein gelatine, used in many foods from peppermints to pork pies.

The greatest risk could come from bones because the procedures used to
concentrate and purify gelatine could create a stronger source of BSE.
With the passing from mother to calf of BSE confirmed in 1993/94,
blood could also contain the disease, at least as far as cattle are
concerned. The problem, of course, did not go away. The number of BSE
cases per month rose from 800 in January 1990 to 1,500 in December
1990. The Southwood Committee had predicted a maximum of 400 cases per
month.

We were wrong but we're not sorry...

After four years of Government reassurances that BSE could not infect
other species, tests carried out in February 1990 proved the opposite.
BSE was transmitted to mice by feeding and to other cattle by
injection. Cattle were no longer 'dead-end hosts'. The disease had
never been previously reported in cats but in May of the same year, a
domestic cat died from a spongiform encephalopathy. Even then the
Government stuck to its guns and denied that spongiform
encephalopathies could jump species. In fact, that is the very
nature of the disease. By the time 52 other cats had died in July, the
government finally admitted that they had contracted the disease
through eating 'pet food'. The question was no longer 'Can BSE affect
other species?' but 'How many species will it affect?'

A month before, in January, trading standards officers revealed that
infected cattle were still being sent to market because farmers were
still only being given half of the normal price for their cows. A
Ministry official denied that BSE was finding it's way into our food
but some people weren't quite so convinced. In April 1990, Humberside
County Council banned the use of British beef in school meals. The
number of known cases of BSE passed the 10,000 mark.

In April 1991, the Ministry of Agriculture predicted that a peak in
the number of BSE cases would occur in 1991 and the disease would
disappear by 1994. By the end of the year, 25,025 cases had been
confirmed in Great Britain, providing the first indications that,
despite government claims to the contrary, the disease was being
passed from cow to calf. The following year, BSE was transmitted
experimentally to seven out of eight species of mammal, including pigs
and marmoset monkeys. In four experiments, this was by eating. A puma
and a cheetah were also reported to have died of the disease. Evidence
was mounting of an uncontrollable epidemic, with serious implications
for humans. CJD, the human form of BSE, claimed the lives of two dairy
farmers who had tended herds with BSE infected cattle. The number of
human CJD cases in Great Britain was nearly ten times higher than the
annual number recorded 25 years earlier and twice as high as the
number recorded five years earlier.

Vicky Rimmer, a 15 year old Welsh girl, developed the symptoms of CJD,
despite no family history of the disease or medical mishaps such as
faulty blood transfusion. She was also extremely young considering the
very long period it normally takes for symptoms to show. This meant
that the disease was most probably contracted from an external source,
more than likely food. A doctor from the CJD surveillance unit
examined Vicky and told her mother not to make her daughter's
casepublic. According to the Daily Mirror (January 25 1994) he told
her she should think of the economy and the Common Market. More than
17,000 cases of BSE were confirmed in cattle born after the feed ban,
with 500 cases known to have come from mothers which later developed
BSE.

This meant that BSE was infecting cows by means other than infected
food. However, the government tries to explain this by blaming
farmers, feed compounders and renderers for breaking the law - they
accuse them of continuing to put ground-up sheep and cattle into
cattle feed. This is manifest nonsense and is the last ditch attempt
to deny the occurrence of vertical transfer of BSE (where the mother
passes on BSE to her calf in the womb). The existence of vertical
transfer means that the infectious agent must be in the cow's blood
and will therefore be found in virtually all beef products. In 1994
the government had still taken no action to control cattle being moved
from BSE infected herds to other herds, nor had they taken any other
steps to control the epidemic. The total number of BSE cases confirmed
exceeded 137,000 by the end of August 1994 - more than six times the
number predicted by the Southwood Committee in their 'worst case
scenario'. However, in April 1994, it was admitted that cows did pass
BSE on to their calves.

What can we conclude from this?

Basically two things. Firstly, almost 10 years after BSE was first
identified, expert knowledge is still virtually nil. And, as if to
cover this up, all the available evidence suggests that the government
has carefully manipulated the facts to avoid doing anything about it.
The main reason is to protect the huge vested interests of the meat
industry - the cost of compensation for replacing six million
infected cattle could run into billions of pounds. The bad
international publicity from this would endanger UK food exports,
tourism and even much of our industry. Secondly, there is a very real
risk of mass infection in the human population. The government has
made sure of that.

And while the time bomb of the twentieth century equivalent to bubonic
plague ticks away, we all have to take responsibility into our own
hands. The simple and safest answer of course is to stop eating
animals. In the absence of any accurate, reliable or simply truthful
information coming from 'the experts', the choice has to be yours.

www.krishna.com
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