Mad Cow Disease Found!

BSE Info
Here is a FAQ page on BSE courtesy the Alberta Government.

http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/cpv6617?opendocument

Also, I completely agree with Ceili's comment....


Although there is still the need for confirmation before anyone can say this cow is indeed from Alberta.

As I previously stated in a different thread, I find it disturbing that a USDA vet approved said cow for slaughter. At least the BSE cow discovered in Canada was not allowed into the food chain.

I saw a news item on t.v. the other day on how organic farmers and ranchers are likely going to see an upswing in profits. Isn't that the way to go if you're going to eat meat? From a cow whose feed is natural grasses/grains/etc. grown organically and isn't subjected to hormones & antibiotics and who lives a natural lifestyle? Okay, so maybe not all organic ranchers allow their animals a free range lifestyle, but I would expect the best ones do. I might even consider eating meat again if I knew the animals were treated humanely their entire lives. Hmmm...well probably not.

Also, I feel the need to address hamburger's comments regarding the conversation with his neighbour who is a microbiologist. I used to work in healthcare and so I am a little more intimate with the inner workings of the medical world than the average joe on the street. There are sterilization methods, including those for prions, for treating medical equipment. Since it is known that prions reside in neurological tissue, it's highly unlikely that someone going in for removal of their appendix is going to be exposed to the same instruments used in neurosurgery. Even if that were the case, the risk of transmission would only be proportional to the method of instrument sterilization. (i.e. proper sterilization equals low risk) Of course the factor of human error is always the greatest risk.

http://bmbl.od.nih.gov/sect7d.htm (See "Inactivation of prions" approximately half way down. I noticed that sodium hypochlorite is listed as an inactivator of prions. Good ole' bleach! It kills everything. )

I read about estimating a cow's age since I know how tricky it is with horses. With both kinds of animals it is done by checking their teeth. Once all their teeth are in place (for cattle that's at about four years - 40 months) the estimation is based on how worn down the teeth are. There are a lot of variables: the breed of cattle, the sex of the animal, its food, etc. If you've ever gotten close to a cow, you'll also know that making it open its mouth to let you examine it closely is not easy. Obviously one would think that a vet would know, obviously it is an important factor. As some have said: records can be changed, eartags can be flipped about and now, teeth are hard to use for estimating.

Here's a website that discusses this. It is for beef cattle, not dairy, but the teeth eruption is probably the same, if not necessarily at exactly the same time:Australian Beef Cattle Dentition

I agree that it is awful to consider that the animal was allowed into the food chain. What the heck were they thinking of? $$$$$$$? At the same time, this is a new disease never previously found in North America except for a single case in Alberta. It's not like the people who run these feedlots and rendering plants are (I hate to say this) rocket scientists. They just do what they do, as they've always done. There was an apparent reason for the cow to be dropping -- she'd been crippled -- something that happens frequently to cattle.

The worst thing about the disease is that it can lay in abeyance for years, both in the cattle and in people. Who knows when someone or some cow was infected or as Acquiunk has pointed out, even if the infection was caused by feed?

Here's a table with all BSE cases worldwide:

Number of reported cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) worldwide

The crucial country in Walters table is Japan which as far as I know is an isolated herd. The four case of BSE have all been found as the result of universal testing and the latest case is in an animal that is younger (23 months) than the assumed time period for incubation of this disease. This suggest that it can occur spontaneously which is not surprising as the infectious agent is simply a revers atomic arrangement of a normal prion. At some level this problem fades from biology into physics.

Mabton (red star) is on the eastern edge of the Yakima Indian Reservation, but note, less than 1% of its population is Native American. That tan bit of land, btw, just below 24 and above Richland... that's the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.



A photo of grown-over acreage burned in the Mabton Range Fire:


Mabton City Data with maps, demographics, etc.

It is said that Sunny Dene Farm had just expanded its herd.

c.i. The popularity of the atkins diet is one of the big reasons for the high beef sales.

I think science will eventually prove BSE naturally occurs. Downer cows are not a new phenomenon. But the fear and understanding of BSE is.

BTW...canada never allowed rudiment protein laced feed. The united states would never have bought canadian cows if we did.

Ceili, I know about the atkins diet, but it's still never-the-less interesting that BSE has not scared off beef consumption. Walter's link on the number of cases worldwide of BSE is very telling. However, the subject of "fear" where it concerns terrorism and BSE doesn't seem to reconcile very well. We've had only 9-11, but that remains one of the most important 'security' issues on our plate. People stopped traveling, and the stock market got hit. One case of BSE in the US, and people continue to eat beef, and the markets are at new highs. Go figure.

The Mad Cow's (I had a sudden urge to write Crazy Cow) spine and brain, which are the disease carriers, were sent to a rendering plant where they were boiled down for soap products and poultry feed.

So now, nothing is safe anymore. Ann Veneman really ought to lose her position for repeatedly lying to the public.

My town has a healthfood store that carries eggs, poultry and beef from grainfed animals only. I guess that's where I'll be going, from now on.

I'm 90% vegetarian anyway.......just get the urge, once in a while.

Say, how was this discovered, anyhow? If the brains were rendered, the meat process, packaged, and shipped, how did they find out?

Roger.....the Crazy Cow was slaughtered Dec.9 and they know exactly where every part of it was shipped.

I can't imagine that this was the only Psychotic Cow in that dairy.....it's just the only one that was accidentally caught via a USDA spot-check.

Maybe there's a whole lot of them Nutsy Cows.....after all, it had given birth to several calves, hahaha!

U.S. Bans Sick 'Downer' Cattle for Meat
By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) - Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman on Tuesday announced a list of new restrictions to further enhance the safety of the American beef supply, including a meatpacking ban on the use of sick ``downer'' cattle like the one discovered last week with mad cow disease.

She also announced bans against the use of small intestines and head and spinal tissue from older cattle in the U.S. food chain, as well as changes in slaughterhouse techniques with the aim of preventing accidental contamination of meat with cow nerve tissue.

The other new measures include:

Any animal tested for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) will not be allowed into the food supply until test results are confirmed. The Washington cow was sent to meatpacking plants almost two weeks before test results showed that it had mad cow disease.

Prohibiting air injection stunning of cattle, a pre-slaughter practice that can disperse brain tissue.

Stricter controls on automated carcass stripping systems to better insure that spinal cord tissue isn't nicked.

Creation of a national animal identification that would enable officials to respond faster to an outbreak.

This last statement is highly unlikely - Acquiunk

`These actions are not being taken in response just to our trading partners,'' Veneman said.


Link to full article

There are at least three articles in the New York
Times today that add a little light to the subject. I did save one of them. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/30/national/30ASSE.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
This link only lasts about a week before you have to pay to read it. I'll copy the entirety if anyone is interested in its being saved here.

ossobusco, I think the Times article is very pertinent and should be posted.

As an eater of hamburger in Washington state, I'm really, REALLY glad I switched to Coleman natural beef a couple of years ago.

I heard something interesting on the radio this morning. Let me try to summarize. When the scientists took parts from the bone of an BSE infected cow and injected it into a healthy cow, the heathly cow came down with BSE. When they took a sample from the meat of an BSE infected cow, and injected it into a healthy cow, the healthy cow stayed healthy. Their conclusion from the experiment is that meat from infected cows are safe. Only when parts of the bone of an infected cow are transfered or eaten are dangerous.

According to one of those articles I read though, the prions are in muscle first and only migrate to brain with time. But muscle hasn't been implicated in illness that I know of, so maybe even if the prions are there they break down on ingestion as any other protein does. Well, what do I know, just musing.

It is crucial to keep this in mind when thinking about the possibility of contracting BSE from eating meat.

"The oral uptake is not very good," he (Dr. Robert L. Klitzman, an expert in prion diseases) said. "That's why there was not much of an epidemic in Britain."

See the above NYT article posted by ossobuco

Yes, acquiunk, and that makes sense to me.

I have a friend of a friend who died of Kreutzfeld jacob - a veterinarian in California. He knew he had it before it got him. I don't know more. This was several years ago.

I speak as someone who never went all that far in microbiology but had an interest from early years. That is, I got a degree on the way to med school, and never got into med school, it being in the early sixties when women..., oh, well, that isn't the question here. I probably would have been a sloppy md or scientist, but I am still interested.

Prions are not aggressors, to my mind, they just act re their nature. as proteins. They are not even bugs, viri, etc. They are proteins which can break down. They can also connect chemically in ways that can cause lots of trouble.

It's actually quite surprising that it's taken this long to show. I'm assuming that's because they don't test every single brain, but rather use a sampling procedure. Due to the disease not being noticed at the early stages, it could very well be that it's all over the place, just not at the level of detection.

It'd be interesting to do a study on the amount of hotdog consumption of each CJD case.