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....
Quote:The owner of the cow was a veterinarian. If he couldn't tell the age of the cow, the beef industry has more problems than this disease.
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.
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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?
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.
Ok, then -
December 30, 2003
Experts Try to Assess Risk From Diseased Cow
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
There are two fears that Americans seem to have in the wake of the discovery of mad cow disease in a Washington cow, and the science of assessing them is very different.
The first: Did my family eat any of that cow, and, if so, will it hurt them?
The second: Never mind that one cow ?- how many others are out there?
Answering the first is really a matter of looking at the history of similar brain diseases in Britain and New Guinea.
Answering the second is, for the moment, largely a matter of statistics ?- but difficult, because the numbers are so vague.
It seems almost inevitable that some part of the cow was eaten. It was killed on Dec. 9, and ground up with about 20 others to make a batch of 10,000 pounds of hamburger that was shipped to groceries in eight states and Guam, although 80 percent went to Oregon and Washington, the Agriculture Department says.
The diseased cow was not found until Dec. 23, and a recall order was issued.
Dr. Gary Weber, a spokesman for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said he thought that, like most ground beef, the batch would have been frozen for transit. He had heard that 20 percent was found in storage, he said. But he said of the rest: "I'd hazard a guess that some of it has been consumed."
Nonetheless, even if the meat was eaten, the risk to humans seems low.
Dr. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinarian of the Agriculture Department, has described it as "minuscule, if any risk at all."
In Britain, nearly 200,000 cows were infected. Millions of people ate meat from those cows, including steaks, ribs, hamburger, neckbones, beef marrow and brains. Material from cows was used in a wide variety of items, including beauty products, polio vaccines and weightlifters' steroid substitutes. A lion in the Newquay zoo in England was found to have a form of the disease. Yet only about 150 Europeans have died of it. Early predictions of 100,000 to 200,000 British deaths did not come true.
Some research has indicated that not everyone is equally at risk, that some people have a genetic predisposition toward the disease.
Moreover, assuming the Agriculture Department was correct, and only muscle meat from the Washington cow was ground up, the risk is probably far lower. Although prions, the misfolded proteins that cause the disease, have been found in the muscles of hamsters, mice and humans infected with the disease, brain and nerve tissue is thought to be a million times more infectious.
But not all scientists agree. When young animals are infected, the disease does not show up in their brains for at least 30 months, said Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California in San Francisco who won a Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on prion diseases. But it could be present in low levels in other tissues, including muscle, Dr. Prusiner said, and at higher levels in the lymph glands of calves. It is not clear that those levels would be enough to infect anyone, and federal officials have asserted that the muscle meat is safe.
Also, it is possible for brain tissue to be driven into or splattered on muscles in a slaughterhouse. Animals are usually killed with a blow from a hand-held jackhammer that slams a piston into the skull. The last few beats of the animal's heart can circulate the tissue. Also, sawing a carcass in half can splatter spinal cord tissue around, as can the use of high-pressure jets that strip meat from bone. Agriculture officials said they believed that such methods were not used on this carcass.
Dr. Robert L. Klitzman, an expert in prion diseases at the school of public health at Columbia University, who in the 1970's studied a brain-wasting disease known as kuru that nearly wiped out the Fore tribe of New Guinea, found that even some people who had eaten the brains of other humans at cannibal feasts did not become infected.
Moreover, Dr. Klitzman said, many of the Fore who were infected with the prion-caused disease may have become so not from eating, because digestion breaks down most proteins into amino acids, but because they did not wash after a feast, and may have put it directly into their blood by scratching insect bites.
"The oral uptake is not very good," he said. "That's why there was not much of an epidemic in Britain."
On the larger question ?- how many other cows have the disease ?- Dr. DeHaven said the department believed that "the worst-case scenario is the disease exists in the United States at a very low prevalence."
Dr. Klitzman said it "would not surprise me at all if we have more." But he said the chances of two cases arising spontaneously were remote. He said the two cows could have been infected from one source of feed.
Until May, Canada and the United States formed one large beef market with animals freely crossing the border. That border was closed in May after Canadian agriculture officials found one case of mad cow disease in a beef steer, but many scientists warned then that any cattle disease found in Canada was likely to be found in the United States, too.
The possibility that both cows were born in Alberta ?- although Canada is not ready to concede this ?- can be read as encouraging news, scientists said. It suggests that the infection might have one source, and might be a regional problem rather than a continental one.
Dr. Donald Berry, chairman of the biostatistics department at the University of Texas's cancer research center, while cautioning that he was not an expert in mad cow disease, said that finding two positives in roughly 40,000 recent tests would suggest that there could be about 1,750 positive animals in the 35 million slaughtered each year.
But Dr. Berry pointed out that there were many variables. For example, the Agriculture Department says that most tests are of "downer" animals, many of which are old and therefore much more likely to show signs of the disease, which takes four to six years to incubate. Older animals are a small part of the overall annual slaughter, and downers are a small number of that group.
If both positives turn out to have been from cattle born in Alberta, even if the one detected in May was a Black Angus cross steer and the Washington one a Holstein dairy cow, it makes it "more likely that it's isolated and comes from one area," Dr. Berry said. "The feed could have come from one feedstore."
Critics of the beef industry and the Agriculture Department remain sure that more diseased animals exist.
Agriculture Department officials said their testing was intended to spot the disease even if it appeared as rarely as in one of one million cattle.
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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.
