from Eve Riser-Roberts, Ph.D.
What's All the Fuss About - Continued
Claims by the beef industry that only the cattle brains, nerve tissue,
and spinal cord are infected and can cause disease are totally
misleading. Published scientific studies have shown that the prion can
also be present in many other tissues, including muscle (i.e., steak)
(53) and blood (12), bone, eyes, tonsils, lymph, intestines, spleen,
liver, and other organs, glands, and other tissues (13, 14). Organ
transplants, surgical equipment, pharmaceuticals made from animal
products, garden fertilizers, cosmetics, human growth hormone, and baby
food can also carry the prions (53). The infectious agent for the sheep
TSE (scrapie) can be found throughout the body of an infected sheep. It
has been suggested that the brain, spinal cord, spleen, thymus,
tonsils, and intestines of the cattle were chosen by both the British
and U.S. Governments for their initial feed ban possibly because these
parts had the least commercial value (62, 68).

Two broadcasts of the TV program, Dateline, in 1996 and 1997, covered
BSE (47). They pointed out that while cows are supposedly not allowed
to directly eat cow parts since a 1997 FDA voluntary ruling, cows and
calves may still be fed bovine blood products. (26) This is a dangerous
exception, because scientists have conclusively proved that blood and
blood products can carry the disease-producing prion (53). The Red
Cross will not accept blood from donors who have lived in Britain for
three months or Europe for six months dating from 1980. Dateline's
commentator, Stone Phillips, stated point-blank that the American Red
Cross had secretly sequestered 2 million units of various blood
products, because of uncertain provenance with regard to donors and CJD
(47).

Although there is a case description in the New England Journal of
Medicine (1992) in which colostrum from a Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseased
woman was found to be infectious to mice, cow's milk is considered
"safe" by the World Health Organization. (30) Teamsters for dairy
workers petitioned the U.S. Secretaries of Agriculture and Health &
Human Services to immediately ban the distribution of milk associated
with the BSE outbreak in the Pacific Northwest. (33) In Great Britain,
the distribution of milk from any cows linked to the outbreak was
banned. In 1993, the British medical journal, Lancet, reported the
death of a 61-year-old dairy farmer from CJD (53). His herd of
BSE-infected cattle had been destroyed in 1989, and he had been
drinking milk from the herd for at least seven years. Four months
later, another dairy farmer died, aged 65.

However, it's not only the beef products that can be contaminated,
but also the equipment used to process an infected cow. When other cows
and other animals are then run through the machinery, their products
will also become contaminated by picking up nerve debris and prions
left behind by the infected cow. Many different types of animals pass
through the same equipment. If one is infected with a TSE, the machines
become infected. In 1990, Dr. Linda Detwiler, a USDA official, reported
that U.S. sheep scrapie had been spread into cattle in Government
tests. For decades scrapie-infected sheep have passed through U.S.
rendering plants. (50) In 1990, the USDA produced a report titled, "BSE
Rendering Research Priorities," which warned that rendering plants
themselves may be contaminated with TSE disease agents: "If scrapie or
BSE-infected animals are rendered, it may become necessary to disinfect
the rendering facilities. Unfortunately, both the resistance of
spongiform encephalopathy
agents to many disinfectants and the need to avoid corrosive chemicals
in rendering plants create major limitations on the choice of
technology available." (53) Referring to the first acknowledged case of
BSE in America in Washington state, Michael Hansen, of Consumers Union,
the watchdog group in Yonkers, N.Y said, "All those rendering plants
the infected cow material passed through will be contaminated."
Therefore, it was not just meat and various products from this cow, but
also from other cattle and other animals that were processed after them
in three different plants, and which will probably not be traced or
recalled. (3) Also worth noting is that, depending on the equipment
used, water may be drained from the rendering tanks to go to the water
treatment facility (carrying prions with it). (53)
what's REALLY in your hamburger?????
One process used on a cow carcass is to remove meat from the bone with
machines using high-pressure water jets. (2) This method also strips
off bone and spinal cord material, which is likely to be highly
infectious in a sick cow. It is pooled into beef patties, meat pies,
and pasta fillings; meat from as many as 60 animals may go into a
hamburger mix. Each batch contains meat from about 1,000 animals, any
one of which could infect the whole, and expose as many as 400,000
persons to the agent. An agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
pointed out that about 35% of samples from advanced meat and bone
separation machinery had ''unacceptable nervous tissues'' detected.
Also, 29% and 10% of the samples had spinal cord tissue and dorsal
nerve root ganglia tissue detected, respectively, according to the Food
Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

(15) Meat that is cut close to the bone, such as T-bones and ribs, can
have traces of spinal cord tissue. (20) Processed beef products such as
hamburger, hot dogs, sausage (believed to be the source of most human
BSE infections in Europe), and pizza toppings can have traces of spinal
cord tissue. Although brain and spinal cord material are banned from
meat, a 2002 USDA survey found these tissues in beef products at 74
percent of the plants tested. The stun gun method that splattered brain
material into the liver has just been banned (82).

The suppression of this information and the lack of surveillance over
the years could result in tremendous loss of human and animal life, as
the disease eventually expresses itself. It can reportedly take an
average of 13 years, and as much as 40 years before symptoms are seen
in humans, and it is always fatal. (1) In the British outbreak, the
disease was found to occur in people under 30, even teenagers, which is
rare (53). In 1996, the death of two teenagers from CJD in America was
reported in the English press (69). By 1995, more British farmers were
being diagnosed as having the disease (53). Waiting until the first
case of BSE is diagnosed in the United States will certainly be
"closing the barn door after the horse is gone," says R. F. Marsh, DVM,
PhD. (45) "With a disease having a 3- to 6-year incubation period,
thousands of animals would be exposed before we recognize the problem
and, if that happens, we would be in for a decade of turmoil" (60).

As of 2002, there were 830 deaths in Great Britain due to CJD (55). The
number of definite or probable variant CJD (BSE-caused) cases were 122.
Other European countries also report human deaths from BSE-contaminated
meat. One problem emerging is that when a country announces that it has
a BSE problem, it loses its international trade markets, which can be
financially devastating (53). So, many countries appear simply not to
be reporting their cases of BSE. This then allows their contaminated
products to be imported into other countries, such as the U.S., that
are ostensibly dealing only with BSE-free nations.

If this hypothesis of the disease transmission proves correct, the
man-made cycle of using dead animals as feed for other animals ensures
that the disease will be perpetuated. Our pets would play an important
role in this cycle, as they are fed the contaminated food and are in
turn used as contaminated food themselves.

It is believed that this is a pandemic disease, an epidemic that is
worldwide. (29) And a quiet one, because the cause and effect are not
easily linked, because the symptoms do not appear until years after the
initial infection, because the existence of the disease and its
transmissibility are being denied by Governments, because the disease
is not being adequately monitored, because interests of countries and
meat industries are taking precedence over human lives, and because too
little is being done too late to prevent it.