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/RANT
ON/
Reading the US
news today, I just cannot maintain a dispassionate state. I cannot believe the
resistance - in the industry and in the government - toward preventing "downer"
animals from being used for human consumption, or better yet, not being
used at all. The argument is that some "just" have broken legs or other
non-infectious problems that do not affect food safety.
Aside from the
blithe dismissal of transmissibility of illnesses from sick cattle, I find it
appalling that downer animals are allowed to be so cruelly treated by being
dragged or literally bulldozed into the slaughterhouse because they cannot
walk. There is no justification for allowing this, either economically or
otherwise. There are approximately 195,000 "downers" out of 36 million cattle
that are slaughtered annually. That is about 0.5%. How can that kind of
treatment possibly be economically justified???
We now see
that even if such animals were not allowed to be used directly for human
consumption there are still many roundabout pathways through various food cycles
that pathogens could eventually lead back to humans, or (perhaps as bad
or worse), might jump species to begin an infestation in yet another
species.
If all downer
animals were required to be humanely euthanized and cremated, then all that
would happen is that ranchers, middlemen and slaughterhouses would take
better care of the animals to prevent broken legs, disease, and so on. The
number of downers would plummet, since they now would have some economic
incentive to keep the animals healthy all the way through to the end. At the
least, if no better care was given, the sick cattle would suffer as little as
possible by being euthanized immediately. And we would avoid feeding pathogens
forward through any food cycles.
To me, its all a
commonsense part of the attitude of "stewardship", especially towards
animals and other aspects of nature that we have elected to
take responsibility for. Good stewardship and good economics are not
necessarily incompatible in any way.
/RANT
OFF/
Tim
-----Original Message-----
From:
ROSEN Forum [mailto:***On Behalf Of Tim
Gwinn
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2003 4:48 PM
To:
***
Subject: Re: Prion research and mad cow
disease
I certainly
agree it should not be recklessly spread. That's why I called the agribusiness
methods "stupid". I did not intend to insinuate that a "natural"
cause meant we could be lackadaisical about it. :)
My concern is
that correcting these agribiz methods may be inadequate. In the western
US, prion disease is a serious threat to deer populations, and even culling
huge wild herds may not be adequate:
If we take
these wild deer across these several states as a model, then even
reducing the rate of transmission down to a more natural capacity may be not
enough, particularly for large numbers of domesticated animals in close
proximity. In the short run, it is probably all we can hope to do,
barring some major breakthrough in understanding the causal roots of these
things.
Regards,
Tim
Just because something is "natural", that doesn't mean it
should be recklessly spread by artificial means throughout the food
chain. Eliminating the poorly thought out (to say the
least!)agribusiness mechanisms by which this spread is occurring will
reduce the pathogenic activity of prions back down to something approaching
their natural capacity, rather than magnifying their ability to cause
disease through the distribution network our technologies have created. This
issue is not about eliminating prions altogether, it is about common
sense.
Judith
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2003
1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Prion research
and mad cow disease
If misfolded
proteins are not the root cause, but are rather induced by viral or other
such agents, then - similarly -
until such time as they can be identified and countermeasures
(e.g., vaccines) created, it would seem these diseases will continue to
occur from time to time, despite our
best efforts at reducing spreading diseased animal tissue back into the
food cycle.
So, while I agree that it is stupid for
agribusiness to feed potentially infected animals back into the feed
cycle, eliminating this may eliminate or reduce epidemics but will likely
not end the problem altogether.
Although these PrPSc prions pose dangers, maybe
as we learn more about them they will tell us more about the
protein-folding problem?
Regards,
Tim
Apparently, these entities-- prions-- have been around for
a long time, but it has been masked by a couple unrelated
things. One: The lifespan of most humans only a
few generations ago was quite a bit shorter than it is now, so the
long "incubation" (which isn't really incubation, but rather a
cumulative process that only manifests noticeable symptoms near the end
stage) was rarely ever finished. And Two: the interspecies
tinkering humans have been doing with animal breeding and animal feed
production. There may be other causative factors as well (things like
pesticide residue, pollution, genetic modification using viral or
retroviral vectors, even ozone depletion and concomittant solar
radiation affecting prion mutations, etc) that have
caused prions to become the pathogenic threat they are right now.
The main contributing factor that my research has
turned up is the factory farming mentality and practices that have come
into common use within the past 50 years: Using animal
carcasses to create feed for the same species or similar species of
animals. This has been the main form of transmission to date.
You would think that US agribusiness would have learned more from the
experiences in the UK over the past ten years. Sadly, the only law to
come out of that was to forbid the use of mamalian derived food
additives in "Ruminate Animals" (animals that chew their cud). That
means it's still perfectly legal to make dead cow into feed for pigs.
What's more, there are poorly enforced testing procedures AND
follow-up with the "Rendering Industry" (Abbatoirs) that takes
slaughterhouse refuse or offal and turns it into animal feed and other
products like gelatine or cosmetic industry ingredients, etc.
There is a lot of slip 'twixt cup and lip, in this whole
supply chain. Feed for ruminative animals is made with the same
machinery as dead-cow-proccessed feed in some plants-- and when I
researched the medical precautions of how to sterilize equipment in
human surgical settings-- they said the only safe thing to do is to
discard surgical instruments used on infected people! The next best
alternative is to soak the instruments in hydrochloric (or was it
sulfuric?) acid for an hour, rinse, and then autoclave-- and that
doesn't guarantee prions haven't remained that keep their infectious
ability. So they only advise the use of that procedure on equipment that
was NOT used in brain surgery, spinal surgery, eye surgery, or certain
other high-risk types. I really don't understand how prions can survive
all that, but this advice (from the World Health
Organization) raises my goosebumps! I think it's a safe bet that
rendering plants don't do any of the above sterilizing of their
equipment.
Variants of mad cow disease have now been confirmed in
cats, mink, mice, macaque monkeys, chimpanzees, cows, sheep, and I'm not
sure how many other species, besides humans. There was a report of
ostriches with a confirmed brain wasting disease in a zoo in Germany!
There were studies done on certain types of parasitic flies that lay
eggs in living or dead flesh that proved that ingestion of the flies
larva can transmit prion infection. I don't know if other exposure to
these flies, as in being bitten by an adult, can transmit
infection, but I do know that there is an unavoidable level of
insect contamination in any processed food. There were studies that
proved that prions in placental material from infected female animals
that have given birth remains active in the pasture for a
number of years. What the implications of that are for grazing
animals, I don't know. But the whole situation is cause for some serious
alarm.
Potential solutions in the short term for your average
citizen: Eat only organically grown foods-- and meats raised using only
organically grown feed of the correct type for that animal's
evolution! The highest risk foods are organ meats
and processed meats from cows (and I should think sheep, as well),
especially animals that were over two years old. Dairy foods are not
supposed to be infectious, and muscle tissue is not high risk, unless it
has the bones in or was processed with great stupidity.
Mind you, this doesn't address the threat that is carried
in the fact that animals like cows are used to generate many common
vaccines, which is an area of research I skimmed over, but merits more
detailed review, I suppose. All my kids have already been vaccinated for
everything, so I'm not sure that it's worth it to scare myself
now.
I have to say, I am very disappointed in the behavior of
agribusiness in general. If this is what they do when unregulated, then
something seriously needs to change. I'm researching organic internet
sources for meat and other foods. Anyone who's interested, email me off
list and I'll share my results with you.
Judith
----- Original Message -----
From: "James N Rose" <***>
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2003 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Prion research and mad cow
disease >
> from your depiction
... these effectively are 'magic bullets',
> impervious and
dangerous once in the open environment. Biological
>
versions of bucky-balls.
>
> If they are truly
biologic-primitives on the scale you describe,
> then they should
have been present in the natural environment
> long before
now. Either they were, and natural biology once
> upon a
time found a way of dealing with them, or ..., their
> appearance
required special atypical and contrived conditions
> to form
them.
>
> James
> 122703
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