UDDER DENIAL
or
WHY MAD COW DISEASE MAY BE IN YOUR FRIDGE TODAY
CiH Foreword. You might have an enjoyable shudder after reading this.
These tales of eco-apocalypse may well be taking over from the old stories
of witches and ghouls, in satisfying modern societies deeply held longing
for nameless terror. This article was written a few years ago, and the
consequences haven't developed to their utmost worst case, so far...
Fact for the day - There seems to be a genetic mechanism which activates
the vCJD condition, and about 40% of the UK population have this
predisposition!
The original version of this article can be found on a link from:-
www.cruel.com
Mad-Cow has to be the most intriguing fatal disease on the planet. Imagine
the scenario: you're walking along eating this hamburger, not knowing that
as you munch, alien invaders are climbing out of the meat, through your
tongue, bouncing like happy, yellow pac-men toward your brain which THEY
will eat the way you're inhaling that burger. You don't know you're infected
so you get married and have a child---who, you guessed it, is born with the
Satan bug pre-loaded, already munching away at his brain.
The truth about Mad Cow is so horrific nothing is taught about it in med
schools. Until a year ago, most scientists knew Jack in the Box about it---
(malady originally found in cannibals but mysteriously, at times seemingly
spontaneously in non-cannibals)--which was probably for the best. If doctors
had known any more, med students would have realized they had no more than
five or ten years to live, quit school and spent their last years surfing
Tahiti.
A lot of people would have you believe only Mad-Cow and Englishmen go out in
the Noon day sun. Hooey. Mad-cow has been killing American sheep since the
early 70's, U.S. cows since the mid-80's, and U.S. citizens for the last
decade. The reason it hasn't been made public is that the people who had the
facts chose to misinterpret them. They are in udder denial.
Scientists have know the truth about Mad-Cow for ll years, since l985 when
Britain's #1 researcher, a microbiologist, discovered and announced them. It
took him a decade to publish his Feb, l995 book which claimed a hundred plus
humans dead of Mad-Cow might imply the British beef supply was infected.
(Two prestigious medical journals trashed the book in scathing reviews the
same week as a Rock group named "Mad-Cow Disease"; made its London debut to
rave reiews. Go figure.
Summer '95, the Canadian Red Cross had a blood recall when they discovered
two infected Canadians had donated blood but the press only wanted to talk
about a sick bull whose owner refused to destroy him. The November '95 issue
of the British Medical Journal suggested the possibility that maybe people
got Mad Cow from eating beef. Three million Brits immediately quit eating
beef.
Mad-Cow hit our shore in two blows --the first January 12th, l996, when John
Darnton wrote a long article on balmy bovines for the New York Times, the
second March 20th, l996, when the British government finally admitted to the
world that the obscure, brain-disintegrating cow malady called Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (Latin for sponge brains) was the same disease
found in a lot of dead sheep, in the brains of several hundred dead Brits
and the same disease that turned cannibals' minds to mush back in New Guinea
in the 1940's.
White man wasn't supposed to get the cannibal bug. Papuans deserved things
like that. These dumb-nuts ate their deceased family members' brains as a
social ritual, hoping to keep their relatives thoughts 'alive' and know the
future. Once a Papuan was infected, any children born, automatically had the
infection incubating inside them and the whole family died dingy. It was a
weird sickness which deserved the most obscure name possible and
"Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease" did the job.
CJD was a 'prion' disease, so called after the minuscule protein particle
that seemed to cause it, not a bacteria, not a microbe, but a virus, a sub-
microscopic speck that had no DNA or genetic structure, A Flying Dutchman of
a protein particle like an unpiloted plane, just a few simple atoms of death
strung on an amino ribbon floating single-mindedly through a mammalian body
until it found the area where it loves to root, the brain. There, the prion
embeds itself, bonding with a single healthy protein molecule and like a
cult leader, instructing him to mutate into a twisted prion like itself.
Then, the newly converted devotee molecule does the same thing, converting
another normal cell, setting off a chain reaction-series of imploding, self-
destructing cells, leaving large, ventilated, vacant spaces. The cult is as
lethal as it is patient not caring if it burns down the church as it quite
happily decays into the ground, hungrily waiting a few centuries for another
victim.
Though science would have us believe CJD can be sporadic, or appear out of
nowhere, CJD enters us only when another person's flesh is eaten. White men
didn't eat their brothers, so there was no thought in early researchers,
Cruetzfeldt-Jacob, that bwana could get this bizarre mush brain syndrome.
But as a wise man once said, science never advances so fast as when it is
dead wrong.
If there are coherent universes contained inside coherent universes,
microcosms above and below, why can't germs have feelings and aspirations?
As germs go, this one was a bug with imagination. It wasn't interested in
crawling on the savannah of Papua, in some blade of grass, It wanted 'the
big time,' so it waited until a chipmunk ate the grass, the aborigine ate
the chipmunk then the germ tap-danced up the poor man's brain stem to the
man's brain, eating holes in his gray matter until the cerebrum resembled a
big, gray sponge and the host became spastic, mindless and started laughing,
as mindless people everywhere do, only this fellow would laugh himself to
death and then, as if to 'get' the joke, his children ate his brain.
At first, the disease seemed kind of fun. Imagine Cruetzfeldt and Jacob
coming upon this native, laughing himself to death with kuru, (the Papuan
name for it) then embarking for Europe, with the laughing man's pickled
brain in a jar. Seeing no germs in any lens of the period, they threw this
spongy cauliflower into their little British garden. A trillion prions
abated into the ground, waiting for some low-grazing animal to come munching
toward them, and along came the family pet, Wooly the Ram. Bingo! It's Mega-
death starring The Cannibal Bug opening at the Palladium.
That might well have been the scenario for, after New Guinea, the disease's
next official appearance involved a big, geographic leap. In the 70's, it
appeared in the sheep herds of Britain. British sheepherders, with Celtic
poesy, called the penchant "scrapie" after the sick sheep's habit of rubbing
up against things.
As breeders traded sheep like baseball cards, scrapie moved to sheep herds
in America which in 1970 had an epizootic amount of laughy, rubbing sheep.
For a while farmers wondered if their teen-aged kids had dosed herds with
some of those new-fangled, hippie drugs. Rams and ewes who had never met a
cannibal started exhibiting an odd, itch to scrape their heads and hides
against fences, even if the fences were barbed wire. No one suspected that
scrapie was just that old Papuan wolf hiding in sheep's clothing. It was
beyond imagination that a cannibal infection on one, isolated continent
could leap to food chain-animals on another continent, unless the unseen six
fingered hand of some alien gray Dr. Pasteur was at work. Maybe all those
cattle mutilations in the South West were really UFO research, designed to
vacate this fine planet of bothersome earthlings, fitting it for new,
silvery skinned tenants.
Or were cattle mutilations the work of "local talent" who didn't want to
alarm farmers with requests for cow labia? In l970, the U.S Dept of
Agriculture and National Institute of Health were on some kind of secret
detail. They collected thousands of scrapie-infected sheep, examined them,
isolating the animals in pens, in up-state New York, but then, according to
Howard Lyman of the U.S. Humane Society, (an ex cattle rancher who was privy
to all this), the NIH (i.e. Washington) sold the sick animals to farmers
across the USA.
When these sheep later died, unsuspecting farmers sold their corpses to the
rendering industry to make cattle feed, in order to GET l00$ rather than
SPEND 500$ for an autopsy. Unwittingly, the U.S. Government had sent a
gaggle of happy little Papuan prions off to have their way with a lot of
unsuspecting American cows.
In the USA there is an enormous industry of turning cow corpses into Soylent
Green to fatten livestock, called 'feeder cattle,' meaning cattle raised to
be eaten by cattle. This practice is so solidly entrenched in the USA that
you can actually trade commodity futures on 'feeder animals.'
Back in the 70's the delegated feeders were sheep who'd died of scrapie.
This was simply American frugality to use up all those imported, sick sheep.
Grinding up dead animals worked well for American ranchers; cows buffed up
into Schwarzeneggers so Brits began doing it to their dead sheep and in the
70's, Brits were losing a lot of sheep to scrapie. Why not cut losses with
cash for corpses? Trusting beef-farmers bought hi-protein certain-death feed
for their cows for the next 18 years. Because the UK had an enormous
percentage of sheep to cows, every cow got a daily, heaping serving of
kibbled sheep. And poor, trusting Brits ate a lot of the infected sheep too,
as in Britain, mutton is consumed.
For the first time since Papua, humans got prions in their brains. How not
to? Farmers and butchers couldn't see that a sheep was ill. At slaughter
time, the dementia hadn't yet manifested. Even if it had, in l974, the top
UK microbiologist/researcher, Dr. Richard Lacey and his U.S. counterpart,
Dr. Stanley Prusiner had only just set up their electron microscopes to
study prion diseases. In those days researchers thought prion diseases were
only genetic. The fact that they were infectious first, later becoming
genetic was beyond imagination.
So get the picture: 26 years ago, microbiologists in two countries could see
the bug, farmers, veterinarians and butchers couldn't. There were no
antibody markers visible at any time during incubation so sick ewes freely
gave their illness to their baby lambs who carried the bug straight to human
tables. In Britain, mutton may have infected Brits. We say 'may' as there is
a theory that CJD does not come to humans through sheep, but rather, after
another step up the food chain, through sheep-kibble to cows, then through
beef steak into human mouths. The logic of science is hazy to the point of
denial here as there were human dementia deaths in the 70's but they were
ascribed to Alzheimer's, the disease that was giving doctors deep-pockets,
so prions, sheep and sloppy doctors were all off the hook.
But all that was soon to change. In l985, British farmers noticed that an
illness suspiciously like scrapie turned up in a cow. Patient Zero was a
Holstein dairy cow who started kicking like a chorus girl, developed an
extreme case of the jitters then fell over dead. Her brain was examined
posthumously, its Swiss cheese appearance noted and the disease given the
name "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" or BSE, a whole letter away in the
dictionary from Cruetzfeldt and a dictionary away from 'Scrapie.'
In a cow, the bug caused more than just an itch to scrape. BSE was a true
"Dementia" disease, like Alzheimer's is for humans, i.e. memory loss, motor
function changes, loss of large movements like walking ability. Eyesight is
lost, the ability to make fine movements with the hands, loss of spacial
arrangements like parking a car. A lot of that is not crucial to a cow, but
it was hard for the farmer to milk Bessie when she was splayed on the ground
shaking, screaming and dancing around like James Brown.
A cow is a lot more valuable than a sheep. Beef-farmers demanded answers. At
first, nobody connected spastic cows with the scrapie sheep of the 70's and
certainly not with New Guinea cannibals of the 40's but in l986, a professor
of Microbiology at Leeds University, consultant to the W.H.O., Dr. Richard
Lacey, announced that scrapie, BSE and CJD were the same thing, that beef
disease was in the meat supply, could kill humans and that a wave of deaths
would soon hit Britain.
Lacey was called 'an airy-fairy, politically suspect vegan,' and accused of
trying to dismantle the 6 billion dollar a year British beef industry. His
funding was pulled. Like a Cassandra, he stuck to his guns, warning there
was going to be a fatal outbreak, saying that people should stop eating beef
and that newspapers should start warning people of the possibility of human
infection. Lacey felt that 100,000 people were already infected. His
prophecies made Beef-eaters and especially beef-farmers edgy and got him
fired but his words weren't ignored. The government created an Official
Advisory Council, (leaving the nation's only expert, Lacey, off the board)
which told farmers not to worry, that while feeding powdered sheep corpses
to live cows probably wasn't a good idea (even if the idea had been given to
them by American ranchers, who practiced 'the grisly, fleshly humus pile'
method for buffing up beef to the tune of huge profits,) Brit farmers could
do as they wanted. That was l986. And the band played on.
In late l987, 700 BSE-infected cows were reported in Britain. By Summer
1988, the number had climbed to 7,000. Out of one side of their mouth, the
experts said they were stumped. Out of the other side of their face they
created a l988 law making the use of sheep and bovine offal illegal. Europe,
Asia and America heard about the law, realized the livestock they'd been
importing was infected and en masse boycotted British sheep and beef,
causing millions of pounds sterling profits to vaporize.
The sacrificial lamb-ban was a case of too little too late. British
livestock with tourist cards were grazing in every country of the world, and
had entered the breeding stock with a baa, moo and a Mona Lisa smile. The
entire world had been eating imported British beef and lamb chops well since
the ground floor of the disease in the 70's so laughing Papuan prions were
pac-manning up brainstems from Budapest to Bora Bora.
The world ban on beef, the Prophet of Leeds, and the '88 law against
grinding up sheep did not stop the progression of BSE in England. Cows kept
dying. Brits waited for the next hoof to fall and fall it did. The number of
infected dead cows soared from 1989's mere 7000 to 36,000 in 1992. In eleven
years, 160,000 British cows had gone four hoofs to the sky and there still
wasn't an official murmur about human contagion---aside from Crazy Lacey
whom no one took seriously,--- not a mention of the possibility of the
disease munching its way another insidious step up the food chain but the
90's, the human form of the disease, CJD, began to show its sub-atomic
teeth.
In 1993, WHO figures indicated a total of 250 suspected, 117 proven CJD
deaths with the average age of the victims being 27 years (descending from
the former CJD average of 63 years). But the bell didn't stop tolling: 56
Brits died of CJD in l994, followed by 42 cases in l995.
March 20th, l996, Agriculture Minister Dorrell announced to the world that
British scientists "suspected a link" between BSE and it's human equivalent,
CJD. A link between spongy brains in British cows and the even spongier
brains in British politicians was finally officially on the record.
Dorrell's admission caused a furor which put photos of stumbling, cross-
eyed, drooling cows on TV's across the planet and made England's Wimpys and
McDonalds burger shops stop serving beef and begin marketing a soy patty,
(which they did for all of three days until they had some European beef
flown in and started resupplying the real thing.) Vegans picketed the
MacMeister and got their asses sued --- the world's first case of 'McLibel.'
English schools immediately stopped serving beef in cafeterias. All this
ruckus shot American beef, grain, soy and especially corn prices sky high in
slavering anticipation of the US cornering the feed market as it became
necessary to fatten the planet's cows on something other than their dead
brothers.
Staunchly, Prime Minister Major and the German and Italian politicians ate
veal chops for lunch in Turin as they haggled over the ban, taking us back
to an earlier Brit minister who'd force-fed his gagging 4-year old daughter
a burger in front of the press corps. The Royal Family stodgily continued to
serve beef at Buckingham Castle, recalling how, during WWII, they
patriotically stayed in London dodging bombs alongside commoners but the
bravura was really profiteering, pro-beef drama to keep the British beef
industry alive and shouldn't make us forget the important question---why
hadn't the 7 year ban on British Lethal sheep powder stopped the progress of
the disease in Britain?
THIRTEEN REASONS WHY IT DIDN'T - MAD COW IS IN YOUR FRIDGE TODAY:
1.) MAD COW, SCRAPIE and CJD are mutations of a cannibal disease. A mammal
gets it by eating the infected flesh of another mammal, although corneal
transplants and pituitary injections also carry it.
2.) US/Brit Sheep were infected simultaneously back in the 70s. In both
countries, sheep's dead bodies were turned into protein powder and fed to
cows. Britain banned 'death kibble' in '88. It's still 100% legal in USA.
3.) MAD COW causes NO ANTIBODY RESPONSE. When infection enters any body,
human or animal, the victim's immune system shows no sign of fighting the
infection as it does with bacteria, germs and viruses which means the
mammal's immune system can neither detect nor fight it nor can scientists
use the antibody-search method to see if someone is sick, as we do with
AIDS.
4.) CJD disease takes 10-50 years to eat away the human brain. In COWS,
death strikes as early as one year after exposure, as late as 8.
5. ) Mad-cow causes a genetic mutation which is transmissible so if you have
it and are starting a family all your children will have it. Sheep and cows
pass it to offspring, too and chickens to their eggs. If it weren't
transmissable, why for decades had the FDA has demanded that all donors to
the blood supply answer the question 'has anyone in your family died of
Cruetzfeldt-Jacob?' The disease is l00% inherited and one drop of blood of a
descendant of a CJD victims can infect all your descendents down through
time.
6.) No scientist can tell if a cow or human is in an incubating phase.
Except for brain biopsies, there are no tests, no genetic markers. Prions
are not reliably found in urine. You can see prions in brain tissue but you
cannot open the skull of a live mammal to scoop them out. If a cow whose
milk you are drinking has it, her calf, sent to be a veal chop last Winter,
had it when you ate him. An older cow may fall over dead with it, but
meanwhile her sick, offspring are long gone to human tables. The long
incubation period means the farmer can't see that the animal is ill. The
USDA studies the brain of 100 cows per hundred thousand --- a snippet of a
sample indeed.
7.) Mad-Cow is killing faster and faster. It was once thought humans could
incubate the disease for up to five decades without going into the final,
dementia stage but lately Brit teens have been dying of it so it appears
Mad-Cow prions evolve the way everything else does. The mutation is toward
legs.
8.) The only way for a farmer to find the disease in his herd is via a 500$
autopsy. Farmers prefer selling the corpse to a rendering factory for $l00
profit, a practice still legal in the America at this time of writing.
9.) Mad Cow prions can't be killed the way we fought the plague or fight
cholera epidemics, or Ebola, by burning bodies. It is passed on via
'prions', proteins that degrade at 800 fahrenheit, way above the temperature
that would reduce them to ash. What is more, burning is a bad idea, as prion
molecules go up in the smoke, airborne and fall back on the land. As they
were never alive, they do not die. These zombie molecules just wait for the
next set of munching teeth. As Britain is considering burning 5 million cows
soon, loosing the prions like some ghostly stampede in the sky, the air and
water there may soon be contaminated. Cancel your Summer trip. The place
will soon be a giant science experiment.
10.) Though Mad-Cow attacks brains, it's thought to be in every part of the
cow, his flesh, blood, urine. The contamination cannot be removed by cooking
or powdering him. A British Vegan woman caught it simply by dusting her
roses with blood meal.
11.) USA has had thousands of 'downer' cows (dying mysteriously) since l981.
Dr. Richard Marsh, a virologist on the Veterinary staff at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, stated that he had seen 100 cases of BSE in America,
between 1981 and 1989. If the bug entered US beef 15 years ago and has been
multiplying ever since, a million cows could be infected.
12.) MAD-COW mortality figures hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer's. Some
U.S. doctors know the truth yet haven't blown whistles. Pittsburgh Veterans
hospital autopsied 53 sequential Alzheimer's victims. Sampling 1 showed 5.5%
had died of Mad-Cow, sampling #2 that 6.3 Percent died of Mad-Cow.
Alzheimer's death tolls are doubling and tripling, not characteristic of a
genetic disease ergo the shadowy presence of another PROBABLE CAUSE.
13.) No lab in USA will do a Mad-cow autopsy as the prion cannot be burned
out, sterilized afterwards so on all our death certificates, officially,
we're going to die of you guessed it, ALZHEIMER's and the cows? They're
downers. That's all.
Since beef and sheep farmers have been sending 'downer' livestock to
rendering factories to be made into 'protein powder' for livestock for the
last 26 years, Mad Cow prions could be in every ounce of meat, milk, pork,
chicken, egg, cheese, or butter you have eaten since l970 and in every bite
you eat today and in gelatin caps, animal glandular supplements and in the
glue on the postage stamp you will use to mail a xerox of this article to
your Aunt Edna.
Forget Ebola which kills you so fast you can't move ten feet and give it to
anyone else and which you can blow out like a birthday candle with a good
bonfire. Mad Cow is the most prevalent, virulent disease to hit this planet
since the plague. Conceivably it could represent the end of all human life
here, vacating the orb for a new, Vegetarian Adam and Eve to bring forth a
new, meat-free race, or for Pleidean squatters to turn into Acapulco.
It is certain that we will see many more cases associated with CJD than we
have ever seen with AIDS as Mad Cow infection has been found all over
Europe. Figures for sick cows to l995.
BRITAIN 157,394
Switz 205
Ireland 120
Portugal 30
France 16
Germany 4
Italy 2
Canada 1
Denmark 1
There are no official figures given for the US. That someone wants to hide
the problem, let a tidal wave of CJD deaths be ascribed to Alzheimer's to
bolster a troubled economy at the expense of its people might be inferred
from U.S. official silence.
A few days after the Brit admission, the USDA issued statements that
American beef was clean. "The US did not use sheep for bypass protein cattle
feed." This is an outright lie. In the USA, thousands of downer sheep have
been used to feed cows and of late, America has an enormous amount of
'downer' cows to feed them, too.
From the Pittsburgh sampling we realize that there are hundreds if not
thousands of CJD deaths in America but they are passed off as Alzheimer's.
BSE is entrenched in American beef regardless of what the US Government
wants you to believe, and boy, there seems to be an effort to control what
you believe.
Ted Koppel interviewed Dr. Richard Marsh on Nightline two weeks ago. It went
like this. Koppel: "But we (USA) don't feed sheep brains to cows, do we?"
Marsh blinked. "I don't know where your information comes from, but we do."
He was instantly cut off by a commercial and did not reappear that night.
(Capitol Cities which owns ABC was founded by William Casey of the CIA. It
is as close to being an official mouthpiece of the oligarchy as exists. Oh
hey, get real. Why do you think Kissinger is their favorite 'witness.' He's
practically the ABC poster boy.
The truth is, Virologist Vet Marsh knows of what he speaks. All those BSE
cow bodies he saw in Wisconsin 1981-1989 had been fed dead sheep yet the
cows' became 'feeder cattle' and went to feed thousands of other cows who
have bred thousands of animals. Papuan prions have been spread to herds from
Maine to Hawaii. Knowing the genetic mode of transmission of the disease is
to all offspring, it is reasonable to suspect that there is sponge brain
infection slowly crawling up the brain stem of every cow in America as well
as all the humans who have eaten them as well as all the offspring of both
species. And to pigs, chickens who were also fattened with the deadly
Soylent Green. As a poultry farmer told a prion researcher, "rendering
salesmen brought us bags of this powder saying it was wonderful stuff and
had ever so many uses: we could use it for fertilizer or to feed our
chickens."
As so many CJD deaths are masked as Alzheimer and private labs won't let CJD
tissue in the door to be examined, it is certain the American public will
not be informed of the disease that is in our food, our kitchens and our
bodies. We are scheduled to be 'downers' and Ted Koppel doesn't want us to
know it.
Dr. Richard Deandrea, a L.A. physician who has studied CJD and BSE
extensively, tells of his first CJD patient. After her death, which featured
frills atypical of Alzheimer's (fingers numb, blindness, slurred speech,
weak knees,) Deandrea dogged the Center for Disease Control for a
pathologist who'd give him an autopsy to see if it might be CJD. CDC evaded
3 weeks of his calls. Finally, a female CDC staffer told him that off the
record---she'd deny it later--"CJD is an issue no pathologist will deal
with, a virtual death sentence to a lab. A well trained pathologist knows
the quarantine would never be lifted. You couldn't sterilize the lab to OSHA
protocols. It would have to be gutted, incinerated. Forget it. Your patient
died of Alzheimer's." So, there may be CJD deaths but there sure aren't
going to be CJD death certificates.
All the same, the beat goes on. On March 20th, 1996, the very day that
Minister Dorrell lit the fuse on the Mad-Cow bomb in London, a Florida man
died of CJD. His wife gave a TV interview describing his shaking knees, his
lack of co-ordination, then quick parabola into a vegetative state, followed
by death and said that her husband had never travelled abroad in his life.
Why would he have to? Prions enjoy the American climate. They mutate into
Natural Born killers of the speediest kind here although American reporters
seem the first to manifest the dementia. 1,490 dailies in the USA, 11 big TV
networks and only CNN carried the story of the man's death airing it March
28th. (Jane Fonda must be feeding Ted his tofu.) True, the Oprah Show had an
ex beef rancher on, who had seen U.S. sheep and cows dying of Mad-Cow but
that won't happen twice. Beef dropped 150 points on the stock market while
the show was on the air and the beef industry is suing Oprah for it.
Small stations are more likely to reveal death toll statistics. In
California, KCAL-TV News reported two recent CJD deaths, one in Stockton the
other San Francisco. Dr. Deandrea knew of a death in Lancaster CA and
another in Minnesota, all in the last few weeks yet the NIH claims it knows
of only 11 CJD deaths since '94, ---no surprise if there isn't a lab on the
country that will allow a suspected CJD death case in the door for an
autopsy!
But the double whammy for the slowest of slow of this torpid group of
officials goes to the US Department of Agriculture, who responded to the
whole Mad-Cow issue by saying that it was going to "consider the banning of
the use of sheep tissue in cattle feed." Is such a lackadaisical failure to
grapple with the problem bureaucratic caution, a deliberate ruse to avoid
creating panic, denial born of fear or genuine ignorance?
Check all four boxes but there could be a vested 'short stroke' interest in
keeping the steaming hot meat issue under a lid for a while. If meat is
history and grain no longer required as feed, Cargill, Conagra and IBP will
go broke along with the 50 billion dollar a year U.S. meat industry. On the
other hand, if D-day can be staved off for just a while, a few knowledgeable
insiders could profit bigtime---trashing their own corporations but making
it back betting the downside on beef, the upside on pigs on the stock
market. Then, when people start to die of CJD, the profiteers will switch --
betting the upside on soy for humans and the downside on all other livestock
and feedgrains. Fortunes will be made. If stocks are your hobby, bet against
livestock futures for there is 'scrapie' in every state of the union and, as
dead sheep are still being fed to every single American cow, meat is lethal
whether it's in a can of Whiskers (80 Brit cats have died of Mad-Cow) or
walking around mooing or under cellophane. The only safe beef is the one WE
have with the USDA.
Scientists who invented the "bypass protein" method of feeding livestock,
(taking the rendered corpse of dead animals, grinding it into meat meal,
mixing it in with grains,) have turned an attractive planet into a potential
graveyard. Scientists who turned healthy herbivores into cannibals for the
first time in their billion year history may have shot themselves and
humanity in the collective hoof. Of course, there are other animal husbandry
practices which have made cows vulnerable to pathogens, which have given
Mad-Cow a running start.
Even if there were no prions lurking, when you feed an herbivore protein,
its body produces ptomaines, which causes lesions or tubercles in its body.
That means tuberculosis. In 1989 the National Association of Federal
Veterinarians decided to create a 'test-balloon' state. They allowed
California to sell meat infected with tuberculosis, a practice illegal since
1906. TB immediately went up 36% in the sunshine state.
HOW NOW MAD COW? Bovine immune systems have been destroyed by still other,
common practices: massive daily injections of synthetic growth/lactation
hormones which exhaust the cow who is chemically stimulated to give 40% more
milk. Then, there are the anti-biotics necessary as such a regimen paves the
way for multiple infections. Then---the horrific, painful mutilation of cows
with more than 4 teats. (Many have 8 teats; extras are amputated without
anesthetics.) Then there's de-horning, also done without anesthetics. Worst,
imagine the hormones of grief created in Bessie when baby veal is calf-
napped on its second day of life. Then 305 days of the farmer stealing the
milk her child was supposed to get. Then a 2-day starvation period (no food
or water) to dry up her milk to get her ready to 'calve' again. And the
killer cycle starts all over again driving the poor cow literally mad. (At
last someone uses the right word for a disease!) A happy cow would live 25
years on a happy farm. A dairy cow is exhausted at 3 to 5 years of age. Her
reward: she is slaughtered and her poor, suffering corpse eaten by humans as
burger.
In its greedy striving for more bigger and longer for less cost, science has
contributed to cows having the last laugh in this A-Cow-Palypse Now.
So these are the facts. Prions are here to stay and if this disease has
worked its way up to the top of the Food Chain and the fact is known by
American researchers, why do these educated men remain silent? The
Pittsburgh Veterans Hospital sampling never hit the newspapers. The
definitive paper on Mad-Cow, written by the foremost U.S. prion researcher,
professor of neurology and biochemistry, Dr. Stanley Prusiner of the
University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, is curiously
without mention of the danger of eating meat. For ten thousand words,
Prusiner just goes on and on about prions bonding with other prions as if he
were studying the mating habits of penguins. His 10,000 word magna opus
never mentions the words 'meat,' once. You'd think that if an obscure, New
Guinea cannibal brain disease showed up in American war veterans,
researchers would ask questions like 'why don't doctors do Alzheimer's brain
autopsies in a designated-to-be-compromised lab put in every city and why
don't veterinarians do cow and sheep autopsies in every slaughterhouse?' Why
cling to this dainty-lab fetish? The average kitchen is already as infected
as any morgue on the planet. So OK, maybe science has made a few boo-boos
here but why the enormous non-confront and zip-the-lip silence from all
interested parties?
Is it that lab restrictions are too tough or that scientists are ostriches,
or that governments and world banks fear bankruptcy? Or is there some kind
of oligarchic 'Life-boat' theory at work? (i.e. that the upper classes have
decided to toss us peons out of the lifeboat.) All of that is possible but
in reality, there probably is simply some kind of myopic stupidity that goes
with specificity. Scientists are Johnny One-Notes. They wander around in
their specialty, in Prusiner's case, stunned by a maze of bonding prion
molecules and can't see the forest for the trees.
Let's give these eminent men the benefit of the doubt. Maybe---until last
week, scientists never connected CJD to an obscure British disease that was
related to an even more obscure sheep problem related to a positively arcane
cannibal disease of the 40's. Nobody could connect the dots. The puzzle
pieces stayed in the box because for the last 25 years, CJD has been able to
hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer's. The Alzheimer's Foundation itself
seems to be clueless, saying that if current trends continue, 14 million
people will have Alzheimer's by the turn of the century. No mention of CJD
from them.
If (as Pittsburgh concludes) 6% of Alzheimer's cases are really CJD, in the
next 4 years, 840,000 US humans will die of CJD and if they were of
childbearing age when they caught it, 2 million children and 4 million
grandchildren carry it in their genes and these 4 million people walking the
USA today do not know that they will go into spasms, then idiocy, then
comas, costing the families and the health system $120,000 per patient and
so will all their descendents, forever.
Today we see the obvious feature of Alzheimer's; this genetic disease was
doing something genetic disease don't do, doubling and tripling its toll.
There was certainly reason for scientists to suspect another culprit but,
except for Crazy Lacey of Leeds, nobody did. After Lacey was excommunicated,
of course, maybe nobody wanted to be a whistleblower.
It remains to be seen if, now, in the light of England's admission, US
researchers will inculpate meat, develop tests, do brain autopsies, and
convey true CJD death tolls to the press and public. Or, will Stepfather
Bank and the government prevail and prod scientists to keep quiet to avoid
creating mass panic, a stock market drop, World Bank rollover, the whole
enchilada.
Admittedly, if there's even a whisper of prions in America, huge losses
would result to the U.S. 50 billion dollar a year meat industry. They have
in Britain. Five days after Dorrell's admission that CJD was BSE, and prime
rib could kill, the entire European Union ordered its second ban on British
beef exports. (The first had expired.) A 6 billion dollar a year beef export
market collapsed in a single day. Loose lips sink world economies but
silences go before apocalypses.
It's been a month since the truth came out of its burrow and, except for
Oprah, the media hasn't touched this hot potato. Does somebody in some
penthouse somewhere up there not care if the lumpen proletariat dies raving?
Would it really be easier to get a taxi in Manhattan and get tickets to a
hit play if, say, 3 billion of us just shuffled off this mortal coil?
The British power structure covered its ears for 25 years. Banks seem not to
want to hear mad scientists, gloom-and-doom prophets saying a high profit
commodity might be deadly. Lacey wasn't the only voice in the wilderness.
There were others: Haresh Narang, a microbiologist, hired by the Public
Laboratory Services in New Castle, said CJD in humans came from BSE.
Microbiologist Dr. Steven Doeller, said scrapie, CJD and BSE were the same
thing. All were roundly ignored but a quarter century of misdemeanor petty
denial was trumped in 1995, a halcyon year of felony-sized cover-up, when
Dr. Lacey's book on Mad Cow was trashed in the British Medical Journal and
shrugged off by New Scientist, (helping the book sell, actually). His book
made the Beef Industry so nervous that in December l995, 3 articles were
planted in prestigious British journals: The Economist, Nature and New
Scientist, saying there was nothing to worry about, Lacey was crazy, all
three written by that eminent scientist "Anonymous."
British Doctors who refused to sign their names cooperated with public
officials in a quarter century long 'news-out' while simultaneously, rising
CJD deaths were brushed off as Alzheimer's. The truth was staring them all
in the face; BSE affected the same part of the brain in humans as in cattle,
as in New Guinea cannibals. The peppy prion was always the perpetrator. But
if a prion were caught en flagrante on the nose of a cow, for 26 years,
officialdom did not want to know about it, not in the early 90's when the
first of the 117 known human victims appeared, , and not when 300 cows a
week were dying of the disease, which they are now in Britain.
That the Brits admit anything about soggy brains and beef is probably
valiant when you compare it to the American response. When the USDA heard
that Britain was planning to slaughter ll million cows they said brightly:
"Great, we'll sell England our beef. We have a surveillance program here,
we've gone through 43 states, and seen 2,660 specimens and found no cases of
BSE." Apart from the greed of that statement, examine its mendacity. The USA
has approximately 200,000 animals slaughtered daily. If they did open the
skulls and look inside, this test still represents one out of 75 cows, or
3/4 of ONE percent of the daily CORPSE PILE. Worse, all officialdom here
knows full well that sheep are still fed to cows.
Convenient silences and outright lies seem to have migrated to the new
world, along with infected sheep. MIT and the NIH first explored a
connection between BSE, animal foods and dementia as far back as l981, when
American cows began to come down with a mystery disease known as "Downer Cow
Syndrome," suspiciously like BSE. Many of the downers had previously
exhibited symptoms of the jitters, others just suddenly dropped dead. Their
brains were fed to mink who quickly manifested Mad-Mink disease. In any
case, downer cow corpses revealed BSE brain pathology yet not a peep came
from these scientists, not a whispered word to the farmers to stop rendering
sheep into cattle feed, not a warning to the public to stop feeding beef to
children. Okay, NIH is Washington, but what could provoke MIT to put a sock
in it? Are they federally funded or something?
MIT scientists knew the truth yet American farmers were allowed to sell
sheep corpses for 26 years and cow corpses for 15. Worse, you and I were
allowed to feed infected meat to our children.
When the scandal first hit, one Department of Agriculture staffer actually
said that the rendering practice has been outlawed in the USA. A few days
later, another staffer said 'we discontinued (that practice) earlier.' Two
liars tripping over each other. The truth is, to this day, it has been left
to the farmer's discretion. There are no laws on the books. In all other
countries the 'cash for corpses' practice is illegal. In the USA it is
entirely voluntary whether a farmer renders corpses or doesn't. No US farmer
can afford to ignore free hundred dollar bills so render they do.
Examining the facts, it is clear that denial, lies and benign propaganda are
damage control, intended to prevent panic. A cynic might say that they were
intended to allow knowledgeable investors to profit as the US cornered the
world beef and feed market. U.S. grain futures SOARED to a 15 year high
after Britain's admission, in anticipation of all that US beef and feed
being exported, so no one can say the cynic is wrong.
The Brits saw through us; they screamed that we have plenty of the disease
here, that they got their sheep powder practices from us. They want all
American animal products banned saying that the awful offal powder is fed
not only to US cows, but reminding us that meat and bonemeal imported from
Britain (1980-1989) was used for U.S. poultry feed.
Again, USDA officials responded with trickery, pulling out a red herring,
saying they've never found a sick chicken. Of course not. The problem with
detecting the disease in birds is that they never live long enough to get
the Swiss cheese brain. The average fryer is mature at 32 days. (Before the
wonders of chemistry and all those magic pep powders, it took farmers a
costly 84 days to mature a bird.) No U.S. fryer lives long enough to
manifest dementia but if it's genetically in his brain, it's in the strands
of his nerves and he lives more than long enough to give the disease to the
person who eats a KC extra crispy drumstick or an Egg McMuffin.
NOTE: The practice of rendering bodies and using them for animal feed was
not stopped by federal law until almost a year later. On January 3rd, l997,
it was announced that offal could no longer be used to feed animals eaten by
humans.
Mad Cow Disease is nature's last laugh on mammal-eat-mammal mankind. As Dr.
Deandrea says in his L.A. lectures, "Mother Nature has spoken: 'you have
mindlessly eaten your little brothers so I am taking away your minds."
There's no way out of this predicament. The disease is incurable, "made of
kryptonite or linoleum," joked Dr. Prusiner. "Gives a new meaning to what we
think of as alive" implying what's not alive cannot be killed.)
Healthfood nuts may preen that their beef was raised organically, fed only
grain and grass. The problem in logic is that this is a genetically
transmissible disease. The unorganic Cow passes it on to her milk-lapping
calf who is already infected when he is sold to the organic farmer. Mom gave
BSE to her baby both through the cagy prion taking over her DNA and through
her udder. Baby's healthfood diet does not stop the slowly eroding sponge
brain from invading this happy, healthfood-chewing heifer or invading a
chicken's egg or invading your child when she eats a veal chop at dinner and
follows it with a glass of milk swimming with prions, using dishware in a
kitchen so infected with prions that if it were a laboratory, it would be
burned down to the ground.
WHAT ABOUT COOKING THE MEAT OR MILK? The pasteurizing of milk, at 150
degrees, makes the prion think it's a sunny day. The cooking of meat at 212
degrees makes him think he's in a pleasant sauna. Raising the heat to frying
in the 320 range might make him even blink but you must reduce the prion to
total ash at 340 degrees centigrade (in our American fahrenheit system that
would be 800 degrees) to immobilize him and take away his sexual potency ---
his ability to replicate.
There is no solvent known to immobilize the Mad-Cow spore. This kind of
microbial tenacity is so Sci-Fi it raises the hair of the medical community.
If you ask a doctor to do an autopsy of a patient who died of CJD, he flees,
knowing that if he exposes his lab to this disease, the lab will be closed
down by government officials. The NIH's Paul Brown maintains told reporters
that he can clean prions off his hands with Ivory soap. There is a long line
of men we'd nominate for the "America's most dangerous man" contest but
Brown is a serious contender for the crown.
The truth is simple. The medical community has no cure for CJD. It is very
simply fatal. Alternative, holistic remedies have not been tried on the
prion. Dr. Richard Deandrea feels that if you think you've been exposed,
enzyme therapy might work, seeing that proteins can be dissolved by enzymes
which are found in raw foods. But Prusiner has written that this protein
molecule laughs off all the enzymes he tried on it.
So it looks inevitable. Choose vegetarian proteins like hummous, tofu,
beans. You'll be healthier in every way as these proteins don't tax the
immune system as much as 'foreign flesh.' Immune systems love a whole, live,
raw food diet so eat raw, dark-green salads with nuts, sprouts and seeds. Do
as much cleansing as possible, through colonics. Take periodic raw juice
fasts. Besides a vegan diet of vegetables grown on organic soil, take 'good
fat' supplements like flaxseed, Evening primrose and borage oil, also the
oils found in nuts and seeds. Don't increase dairy, it clogs digestive tract
and could be infected with prions. Make almond milk, brown rice milk, tofu
milk. Avoid soy milk. It lines the gut with plastic. Don't use soybeans in
any unfermented form or give soy formula to babies. It has been implicated
in the rising 'crib death' rates. Use fermented soy like miso, tofu, tempeh.
Discover the pleasure of tahini. Make your own humous, a kind of Israeli
bean dip. Take multi-vit supplements. Blue green algae, spirulina, chlorella
are complete foods with B-12. Animal-source B-12 is dangerous now. Last, get
rid of all other eco-hazards that stress the immune system: flouride
toothpaste, perfume, dental fillings, solvents like propyl alcohol, (used in
all soap, detergent, shampoo and to clean all factory food and juice
machines.) Go 100% natural.
If Mad Cow is in meat, it could be in dairy products and eggs; it's in
mayonnaise. It's in the gelatin in candy or around a vitamin pill. It's in
blood meal fertilizer, urea fertilizer and the manure clinging to mushrooms.
Animal derivatives are used in vaccines, pharmaceuticals like Premarin, in
glandular substances used in holistic remedies like melatonin, in petfoods,
gloves, film, plastics. British leather was banned by Egypt a week after
Minister Dorrell's admission. The sons of the Pharaohs aren't dumb.
Total vegetarianism may be the answer until this is cleared out of our
livestock. Vegetarianism always was a do-able thing. Some say that Type O
blood does not do well with it, so type O's might continue to use fish, but
Type A's can easily embrace millet, avocado and sprout-proteins.
If you insist on meat, find LIVESTOCK ALTERNATIVES: Learn to Hunt. Get Game
meat, venison, quail; shoot pidgeons in the park. Learn to fish: get freshly
caught deep-water fish, making certain it is not a variety like swordfish,
filled with Mercury. Get a boat, eviscerate the fish the moment it's caught,
put on ice, then in your freezer. Do not catch shallow-water coastal fish as
the huge amount of Mercury concentrated in fish is implicated in Multiple
Sclerosis and other neurological problems. There is also a lot of deadly
dioxin in the water, and cadmium and nickel from batteries being dumped off
the shore. FISH will be the last animal protein source, but the fishing
industry (totally fished out now) cannot be expanded. Fish will shoot to
l00$ a pound so get a boat now or start fish farming.
FOR FLUFFY AND SPOT: Discontinue all commercial foods made with meat by-
products. Get ANERGEN THREE from pet stores. Wysong makes "Vegie Cat" a
taurine supplement which you can sprinkle on top of cat's vegie food.
EVOLUTION pet food. (612) 858-8329.
Last of all but most important Go Kosher; put any cooking pot, that has ever
touched beef, lamb, chicken or pork in the garage for melting wax for
candles or tie-dying, put any dish, fork, knife or spoon into the cellar as
relics for museums of the future day when all this is behind us, or when
there are methods for sterilizing, ---perhaps in pottery kilns.
Wearied by plagues, will the American people forget and throw caution to the
winds from time to time sneak out for a hamburger with fries? Will nostalgia
drive us to the burger shoppe at midnight to take that one, last bite for
auld lang sygne? Heck, we've all slipped on diets but is noshing a quick Big
Mac a minor peccadillo like forgetting to practice safe sex when you're
overcome with passion or letting the cable bill go a day overdue? Made blase
by Aids, will US teens find meat-eating like playing Russian Roulette with
forbidden fruit?
While we're on the subject of AIDS the Christian right that was laughing up
its sleeves at the sins of AIDS victims will now watch their own number
decimated in larger percentage, in a much more prolonged, cruel way. I can
see the t-shirt on Melrose, now. "I only ate a tiny weenie, you ate the
whole, damn cow."
The new enemy will inspire new philosophies and tactics. Will grammar
schools indoctrinate babes with "Say no to beef?" so thoroughly that, tiny
policemen, they will wrest that cutlet from our misguided adult hands in
time and report us to the food police?
Mad Cow should really be called the "Cannibal's disease" as only a mammal
eating another mammal can get it and that appears to be what went wrong on
the planet Earth. We started eating our little brothers. Too late we realize
the celestial logic behind the law on the tablet ---'Thou Shalt Not Kill'.
I try to think back to my last lambchop straining to recall the taste so I
can describe it to my grandchildren and wondering when the typos will start.
Is the seed of mush brains in me? Is it in my child? Can any of us ever buy,
serve, eat or wear animal products again?
The promised H.G. Wells 'Things to Come' Armageddon seems to be here,
complete with people shooting disease carriers (cows, sheep and chickens) in
the street.
The millennium came four years early. But brother, it came. And not with a
bang or a whimper, but with a moo.
REFERENCES/ BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Darnton, J. "Fear of Mad Cow Disease Spoils Britain's Appetite," The New
York Times, 1996, 145: p A1 Col 5.
Dawley, H. Mad Cows Business Week 1995, 3456:44
Collee J.G., BSE: Stocktaking, 1993 The Lancet 342:790
The Economist, 1995. 337 (7944) 56-57
BSE, Bulletin of WHO 1993; 71:6:691
Reeve, M.P. Mad Cows & Englishmen, Harvard Health Letter, 1990 16 (1) 1.
BSE in the UK, WHO memo, Bulletin of WHO 1993; 71:6:691.
Lacey, Dr. Richard MAD-COW, the History of BSE in UK
Ozel, M. Xi, YG;Baldauf, E. Diringer, H. Pocchiari, M. Small. CJD The Lancet
1994; 344:923
Burkhalter, S. BGH and cancer? The Network News 1994, 19 (2)
1.
Blood Product Recalled, FDA Consumer, 1995, 29:3
The Lancet 1993 342:672
Ragg, M. Pituitary and CJD The Lancet, 1994: 344:531
Golan Ralph, MD, Optimal Wellness, Ballantine Books, NY 1995.
Mad Cow and Englishment 1996, The Economist, 338:7959 (with 5 separate
articles on the subject). March 30, 1996
Watts, Susan "A Bogeyman Among the Beef-eaters" New Scientist, 2-18-95, p.
42.
FOR COPY OF KPFK BROADCAST call Roy Tuchman. KPFK-FM N.Hollywood CA (818)
NOTE TO RESEARCHERS: At Library, on computer listing Periodical Abstracts,
tap these SUBJECTS: Blood donations, brain, beef, cattle, epidemics,
Geriatric psychology, Medical research, Farmers, Nervous System, Neurology,
Pathology, Proteins, Tomography. The word 'Mad-Cow' brought up nothing at
all for this writer, late March 96. Univ stacks have Brit periodicals like
Lancet.
MADCOW PEOPLE: Dr. Richard Deandrea, M.D. 213 564-6005. 310 399-3345&
Marr Nealon 818-509-1255 Does LA CA PR 4-Lyman, Kit Parash Sec H Lyman 301-
258-3054 : Phys. committe Responsible Medicine Group Wash, DC Eric Haapauro
202-686-2210
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