Udder Denial
Why Mad Cow May Be In YOUR Fridge Right Now
By Anita Sands
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 staffr 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.
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