December 28, 2003 PHXnews (Phoenix) by Tom Buddig

Mad cow disease: The US tests 0.00055 percent of slaughtered cattle for mod cow disease; the Europeans test 25 percent. The Japanese test 100 percent

This story includes WMD and even Karl Rove, the president's political "dirty trickser," who actually plays the good guy in this story.

Yes, the Europeans test cows for BSE (mad cow disease) at rate more than 45,000 times that of the USDA and the Japanese test 180,000 times as much. Your Ivory soap is still 99.44 percent pure, but your beef is 0.00055 percent sure, as far as BSE testing goes. The USDA tests 1 in 1800 cows for mad cow. Some European nations test 1 in 4 cows on slaughter (the older ones most likely to get BSE). The Japanese test them all. Japan has embargoed all beef from the US since the first case was detected in Washington state.

There is a saying in the cattle industry, "If it's on your plate, it must be safe." This makes about as much sense as George Bush when he says, "I have a full plate. And my agenda's full, too." The first quote says you can unfailingly trust your government. The second says you can't.

Not to pick on President Bush - there are many others offering inanities right now. The food industry and its associates in government and universities are offering them for public consumption along with beef untested for BSE.

The abbreviation BSE stands for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (en-CEF-a-LOP-a-thy). It's a brain-wasting disease of cattle that gives brain tissue the appearance of a sponge. Other animals can get variants of the disease. They are all called TSEs, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. Humans who eat the central nervous system (CNS) tissue (brain or spinal cord) of an infected animal can get variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CROITZ-feld YAW-cob) Disease (vCJD), which is invariable fatal.

In a December 29, 2003, article, the Christian Science Monitor, said: "Considering that BSE isn't the deadliest of food-borne illnesses, setting up a comprehensive testing system like the one in Japan would create an enormous cost for a questionable benefit, some say." http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/CSM/mad_cow_csm_031229.html However, the human form of the disease is invariably fatal - about as deadly as illess gets. The article didn't say whom it meant when it said "some say," but it went on to quote Dr. Dean Cliver, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of California at Davis.

Dr. Cliver, commenting on Japanese-style comprehensive testing, said, "We might find it expedient to do that, but I don't think this about saving lives." The expediency he is talking about is not saving lives but about saving international beef sales, according to the article.

Many Americans will respond to this by saying, "If it (US beef) is not good enough for the Japanese (or Mexicans, Taiwanese, Russians, Chinese, etc.), I might just look into this a little and wait a little before I buy more beef."

Another chesnut that can be roasted here is the flat claim that humans can only become infected by eating the brain or spinal cord of a diseased cow. A March 2002 report from researchers, including Stanley Prusiner, a Nobel Prize winner at the University of California at San Francisco, stated: "Because significant dietary exposure to prions [the infectious material] might occur through the consumption of meat, even if it is largely free of neural and lymphatic tissue, a comprehensive effort to map the distribution of prions in the muscle of infected livestock is needed." http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/6/3812?

However, the muscle meats - boneless steaks and roasts - are the safest because they are the least likely to harbor the infection. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/154017_beefsafety25.html The riskiest are the brain and spinal cord, the epicenters of the disease. Meat that is cut close to the bone, such as T-bones and ribs, can have traces of spinal cord tissue. Processed beef products such as hamburger, hot dogs, sausage (believed to be source of most human BSE infections in Europe), and pizza toppings can have traces of spinal cord tissue. Some plants strip meat from the bone by using high-pressure water. Some of the CNS tissue might go along.

Actually, although brain and spinal cord material are banned from meat, a 2002 USDA survey found these tissues in beef products at 74 percent of the plants tested.

Aside from this cross-contamination, some scientists believe the prion infection may spread within an animal from the brain and spine to other organs. A February 2003 study in Germany said: "Therefore, the findings described here highlight further the necessity to investigate thoroughly whether the muscles of TSE-infected sheep, cattle, elk, and deer contain infectious agents." http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/embor/journal/v4/n5/abs/embor827.html

A Swiss study on prion illnesses in humans said, "It is believed that prions overflow from the brain into other organs [muscles and spleen] only toward the end of a classic CJD infection." http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:B31nUFJl5G8J:www.bvet.admin.ch/medien-info/e/presserohstoffe/pr_031106 _e.pdf+classic+creutzfeldt-jakob+disease:+prions+detected+in+muscle+tissue&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 or PDF version at http://www.bvet.admin.ch/medien-info/e/presserohstoffe/pr_0311106_e.pdf

This "end of the infection" would correspond to the predeath condition of a "downer cow," one that can't stand on its own, like the one in the US's first case.

IF THERE'S ONE, THERE'S MORE

So far, US officials are concentrating on tracking down the meat from one BSE-infected cow. Food spreads rapidly with modern distribution methods, and tracing it hasn't kept pace (not a priority), so this is a daunting task that has already reached eight states and Guam.

We all believed until recently that the vast continental ranges of Canada contained just one BSE-infected cow. Now, US officials claim there must have been one more, the one that the 1-in-1800 testing just turned up in the state of Washington. Might a few others, out of the 35,000,000 slaughtered in the US each year, have slipped through this coarse seive?

According to the Christian Science Monitor article, "A 2001 study by Harvard University's School of Public Health found that such regulations [1-in-1800 testing] would prevent a public health crisis even if 500 cows were affected." This at least admits the possibility of more than one (there are 100 million cattle in the US). If 500 infected cows did turn up, the inspection rate would surely turn up as well. However, this could be a little late for any person infected with vCJD by eating the meat. It would also be too late for the cattle industry, a megaindustry whose size is measured in the tens of billions of dollars and whose impact is in the hundreds of billions. Just out of self-serving economic interest, one might expect the industry to encourage more testing of cattle and of the cattle feed that is the normal route for infection in cattle (cattle get BSE from eating CNS material of infected cattle in feed).

HE TRIED TO TELL THEM, AND EVEN KARL ROVE HELPED

Dr. Prusiner is the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered prions, the aberrently folded proteins that cause BSE in cows and vCJD in humans. His discovery was truly revolutionary. With it, an entirely new and unexpected mode of disease transmission, misshapen protein material, took its place in medical books alongside bacteria and viruses.

Prusiner tried, since the Canadian case was detected in May, to get an appointment with US Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, a peach-grower's daughter and former cattle industry lobbyist (according to some reports). http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Science&oid=41359 He finally got his appointment 6 weeks ago with the help of Karl Rove, whom Democrats consider President Bush's political attack dog, of all people, whom he just happened to bump into. Dr. Prusiner told Ms. Veneman that cattle should be tested before slaughter and that it could be done for 2 or 3 cents per pound of beef sold. He left the meeting feeling that Ms. Veneman didn't share his sense of urgency. He told her that a BSE case in the US was "just a matter of time." He was right. Too bad Dr. Prusiner didn't take Mr. Rove along to the meeting. Now Mr. Rove will have to deal with it after the fact.

WAIT A FEW MONTHS TO FIND OUT HOW THE COW GOT BSE

Finding out how the nation's one BSE-infected cow detected so far got BSE might take several months. Unlike Canada, which was able to follow the path of its one mad cow (the US now says there was at least one other) relatively quickly, the US has no national identification system to track cattle. This is a little hard to understand in the computer age. It is fortunate that our first mad cow apparently was from Canada - that improved the odds for tracking it to its birth herd and the feed that infected it. The USDA and Canadian officials are tracing 80 other cattle from the same Canadian birth herd as the Washington mad cow, which would have eaten the same feed and potentially become infected from it.

Dr. Prusiner wants all slaughtered cattle to be tested for BSE using a test he developed and InPro Biotechnology of San Francisco markets. Britain is to begin using his test in February.