January 20, 2004 Daily Targum (Rutgers) By Steven Meck

Mad cow disease, or Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is just one of many transmissible spongiform encephalopathies -- fatal brain degenerative diseases. The disease is not restricted to any one species and has been transmitted to nearly every species experimented on. Eating any part of an infected animal, not just the spinal chord or brains, can transmit the disease. In fact, the nerve tissues go throughout the muscles -- the part most often eaten -- making it highly likely someone could contract the disease from the muscle of an infected animal. The disease has a long incubation period and can stay dormant and undetectable in animals for most of their lives. In humans, it's hypothesized that it can incubate for up to 40 years. The human form of mad cow disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. CJD is a lot like Alzheimer's, and this may be why few American deaths from Mad Cow have been detected. In 1989, Laura Manuelidis and colleagues at Yale University performed autopsies on the brains of Alzheimer's patients and found that 13 percent of the patients actually suffered from CJD.

BSE has been able to spread through livestock by agribusiness changing cows from herbivores into carnivores and cannibals. Forty percent of the "material" from a cow is unfit for human consumption, and is sold to rendering plants to "recycle" it and turn it into livestock feed. These remains, along with downer animals (animals too sick to move), road kill, and pound animals are all grinded and boiled into feed for livestock. The process is a haven for spreading BSE and other pathogens by allowing one diseased tissue to contaminate thousands.

When Mad Cow disease was discovered in Europe in 1986, Great Britain denied it existed in their cattle. When it was found in British cattle, they denied that it could harm people. Then teenagers started dying. In 1996, after enough deaths, the British government took it seriously and started implementing laws to stop the spread of the disease in their livestock. Presently, America has followed all of Britain's PR stunts to a tee, but has failed to actually enact any laws to stop the spread of BSE. The meat industry has been able to do this by saying that BSE has not been found in their herds and by having so many former meat industry officials in the Department of Agriculture. A dozen top officials in the Department of Agriculture have worked or lobbied for the meat industry or for industry trade groups.

Cattlemen were correct -- until recently -- in saying that BSE had never been found inAmerican cattle, but their reasoning was completely circular. The meat industry was barely looking for BSE, so it was no wonder that they didn't find it. From 1990, when tests were introduced, until last year, only 57,000 of the more than 400 million cattle sent for slaughter were tested for BSE. The best way not to find something is to not look for it, and the meat industry has done little more than that to find BSE.

After Britain admitted there was a connection between their infected cattle and human deaths, the FDA went beyond "proposed" rules and took its first step in real regulatory action on June 4, 1997. The Associated Press circulated an outrageously inaccurate story, which stated the FDA had "banned the use of virtually all slaughtered-animal parts in U.S. livestock feed." The ban did far from this, and only banned cannibalism for cattle, sheep and goats. It exempted every other species and even allowed animals affected with TSE to enter livestock feed. It also didn't outlaw the feeding of cattle, sheep and goats to any other animal. Pigs and chickens can still be fed infected cattle and then in turn be fed back to other cattle, essentially just adding a middleman to the equation, but not actually putting an end to transmitting the disease. It left other loopholes that outright allowed cattle cannibalism, by allowing cattle to still be fed blood and gelatin.

The new USDA regulations allow the individual companies to make up their own rules when trying to reduce Special Risk Material and don't actually make allowing SRM to get into the human food supply a punishable law. Don't expect the beef industry to tighten safety precautions, and if anything, expect a reduction in meat inspection for fear of finding anything else.

After some children died from an E. coli outbreak in the '90s, Bill Lehman, a meat inspector, told about his work: "I merely walk to the back of the truck. That's all I'm allowed to do. ... I can't open the boxes. I can't use a flashlight. I can't walk into the truck. I can only look at what is visible in the back of the trailer." He told one interviewer how he did his inspections: "I've just inspected over 80,000 pounds of meat on two trucks. ... I just stamped on their paperwork 'USDA Inspected and Passed' in 45 seconds."

It's anyone's guess as to how long BSE has been in the American cattle. After finally finding Mad Cow Disease, most likely by accident, the beef industry is trying to pull off a PR campaign that the beef is BSE free and that this is some sort of isolated incident. Considering the way animals are processed, there is no way this is an isolated occurrence. If the beef industry is unable to find any more cases of BSE it's because they have continued to only test .014 percent of cattle. Considering that the fate of the cattle is either to become human food or livestock feed, the disease can't simply go away. It will continue to manifest and grow increasingly larger as long as nothing is done.

In order to get rid of this disease the meat industries must be forced by law to end the feeding of animals to each other and to test each animal for BSE before human consumption like they already do in Japan. The main problem with this is that it could cost upwards of at least five cents a day for each cow, which of course is just too much for human safety. Proposed laws like this have already been rejected by the USDA, cattleman and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so I suppose we will have to wait until enough teenagers start dying until something is done. Welcome to 1993 Britain, ignorance has never tasted so good.