March 28, 2004 

What is causing these deaths? Dr. Richard Marsh hammered home to me in my first interview with him over a decade ago that BSE is the product of a process of by-product feeding of rendered livestock back to livestock. It is one strain, a deadly strain which we now know causes variant CJD in people and which might eventually be shown to cause other CJD types in people, types now thought to be 'sporadic'.

Here in the US we've had sheep scrapie since 1947, transmissible mink encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and it now appears that we've had BSE in the country for a long time amplifying and spreading. Not just the BSE strain but other strains in cattle, pigs (see our last chapter in Mad Cow USA), mink, deer, sheep, elk, might be amplifying, creating new strains, and spreading into livestock and people.

It's a mistake made by many to presume that BSE is the only strain of TSE to emerge from decades of feeding livestock back to livestock. What is killing these victims of sporadic CJD? We need to find out.

Janet Skarbek deserves our thanks for her courage, tenacity, commonsense and caring.

John Co-Author of:
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
Mad Cow USA
Trust Us, We're Experts
Weapons of Mass Deception
...and coming in June, 2004: Banana Republicans