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mad cow thread step one get cow offal out of the baby food



I have found the spokesperson for the US cattle industry making specious
assurances  in a very frightening way, the problem was being being swept
under the rug.
The article below comes from Oct. 2000 and it gives  a history of the
development of the BSE epidemic in UK. One of the first steps was to get
cattle offal out of human baby food. I have a sneaking  feeling that cow
offal goes into baby food in US and Canada. In North America  we are
conditioned  to sneaky dealing in the food supply and  the assumption
that industry stuff must be proven dangerous beyond any reasonable doubt
before  the stuff gets taken out of the food supply. The GM policies on
sneaky foods  are contributing to a potentially  huge spread of BSE.


BSE disaster: the history

A few days before Christmas 1984, vet David Bee was called to Stent Farm
in Sussex to examine a sick cow with strange symptoms - its back was
arched and it had lost weight.

Within six weeks, cow 133 was dead, having developed head tremors and a
loss of coordination. Seven months later, the UK Central Veterinary
Laboratory diagnosed spongiform encephalopathy. By this time, other cows
were also showing symptoms. The epidemic had begun.

Four herds had been affected when the Central Veterinary Office alerted
the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) in June 1987.

Nearly a year later, the government set up a working party chaired by
Oxford University professor of zoology, Richard Southwood, to
investigate bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and any implications
for human health.


Cattle cannibalism


Shortly after this, the government banned the feeding of cattle with
protein derived from other cattle and sheep. Epidemiological studies
done by MAFF scientists had pinpointed this cannibalism as being the
only plausible cause of BSE. By this time it was known that BSE was a
prion disease but whether the infective prion came from scrapie-infected
sheep or another source is still not known.

The Southwood committee reported in February 1989, recommending a ban on
the use of bovine offal in baby foods. The British government went
further, and in November 1989, banned the use of specified bovine offals
(SBO) in all human food.

In October of the previous year, BSE was shown to be transferable to
mice, through a brain-to-brain injection of infected material. But,
making assumptions based on past experience with scrapie, the Southwood
committee decided that it was unlikely that BSE could be passed to
humans. However, the report added: "If our assessments of these
likelihoods are incorrect, the implications would be extremely serious."
After the Southwood report, the government instituted a mass slaughter
programme for all cows suspected of having BSE. However, farmers were
only given 50 per cent compensation for each confirmed case. Critics
have argued that this policy led to infected animals being sold
illegally for human consumption until 1990, when 100 per cent
compensation was offered.


Mad cow - crazy cat


The first hint that humans could be affected came in 1990, when a
Siamese cat called Max fell ill with the feline version of BSE. That
same year, scientists showed that the disease could be orally
transmitted to mice.

The assumption that BSE could not cross the species barrier was proving
increasingly uncertain. Despite this, the government assured the public
that British beef was safe to eat, with agriculture minister John Gummer
famously feeding his daughter a beefburger.

Cases of BSE peaked between 1992 and 1993, with 3 in every 1000 cows
affected. The incidence began to decline in 1993, and in March, the
government's Chief Medical Officer repeated the 1990 assurance that beef
was safe. Research in 1994 showed that cattle could contract BSE orally.
but it was in 1995 that the human tragedy began.


Premature death


In May, 19-year-old Stephen Churchill died after an illness resembling
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. CJD is a rare and sporadic brain disease. It
affects up to 60 people a year in Britain, but they are usually over 55
years old.

Two other deaths occurred that year, showing similar symptoms to
Churchill. James Ironside, a pathologist at the National CJD
Surveillance Unit, discovered that the brains of these patients showed
unusual spongiform symptoms. He named the condition variant CJD (vCJD).

In November 1995, MAFF scientists informed the Spongiform Encephalopathy
Advisory Committee (SEAC), which had been set up in May 1990, that spot
checks on abattoirs had revealed that the SBO ban was not being strictly
enforced. Dressed carcasses in some abattoirs were found to contain
small pieces of spinal cord.

This meant that potentially highly infective material could have been
entering the human food chain for six years after the ban designed to
prevent it was introduced. Robert Will, the deputy chair of SEAC, told
the BSE inquiry: "I was appalled."


Beef ban


By 1996, there had been a total of eight cases of vCJD, mostly in young
people. SEAC advised the government in March that the most likely cause
of this new disease was eating beef products contaminated with the BSE
agent. The Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, related the information to
Parliament on the same day.

Almost immediately the European Union banned all exports of British
beef. The British government introduced new measures in an attempt to
contain BSE, such as a selective cull of cattle reared alongside those
with BSE between 1989 and 1993.

To date, there have been 84 confirmed and probable vCJD cases in
Britain. But scientists are still waiting to see whether this will
snowball into a large epidemic, killing hundreds of thousands of people,
or whether it will be confined to a few hundred cases.


Claire Ainsworth and Damian Carrington
From New Scientist Online News 09:52 25 October 00

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