Re: Mad cow disease again... or it was present all the time?

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the truth about BSE

http://www.wellwithin1.com/bse.htm

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Sheri

At 04:37 PM 5/3/2012, you wrote:

A cow from a California dairy

farm has been discovered to have mad cow disease, the U.S. Department

of Agriculture announced yesterday. The agency says that consumers have

nothing to worry about; after the cow died it had been slated for use in

nonedible products, so there was never any danger that infected meat

would enter the food chain. Milk has not been shown to transmit the

disease, and agency authorities say that this is an isolated case.

Nevertheless, some groups—including the Consumer’s Union, a nonprofit

organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine—say the case

indicates that the Department of Agriculture’s surveillance program is

"

way too small. " Out of the 90 million cattle in the U.S., just

40,000 cows are tested for mad cow disease each year.

In response to consumer worries, two major grocery store chains in South

Korea have temporarily refused to sell U.S. beef. So is America’s beef

safe? And are we doing everything we can to protect consumers from mad

cow disease?

What is Mad Cow Disease?

The scientific name for mad cow disease is

bovine spongiform

encephalopathy, or BSE. It’s named for the spongy remnants after the

disease eats away the cow’s brain and spinal cord. Renegade proteins

called prions cause the destruction and, eventually, the cow’s death.

Although BSE is not contagious, it can spread to other cows if the brain

and spinal tissue of an infected cow make it into the herd’s food supply.

When humans eat meat that has come into contact with the brain or spinal

material of an infected cow, the person can develop a form of

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. CJD is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder that

can arise spontaneously or by heredity, or can be acquired by exposure to

brain or nervous system tissue through medical procedures. When humans

acquire the disease by eating cows with mad cow disease, they develop a

variant type of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease called vCJD, which invariably

causes death.

There has never been a documented case of vCJD that was caused by

American beef, but a huge outbreak of mad cow disease in Great Britain in

the 1980s and early ’90s is believed to have been responsible for the

deaths of

180,000 cows and up to 150 humans by vCJD. The main reason for the

outbreak was that U.K. farmers fed their cattle the remains of other cows

as a source of protein. " It sounds pretty disgusting, but it’s

economical, " epidemiologist Morse tells PM. After the U.K.

banned the use of recycled beef to feed cows, the incidence of BSE

declined rapidly, he says.

For the same reasons, the United States prohibits the feeding of mammals

to ruminants such as cows and goats. Since that law was instituted in

1997, there have only been three known cases of mad cow disease found in

the U.S., and none appeared to have been infected because a farmer or

rancher defied the law. In those cases and this week’s, the disease

appeared to have arisen spontaneously through a mutation. Nasia Safdar,

infectious disease physician for the University of Wisconsin Hospital,

says that molecular texts on neural tissue can distinguish between BSE

cases caused by bovine cannibalism and those that arose spontaneously.

How to Test for BSE

In its efforts to control BSE, the US Department of Agriculture tests

about 40,000 cows annually. The inspectors test cows at random, and also

test any cow that shows signs of neurological problems. These symptoms

include stumbling, inability to walk, and changes in milk production.

While there are some methods of testing live cows for BSE, none of those

methods are completely reliable. The most reliable method—and the method

used by the USDA—is to slaughter the animal and send its brain samples to

a lab. At the lab, the brain is inspected for lesions or spongy

structure. The tissue is also analyzed to see if it contains the

misfolded proteins that are responsible for the disease. If a cow is

found to have BSE, it is destroyed.

Statistically, the USDA surveillance program is designed to detect BSE in

one in a million cattle. But there are more than 90 million cattle in the

U.S., and symptoms of BSE can take months or years to show up.

Is More Testing Needed?

The ban on bovine cannibalism has been the single most important step in

making American beef safer, Morse says. It has essentially eliminated the

risk of spreading the typical form of BSE. The atypical form of BSE seems

to be able to spontaneously arise at any time or any place, but rarely.

Roth, a veterinarian and microbiologist at Iowa State University’s

Center for Food Security and Public Health, tentatively estimates that

only one cow out of tens of millions will spontaneously develop BSE.

The question then is: Would testing more cows do any more good? Because

BSE is so rare, groups like Consumer’s Union wonder if the USDA is likely

to catch it if they test only 40,000 cows per year. But Roth says that

the USDA is doing everything that should be done. " If there were

more testing, it wouldn’t make our food supply any safer, " he says.

" We haven’t had any cases of CJD caused by BSE, so it can’t be any

safer than that. "

The New York

Times

reports that after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease was

discovered in 2003, the USDA tested nearly 800,000 cows and identified

only two additional cases. The government concluded that the effort was

overkill, and they cut the surveillance program down to its current

levels.

Morse says that testing a greater number of cows could actually cause

more harm than good. " It’s very hard to do that for a rare

disease, " he says. " The cost of testing would be very high.

It’s a tragic disease for both people and cattle, but we’ve seen very few

cases of it. It’s so rare it’s hard to figure out a practical way to do

testing. "

In addition, Morse says, testing millions of cows would lead to many

false positives—instances where the test indicates that a perfectly

healthy cow is infected. These false positives could harm farmers’

reputations and could result in a significant loss of income, without any

health benefits to the public.

And, Roth says, even if USDA surveillance does overlook a cow with BSE,

other precautions are in place to prevent the harmful prions from

entering human food. Cattle showing any signs of illness are supposed to

be used only in nonfood applications, and healthy cows are butchered in

ways that prevent brain or spinal cord tissue from coming into contact

with humans.

Still, Consumer’s Union argues, the ban that prevents bovine cannibalism

should be extended to other types of animals as well. " The remains

of cows can be fed to pigs and chickens, and pig and chicken remains can

be fed back to cows, " the group wrote in

its press release. " We believe this could allow for the spread

of mad cow disease. "

Roth says there’s no scientific evidence that this statement is true.

But, he says, it’s hard to prove that it’s not true, simply because BSE

is so rare. Some scientists think that Britain’s BSE outbreak happened

because the cows’ food was contaminated with the remains of sheep with

scrapie—a disease which is very similar to BSE. " Right now the

ruminant feed ban seems to have been successful, " Morse says.

" My personal opinion is that we should have had a broader ban. If

alternative protein sources could be found, it would be desirable to

prevent any recycling of animal products in this way, because we don’t

know what else is out there. "

In the case of the cow that was discovered this week, it appears workers

noticed that the cow was sick and reported it, which was exactly what

they’re supposed to do. But sometimes sick cattle do slip through into

the food supply, Morse says. He thinks that the USDA could do a better

job at ensuring that sick cattle don’t make it into the food supply, and

that fairer incentives could help farmers to report sick cattle.

But overall, Roth and Morse feel confident that consumers of American

beef are safe from mad cow disease. " When I eat a hamburger, I’m

less worried about getting BSE than I am about getting an E. coli

infection, which can be nasty and are far more common. "

Tags:

degenerative disease,

usda,

mad cow disease,

CJD,

bovine spongiform encephalopathy,

mad

cow,

vCJD,

BSE

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