Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed
in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news. The United
States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from farm
and consumer groups I worked with to stop the cannibal feeding practices
that transmit this horrible, always fatal, human and animal dementia.
When the first cow was found in Washington state, the government said it
would stop such feeding, and the media went away. But once the cameras
were off and the reporters were gone nothing substantial changed.
In the United States, dairy calves are still taken from their mothers
and fed the blood and fat of dead cattle. This is no doubt a way to
infect them with the mad cow disease that has now been incubating here
for decades, spread through such animal feeding practices. No one knows
how the latest dairy cow was infected, the fourth confirmed in the
United States. Maybe it was nursed on cow's blood. Perhaps it was fed
feed containing cattle fat with traces of cattle protein. Or perhaps
there is a mad cow disease in pigs in the United States, which simply
has not been found yet, because pigs are not tested for it at all, even
though pigs are fed both pig and cattle byproducts, and then the blood,
fat and other waste parts of these pigs are fed to cattle.
All these U.S. cattle feeding methods are long banned and illegal in
other countries that suffered through but eventually dealt properly with
mad cow disease. Here, rather than stopping the transmission of the
disease by stopping the cannibal feeding, mad cow is simply covered up
with inadequate testing and very adequate public relations. US cattle
are still fed mammalian blood, fat and protein, risking human deaths and
threatening the long term safety of human blood products, simply to
provide the U.S. livestock industry with a cheap protein source and a
cheap way to get rid of dead animal waste.
Docile,
eating what they are fed, trusting the rancher all the way to the
slaughterhouse. Is that just the cows, or is it us too?
I began researching this issue around 1989, long before the disease was
confirmed to have jumped from cattle to the people eating them, as
announced by the British government in 1996. In 1997 I co-authored
Mad Cow USA,
warning that the disease was likely already here and spreading, since
the animal cannibalism that caused its outbreak in Britain and spread it
to other countries was actually more widespread in the United States
than anywhere.
Some years ago responsible U.S. beef companies wanted to test their
animals for mad cow disease and label their beef as being disease free,
but they were forbidden under penalty of law from doing so. Only the
USDA can test for mad cows in America. In 2004 and 2005, after two
additional mad cows were discovered in Texas and Alabama, the United
Sates government declared that obviously mad cow wasn't much of a
problem and gutted it's anemic testing program. Today only about 40,000
cattle a year are tested, out of tens of millions slaughtered. It's
amazing that the California cow was even detected given this pathetic
testing program that seems well designed to hide rather than find mad
cows.
The prevention of mad cow disease is relatively simple. If your
country has it, test each animal before it goes to slaughter to keep the
diseased animals out of the food chain. Cheap, accurate and easy tests
are now available in other countries but illegal here. Testing cattle
both identifies the true extent of the disease, and keeps infected
animals from being eaten in your sausage or hamburger. In this manner
countries like Britain, Germany, France and Japan have controlled their
problem through testing and a strict ban on cannibal feed.
Once mad cow disease moves into the human population of a country, all
bets are off as to what could happen next. It's a very slow disease, it
develops invisibly over decades in someone who has been infected, and
it is always fatal. We'll know a lot more in fifty years, but the
future looks worrisome. In Britain people are dying from mad cow
disease, people who never consumed infected meat. They used medical
products containing human blood, and that blood was infected because it
was from infected people. There is no test to identify infectious
prions, the causal agent, in blood.
Almost none of this information appeared in news stories about the
California mad cow. Instead the headlines and the talking heads fed us
the line that the United States fixed this problem long ago, and the
fact that only 4 mad cows have been detected so far is proof of our
success. Oprah Winfrey once tried via her talk show to warn about
this, way back in 1996, but Texas cattlemen dragged her and her guest
Howard Lyman into court and she had to spend many millions of dollars
defending herself from the supposed crime of slandering meat.
Oprah won her case, which was probably unfortunate for the rest of us
because had she been convicted the ensuing appeals court trial might
have gotten enough attention to wake up Americans to the truth. Instead
Oprah learned her lesson - shut up and you won't get sued. Other
media learned too that if the government and industry can silence Oprah,
they can muzzle anyone. (One of the 4 confirmed U.S. mad cows was later
found in Texas, appropriately enough.)
There are a handful of dedicated activists such as Howard Lyman who have
been sounding the alarm on this. They include the ecologist Dr.
Michael Hansen of Consumers Union and Dr. Michael Greger, a physician.
Terry S. Singeltary Sr., whose mom died of a version of the human form
of mad cow disease, has been a relentless, unpaid activist on this
issue.
Despite their dedicated work, there is no indication that anything is
going to change here in America. The U.S. government refuses to
implement the feed ban and the animal testing necessary. It doesn't
matter if the President is named Clinton, Bush or Obama because their
bureaucrats in the USDA and FDA stay the course and keep the cover up
going. Docile, eating what they are fed, trusting the rancher all the
way to the slaughterhouse. Is that just the cows, or is it us too?
John Stauber founded the non-profit, non-partisan
Center for Media & Democracy and its newsmagazine
PR Watch
in 1993 in Madison, Wisconsin. Prior to his retirement from CMD in
2009, Stauber co-authored six books for them including the 2003 New York
Times bestseller
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. He continues now as an independent
investigative writer,
public speaker and democracy advocate whose leadership on controversial
public issues began in high school when he organized to end the
U.S. war in Vietnam and for the
first Earth Day. He has begun or worked with many non-profit public interest groups.
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