Stop Weaning Calves on Cattle Blood/Dismissing Mad Cow as a “Random Mutation”

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Mad Cow California: Stop Weaning Calves on Cattle Blood

Posted: 04/25/2012 8:59 am

 

I was still in medical training when I was called to testify in defense of Oprah Winfrey in the infamous "meat defamation" trial. If you remember, Oprah swore she would never eat another burger again after hearing that cows were being fed the remains of other cattle. After she tried to remind the audience that cows were supposed to be herbivores, the meat industry representative defended the practice by stating, "Now keep in mind, before you view the ruminant animal, the cow, as simply a vegetarian -- remember that they drink milk." The absurdity of the statement aside, it's not even entirely accurate. In modern agribusiness, humans drink the milk. Calves typically get milk "replacer."

Like all mammals, cows can produce milk only after they've had a baby. Most newborn calves in the United States are separated from their mothers within 12 hours -- many immediately after birth -- so the mother's milk can be marketed for human consumption. Though some dairy farmers still wean calves on whole milk, the majority of producers use milk replacer, which too often contains spray-dried cattle blood as a cheap source of protein.

According to the American Protein Corporation, which boasts to be the world's largest spray-dryer of blood, the chief disadvantage of blood-based milk replacer is simply its "different color." Milk replacer containing blood concentrate typically has a "chocolate brown" color, which can leave a dark residue on the bottles, buckets, and utensils used to feed the liquid. "For some producers," a company official remarked, "the difference is difficult to accept at first, since the product does not look 'like milk.'" But the "[c]alves don't care," he was quick to add.

The calves may not care, but Stanley Prusiner does. Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of prions, the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease. He was quoted in the New York Times as calling the practice of feeding cattle blood to young calves "a really stupid idea," because it could complete the "cannibalistic" circuit blamed for the spread of the disease.

The European Commission also recommended against the practice of "intraspecies recycling of ruminant blood and blood products" -- the practice of suckling calves on cows' blood protein. Even excluding the fact that brain matter may pass into the trough that collects the blood once an animal's throat is slit, the Commission report concluded a decade ago that "[a]s far as ruminant blood is concerned, it is considered that the best approach to protect public health at present is to assume that it could contain low levels of infectivity." Since then, evidence that blood can be infectious has only grown, yet dairy calves in the United States are still drinking up to three cups of "red blood cell protein" concentrate every day.

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration initially proposed to ban the feeding of blood and blood products to livestock, the agency ended up reneging on their much touted promise. Let's hope that the newly reported case of mad cow disease in a California dairy cow will renew interest in closing the loopholes in feed regulations that continue to allow the feeding of slaughterhouse waste, blood and manure to farm animals in the United States.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/california-mad-cow-disease_b_1450984.html?

Mad Cow California: Stop Feeding Cows Chicken Manure

Posted: 04/26/2012 8:52 am

More than a decade ago, the World Health Organization called for the exclusion of the riskiest bovine tissues -- cattle brains, eyes, spinal cord and intestine -- from the human food supply and from all animal feed to protect against the spread of mad cow disease. Unfortunately, the United States still allows the feeding of some of these potentially risky tissues to people, pigs, pets, poultry, and fish. Cattle remains are still fed to chickens, for example, and the poultry litter (floor wastes that include the feces and spilled feed) is fed back to cows. In this way, prions -- the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease -- may continue to be cycled back into cattle feed and complete the cow "cannibalism" circuit blamed for the spread of the disease.

Because poultry litter can be as much as eight times cheaper than foodstuffs like alfalfa, the U.S. cattle industry may feed as much as a million pounds of poultry litter to cattle each year. A thousand chickens can make enough waste to feed a growing calf year-round. Although excrement from other species is fed to livestock in the United States, chicken droppings are considered more nutritious for cows than pig feces or cattle dung.

A single cow can eat as much as three tons of poultry waste a year, yet the manure does not seem to affect the taste of the subsequent milk or meat. Taste panels have found little difference in the tenderness, juiciness, and flavor of beef made from steers fed up to 50% poultry litter. Beef from animals fed bird droppings may in fact even be more juicy and tender. Cows are typically not given feed containing more than 80% poultry litter, though, since it's not as palatable and may not fully meet protein and energy needs.

The industry realizes that the practice of feeding chicken feces to cattle might not stand up to public scrutiny. They understand that the custom carries "certain stigmas," "presents special consumer issues," and poses "potential public relations problems." They seem puzzled as to why the public so "readily accepts organically grown vegetables" grown with composted manure, while there is "apparent reluctance on the part of the public" to accept the feeding of chicken excrement to cattle. "We hope," says one industry executive, "common sense will prevail."

The editor of Beef magazine commented, "The public sees it as 'manure.' We can call it what we want and argue its safety, feed value, environmental attributes, etc., but outsiders still see it simply as 'chicken manure.' And, the most valid and convincing scientific argument isn't going to counteract a gag reflex." The industry's reaction, then, has been to silence the issue.

According to Beef, public relations experts within the National Cattlemen's Beef Association warned beef producers that discussing the issue publicly would only "bring out more adverse publicity." When the Kansas Livestock Association dared to shine the spotlight on the issue by passing a resolution urging the discontinuation of the practice, irate producers in neighboring states threatened a boycott of Kansas feedyards.

Maybe this new case of mad cow disease will reinvigorate consumer campaigns to close the "no-brainer" loopholes in feed regulations that continue to allow the feeding of such filthy feed to farm animals.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/mad-cow-disease-california_b_1450994.html

Mad Cow California: What Is Atypical BSE?

Posted: 05/03/2012 7:08 pm

 

The downer dairy cow recently found stricken with mad cow disease in California was infected with an "atypical" strain. Such cases are thought to arise spontaneously, a notion the USDA seized upon to explain how the disease could arise despite their regulations. If anything, that fact highlights the weaknesses in the current feed rules. If mad cow disease can arise out of nowhere, then it's even more important to close the loopholes and stop the feeding of cattle blood to calves and chicken manure to cows to prevent it from spreading. And what the USDA didn't mention about the atypical strain found in California is that there's evidence it's a more dangerous form of the disease

The California cow died of a particularly virulent form of mad cow disease known as BASE, bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy, also known as L-type atypical BSE. Typical BSE was first documented in the '80s in Britain. Afflicted cows often became twitchy and aggressive, giving rise to the "mad cow disease" moniker, as their brains degenerated into a characteristic Swiss cheese-like appearance. Hence the scientific name, BSE: bovine (cow) spongiform (sponge-like) encephalopathy (brain disease).

Then cats started dying. Max, someone's pet Siamese, was the first non-bovine victim of the disease. Infectious pet food was implicated as the cause of Max's death from a never-before-described feline spongiform encephalopathy.

Then young people started succumbing to a human spongiform encephalopathy called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a relentlessly progressive and invariably fatal dementia, often involving weekly deterioration into blindness and seizures as their brains became riddled with holes. CJD appears sporadically in one in a million people, but typically strikes only the elderly. The new cases among teenagers were dubbed "variant" CJD, a disease now understood to be caused by consuming contaminated meat (or by getting a blood transfusion from someone who did).

Despite massive contamination of the food supply, no more than a few thousand people are expected to die, suggesting a robust transmission barrier between cows and humans when it comes to BSE. The same may not be true of the atypical forms of BSE found in California and in the last two mad cows in Texas and Alabama. Experimental models of human infection suggest that the type of mad cow disease discovered in the California case "is a more virulent BSE strain... in humans," with "higher transmissibility" and causing a swifter death.

Just as one in a million people sporadically get CJD, evidence suggests one in a million cattle get atypical BSE. The U.S. cattle population hovers around 100 million. Though there is evidence some of these sporadic human cases of CJD may be associated with infected cows or sheep, case control studies tie CJD more closely to the consumption of pork. A study co-authored by D. Carleton Gajdusek, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on these diseases, found that "consumption of pork as well as its processed products (e.g., ham, scrapple) may be considered as risk factors in the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease."

Though pigs have been proven susceptible to a porcine spongiform encephalopathy, the National Pork Producers Council claims that no naturally occurring cases of "mad pig" disease have ever been discovered. The Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, however, has petitioned the federal government to reopen an investigation into a case in which a USDA veterinarian may have found a cluster of suspect pigs in upstate New York.

New research just found that unlike the British strain, the atypical forms of BSE found in the U.S. cause animals to have difficulties in standing up, so instead of mad cow disease, it's more of a downer cow disease. Since we continue to feed slaughterhouse waste and blood to pigs, this raises the question whether any of the hundreds of thousands of downed pigs that arrive at slaughter plants every year in the U.S. may be infected.

It's ironic that this new case of mad cow disease was discovered in California where a law excluding downed animals from the food supply was recently overturned by the Supreme Court.

In 2008, an undercover investigation by The Humane Society of the United States of a dairy cow slaughterplant in California showing that downers were being dragged to slaughter for school lunch hamburgers prompted California to strengthen its laws to keep downer livestock out of the food supply. The meat industry, represented by the National Meat Association and the American Meat Institute, responded by successfully suing the state of California to keep meat from downed animals on people's plates on the grounds that only USDA had the authority to determine which animals should not be forced to the kill floor for humane or public health reasons.

Sick animals can lead to sick people. An unequivocal ban on the slaughter of any farm animal unable even to stand may reduce the public health risk of myriad threats from anthrax and E. coli to swine flu and Salmonella. Spongiform encephalopathies are a special case, though, as they are caused by infectious agents that cannot be eliminated by cooking, pasteurization, or the rendering process used to make pet food. In fact, infection can survive even incineration at temperatures hot enough to melt lead. It is therefore the meat industry's responsibility to prevent sick animals from entering the food chain in the first place, by instituting a "bright line" ban on the slaughter of all downed livestock. In the California case, the animal was killed before she could be slaughtered. Next time we might not be so lucky.

See also:

• Part 1: Mad Cow California: Stop Feeding Calves Cattle Blood


• Part 2: Mad Cow California: Stop Feeding Cows Chicken Manure

For more by Michael Greger, M.D., click here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/mad-cow-disease_b_1476074.html

January 15, 2013

"Atypical" Mad Cow Protects Cattle Markets From Expensive Losses--But Is It True?

Dismissing Mad Cow as a “Random Mutation”

by MARTHA ROSENBERG

After the discovery of a mad cow in its herds, Brazil is experiencing what the US went through in the early 2000′s when three mad cows were found in its food supply: rapid, across the board boycotts of its exports. Japan, China, South Africa, South Korea and Saudi Arabia have banned imports of beef from Brazil since its first suspected mad cow case came to light in December.

Mad cow disease is a fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), which is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, scrapie in sheep and goats and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk. In humans, it is a terminal neurological brain disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

In December 2003, when a mad cow was discovered in the US, imported from Canada and slaughtered in Moses Lake, Washington, 98 percent of the US’ $3 billion overseas beef market evaporated. Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and 90 other countries banned US beef almost overnight. The only reason the European Union didn’t ban US beef was it was already banned for its high use of growth hormones.

The US spent most of 2004 trying to woo back its beef sales to Japan who replaced US beef with imports from Australia, New Zealand, and South America. But one month after the country finally agreed to start importing younger cattle only (which are thought to pose less mad cow risk) the unthinkable happened: a US shipment to Japan from Atlantic Veal and Lamb of New York contained veal with the backbone still attached.  Spinal material is banned because it poses more mad cow risk and Japan immediately reimposed its boycott. Atlantic Veal and Lamb was subsequently accused of welfare abuses to animals.

A USDA audit designed to reassure Japan did the opposite. It found nine other meatpackers and slaughterhouses were not in noncompliance with removing animal parts that pose mad cow risk. Published reports said the gigantic Swift & Co. plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, was banned from shipping beef to Japan altogether. “The U.S. government does not take the issue seriously enough,” wrote Eiji Hirose of Yomiuri Shimbun/Daily Yomiuri about mad cow risks. And almost ten years later, Japan has still not fully restored US beef imports. Nor has China.

Since even one case of vCJD in humans from eating infected meat–variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease–threatens domestic and global beef markets, when suspected cases have arisen in the US, officials often assure the public the diseases are sporadic or hereditary CJD which originate spontaneously and are not from eating meat.  Assurances often come before the fact since diagnosis can only be made from a brain biopsy, usually after death. But if CJD is something that “just happens,” the public is greatly reassured and federal officials don’t have investigate the beef supply–the ranches, packinghouses, feed suppliers and even stores and restaurants.

Since April, there is another harm reduction technique that is working to safeguard threatened beef markets. Faced with two mad cow scares this year, both US and Brazil authorities have debuted the concept of “atypical mad cow disease.” Spontaneously-erupting mad cow that has no known cause and may be a genetic mutation has seldom if ever been reported before. But it now seems the new, preferred diagnosis.

A mad cow found in April at a slaughter facility near Fresno whose identity officials protected (identities of mad cow producing ranches in Texas and Alabama were also protected) was “just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal,” said Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University. “Random mutations go on in nature all the time.” Brazil officials are similarly saying their mad cow suffered from “atypical mad cow disease.”

Designating cases of mad cow as a “spontaneous” and “atypical” certainly frees officials from lengthy, expensive investigations into the cows’ herd mates, offspring, ranches, slaughterhouses and most importantly feed. It certainly salvages threatened international and domestic beef markets and keep people eating US beef. It certainly quiets news stories when herds start to exhibit mad cow disease.

But is it true?

The complete history of BSE/mad cow disease in the US is found in Martha Rosenberg’s acclaimed food and drug expose Born with a Junk Food Deficiency (Prometheus 2012)

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter. She is the author of  Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (Prometheus).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/15/dismissing-mad-cow-as-a-random-mutation/