Mad Cow Disease Hits Home
Mad Cow Disease hits home by Lindsey Hodel; Prius Paves the Way for a Hybrid Future by John Rockhold; and Sprouts and Snippets on San Francisco's environmental code, vitamin E in sunflower seeds and nuclear power phaseout in Germany.
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Cattle continue to be at risk or contracting mad cow disease from feed because high-protein bovine blood is used in the ""milk replacer"" routinely fed to dairy calves, and sometimes to beef-breed calves, too.
Ken Hammond/USDA
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Fifteen years after Great Britain began destroying 3.7
million cattle because of an epidemic of mad cow disease,
the first U.S. case of mad cow was confirmed in December in
Washington state. The infected cow already had been
slaughtered, and its meat dispersed into the human food
supply.
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Initially, the USDA reported the cow was a
"downer"—an animal too sick to walk, which is a
possible sign of mad cow infection—but subsequent
eyewitness reports have disputed that claim. Determining
the animal's status is important because downers are
targeted in the USDA's mad cow surveillance plan.
Mad cow (also called BSE or bovine spongiform
encephalopathy) is a fatal cattle disease that causes
spongelike holes in the brain, making the infected animal
stagger—thus the descriptive term "mad" cow.
Scientists think animals develop the disease by eating feed
containing brains, spinal cords or central nervous system
tissues of other infected animals. (Yes, our industrial
food system has been feeding cattle parts back to cattle!
For more on this topic, see "Cattle Futures," Page 24.)
The human form of this disease is called variant
Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD), and relatively few people
are thought to have been infected by eating nervous-system
tissue from diseased cattle. Mad cow and vCJD are caused by
prions, infectious protein particles that cannot be
destroyed by cooking. According to the USDA, the risk of
humans contracting the disease by eating U.S. beef is
extremely low, but consumer groups say the agency is not
doing enough to protect the public. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention so far confirm 153 cases of vCJD
worldwide, with 143 of those in the United Kingdom.
Since the outbreak of mad cow disease in the 1980s in
Europe, consumer groups have urged the USDA to adopt
stringent testing and tracking rules for beef. But, the
beef industry resisted. A week after the U.S. mad cow case
was confirmed, the USDA finally announced it would
implement a national identification system to track meat,
and ban downer cattle and mechanically separated meat from
the human food supply. Beef producers also must follow new,
more-stringent guidelines when using Advanced Meat Recovery
(AMR) systems. AMR systems strip meat dose to the spinal
cord and increase the odds that BSE-infected
central-nervous tissue could enter the human food supply.
Three-quarters of processing plants that use AMR systems
produce meat containing spinal-cord tissue, a 2002 USDA
study estimates. Ground-beef products such as hot dogs and
hamburger (including pizza toppings and taco fillings) are
most likely to contain stripped meat. Marrow in the bones
of muscle cuts could contain spinal cord tissue, too. Milk
and milk products are not thought to be at risk of
contamination.
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