On May 20, 2003, Canadian health officials admitted that mad cow disease has infected their nation. A new North American panic over meat eating may begin. Millions of Canadians may already have consumed over one-billion quarts of tainted milk during the past five years. Surely you do not think that the single mad cow lived on a farm and did not infect one or more of the other cows? But there was more sharing of infection than just eating grass with other cows.

That cow lived in the province of Alberta, home to 40% of all the cattle in Canada. Of course, her milk was pooled with milk from the other cows. A single cow produces ten thousand quarts per year, or 50,000 every five years. If she lived with a herd of 100 animals, her milk was pooled with two hundred similar herds once it got to the processor. Multiply 20,000 cows times 50,000 quarts (2 times 5, plus 8 zeros!). The total is the number of quarts of tainted milk distributed over a five-year period: one billion quarts of milk!

Upon hearing the news, that same day the U.S. government immediately barred Canadian beef imports. How about the ice cream, cheese, and milk imports? Would you eat dairy products from a diseased mad cow? How about all the beef and dairy products sold and consumed in Canada during the previous five years?

The United States imports more beef from Canada than from any other nation. When a cow gets old, it is sent to a slaughterhouse and its meat is sold to Canadians or shipped to America. Canadian milk and cheese is also sent to the U.S. for your dinner table.

So we can also ask, how about all the beef and dairy products sold and consumed in the U.S. over the previous five years?

Regarding the extreme danger of eating meat, we refer you to our book, International Meat Crisis. Those not of our faith are regularly buying that book from us and distributing it to their friends. They are concerned. That extremely low-cost book is filled with startling reasons why no one should ever again eat meat.

And what about dairy products? There is a section in the book on that. Here is more to think about:

When mad cow disease became public in Britain in 1986, most scientists said the public could only get it from meat consumption.

American officials followed the same logic. For example, Americans are prohibited from donating blood if they earlier lived in England for more than a month and have eaten meat there. Yet a dairy cow filters 10,000 liters of blood through her udder each day. Milk is produced by udder cells fed by cow blood. So, if a suspected individual cannot donate blood to a blood bank (because his blood might be infected), how can one continue to drink milk from suspected diseased animals?

On August 23, 1997, an alert reporter, Michael Hornsby, wrote this in the London Times:

"A 24-year-old vegetarian has been diagnosed with Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease [CJD, mad cow disease in humans]. Scientists fear that milk and cheese may be the source of the infection."

Food for thought: Perhaps our friends in Canada should dump their milk into the St. Lawrence Seaway.

And what should we do here in the United States?

Many scientists theorize that mad cow disease can take decades to manifest deadly symptoms in infected humans. Does meat and milk cause mad cow disease? Confused reports are being issued. In November 1999 (Vol. 354:9191), the British medical journal, Lancet, reported: "Routes of transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE, mad cow disease in cattle] have not yet been determined." Scientists are publicly admitting that they do not know how mad cow disease is transmitted from one cow to another cow or person.

In some reports, scientists admit that mad cow disease is in the blood. If so, then it is in every part of the body that can be eaten, and it is in the milk. Yet, to protect the meat and milk industries, in other reports they tell us that the disease is only in the brain of the cow, and not in the blood or the milk. Think it through.

Virgil Hulse, author of Mad Cows and Milkgate, wrote this:

"The destruction of milk from suspected cows was recommended in England to insure the public's safety.. Experiments also indicate that temperatures reached during pasteurization of milk and household cooking does not kill the agent. In the United Kingdom on December 1, 1988, the government announced a ban on the sale of infected milk."

But all that is past now. Nicely forgotten. For now, the public announcements generally consist of this: "Drink your milk, all you want. Enjoy your cheese. It's good for you. For mad cow disease is only in cow brains."

At least we have now been told this: Canadian officials have identified a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. That means just one thing: It has been officially announced that mad cow disease is in our neighborhood!

In earlier reports, over the past several years, I have written about instances of mad cow disease in America. But no public announcement about these cases has been made. So you are to believe that there is no mad cow disease in America. But the situation is far worse. The following excerpt is from the present writer's book, International Meat Crisis (pp. 48-61): -vf

WHY THE PROBLEM WILL GET WORSE IN AMERICA

There are some reasons why this problem is going to keep getting worse. Here are far more than a dozen of them. Others are explained elsewhere in this book:

The "mysterious agent" that causes spongiform encephalopathies is not just found in the brain! It has been found in many of the organs and tissues of animals. For example, cells from the spleen, thymus, and tonsils enter the blood and find their way to many organs, including the liver and bones.

Blood can also contain the disease. Confirmation in 1993, that the disease can be passed from the cow to the calf-established that transmission can be by blood.

You can get BSE from any part of an animal. Mammals contract BSE, scrapie, and CJD by eating the flesh of other infected mammals. Blood, corneal transplants, and hormonal injections can also transmit it. This would include pituitary, thyroid, and insulin injections.

The bones of old cows are one of the major sources of the protein gelatin, used in many foods from peppermints to pork pies. The greatest risk could come from bones because the procedures used to concentrate and purify gelatin could create a stronger source of BSE.

US. and British sheep were infected at the same time. Both U.S. and British sheep were infected simultaneously back in the 1950s from research waste discarded by scientists trying to figure out the cause of Kuru.

As early as the 1970s, both the US. and British scrapie sheep were being fed to cattle. Scrapie appeared in sheep in both the US. and Britain by the 1970s. In both countries, the dead sheep were sent to rendering plants which turned them into protein powder, which was fed to cows. That spread the disease widely.

Cattle are not checked for the disease before they are slaughtered. The USDA in America only studies the brains of 100 cows per every 100,000. That is an extremely small sample.

BSE/CJD cannot be detected during incubation. BSE and CJD cause no antibody response. When infection enters an animal or human, the victim's immune system shows no sign of fighting the infection as it does with bacteria, germs, and viruses. This is because the immune system can neither detect nor fight it. Scientists cannot use the antibody-search method to see if someone is sick, as is done with AIDS.

No scientist can tell if a cow or human is in an incubating phase of BSE/CJD. The only exception is brain biopsies, and that is not done until after death occurs. There are no tests, no genetic markers. Prions are not reliably found in urine. Prions can be seen in brain tissue, but you cannot open the skull of a live mammal to scoop them out.

It can take years before the full-blown disease appears. CJD disease takes between 10 and 50 years to eat away the human brain. In cows, death strikes as early as one year after exposure, as late as 8. If a cow whose milk you are drinking has it, her calf sent to be a veal chop last winter had it when you ate him. An older cow may fall over dead with it, but meanwhile her infected calves have long since been slaughtered and served at dinner tables. The long incubation period means the farmer cannot see that the animal is ill.

BSE can be transmitted to offspring. That fact was established by researchers in Britain. Sheep and cows pass it to offspring. Chickens can put it in their eggs. Could CJD, the human form, also be transmitted to your descendants? This is a very serious matter. The FDA has demanded that all donors to the blood supply answer the question, "Has anyone in your family died of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob?' We dare not wait longer before warning the public that it is no longer safe to eat these foods. They must be told that they must stop eating infected meat.

People have been dying faster from CJD than earlier. It was once thought humans could incubate the disease for up to five decades without going into the final dementia stage, but lately British teens have been dying of it.

Farmers make too much profit selling dead cows for animal feed, for them to stop. Farmers have to pay $500 in order to have an autopsy made of a dead cow. But they can sell it to a nearby rendering plant for $100. Then it is processed into cow food.

The US. ban on animals in feed is being ignored. In America, there is now a ban on putting animals that died into feed. But it is well-known that it is being done anyway.

The USDA has not banned blood in animal feed The U.S. Department of Agriculture banned diseased meat in animal feeds; but, to date, it has not banned putting blood from dead animals into the feedstocks. That link is contaminating the cattle of America today.

It is extremely difficult to kill prions. BSE and CJD prions cannot be killed the way we fought the plague, cholera epidemics, or ebola-which is generally done by burning bodies. BSE/CJD is passed on by means of prions, which are proteins that degrade at 800 F That is far higher than the temperature which would reduce them to ash.

Infected meat should not be burned. Burning is a bad idea, as prion molecules go up in the smoke, airborne and fall back on the land. Britain is now considering burning 5 million cows soon, which will loose the prions into the air, to fall back on the land and into lakes and rivers.

Prions infect every part of the body, not just the brain. Although BSE/CJD attacks brains, it is in every part of the victim. Therefore every part of the cow is affected. None of it should be eaten. This contamination cannot be removed by cooking.

Do not use blood meal in your garden. A British vegan woman caught CJD simply by dusting her roses with blood meal.

Thousands of cows are mysteriously dying in America. Since 1981, the United States has had thousands of "downer" cows. These are cows which have died mysteriously. Dr. Richard Marsh, a virologist on the Veterinary staff at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says he has seen 100 cases of BSE in America between 1981 and 1989. If the prions entered U.S. beef 15 years ago and have been multiplying ever since, a million cows could be infected. In order not to disturb the public, the fact that so many cows are dying is being kept from them.

More on the "Downer Cow" Syndrome in America. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institutes of Health first explored a connection between BSE, animal foods and dementia as far back as 1981, when American cows began to come down with a mysterious disease known as "Downer Cow Syndrome," suspiciously like BSE. Many of the downers had previously exhibited symptoms of the jitters, others just suddenly dropped dead. Their brains were fed to mink who quickly manifested Mad Mink disease. In any case, downer cow corpses revealed BSE brain pathology; yet not a peep came from these scientists, not a whispered word to the farmers to stop rendering sheep into cattle feed, not a warning to the public to stop feeding beef to children. Since then, American farmers were allowed to sell sheep corpses for 28 years and cow corpses for 17.

CJD deaths are occurring now in America, but they are being mislabeled as Alzheimer's. CJD mortality figures hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer's. Some U.S. doctors know the truth yet haven't blown any whistles. The U.S. veterans hospital in Pittsburgh autopsied 53 sequential Alzheimer's victims. Sampling # 1 showed 5.5% had died of CJD; sampling #2 showed 6.3% had died of CJD. Alzheimer's death tolls are doubling and tripling in America, but this is not characteristic of a genetic disease. The rate of genetic diseases does not continually increase. People dying of CJD are being diagnosed as having Alzheimer's. That is why, supposedly, there are no CJD (mad cow) human deaths in America. A related problem is that labs will not test patients suspected of having CJD.

Private labs are afraid to let CJD tissue in the door to be examined. They would have to burn down the lab in order to be certain they had cleansed it of the prions. Dr. Richard Deandrea, a Los Angeles physician, who has studied CJD and BSE extensively, tells of his first CJD patient. After her death, which featured symptoms atypical of Alzheimer's (numb fingers, blindness, slurred speech, weak knees), Deandrea dogged the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta for a pathologist who would provide him with an autopsy to see if it might be CJD. CDC evaded his phone calls for three weeks. Finally, a female CDC staffer told him that off the record she would deny it later-"CJD is an issue no pathologist will deal with, a virtual death sentence to a lab. A well-trained pathologist knows the quarantine would never be lifted. You couldn't sterilize the lab to OSHA protocols. It would have to be gutted, incinerated. Forget it. Your patient died of Alzheimer's." So there may be CJD deaths, but there are not likely to be many CJD death certificates.

If you die of CJD, you will officially be listed as an Alzheimer's victim. Because no laboratory in America will knowingly do an autopsy on anyone suspected of having died of CJD. That Pittsburgh hospital would not have made those autopsies if the staff had known they were working with CJD! The problem is that the prions cannot be eradicated by normal methods. One researcher said that, while we keep eating our burgers, officially on all our death certificates we are going to die of Alzheimer's, not CJD. That Pittsburgh veterans hospital sampling never hit the major news wires.

Beware! BSE cow parts could be in more products than you thought possible. Gelatin capsules, used to enclose vitamins and minerals, come from cows. Break them in your mouth and immediately spit out the gelatin. Glandular supplements from animals come from cattle or pigs. The glue on your envelopes and postage stamps comes from dead cows.

Even more than AIDS, BSE is the most prevalent, virulent disease to hit this planet since the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. You can only avoid it by refusing to eat anything which contains meat. Forget ebola which kills you so fast you can't move ten feet and give it to anyone else, an epidemic which trained medical personnel can rather quickly eliminate.

Sick scrapie sheep are ground up and fed to dairy cows and beef cattle. That is how the USDA gets around the prohibition on feeding scrapie sheep to the cows you eat! Ted Koppel interviewed Dr. Richard Marsh on Nightline a year ago. It went like this. Koppel: "But we (in the U.S.A.) don't feed sheep brains to cows, do we?" Marsh blinked. "I don't know where your information comes from, but we do." He was instantly cut off by a commercial and did not reappear that night. The truth is, Virologist Marsh, a seasoned veterinarian, knows of what he speaks. He observed this problem in Wisconsin, from 1981 to 1989. Dead sheep were fed to cattle, which, after fattening, was used to feed thousands of other cows that have bred thousands of animals.

Pigs and chickens are also fattened on blood and diseased, dead animals, which have been ground up into pellets; so ground-up cattle are sold to farmers, to fatten up their livestock.

Prions like it in America. All the same, the beat goes on. On March 20th, 1996, the very day that Minister Dorrell lit the fuse on the Mad Cow bomb in London, a Florida man died of CJD. His wife gave a TV interview describing his shaking knees, his lack of co-ordination, quick slipping into a vegetative state, followed by death and said that her husband had never traveled abroad in his life. Why would he have to? Prions enjoy the American climate.

How to silence the media. The beef industry frightened the TV networks Into a news blackout on the subject. They are now afraid to discuss the subject. The Oprah Winfrey Show interviewed an ex beef rancher who had seen U.S. sheep and cows dying of BSE. Immediately, beef dropped 150 points on the commodities market; and the beef industry, under the guise of "Texas cattlemen," sued Oprah for daring to openly discuss the subject. Even though she was found not guilty by a Texas jury, no television network is likely to talk about mad sheep and cows for awhile. But the beef industry actually won. They got their message across to the major networks: Tell too much about mad cow, and we will see you in court.

Small stations are more likely to reveal death toll statistics. In California, KCAL-TV News reported two recent CJD deaths, one in Stockton and the other in San Francisco. Dr. Richard Deandrea knew of a death in Lancaster, California, and another in Minnesota-all in the previous few weeks; yet the NIH claims it knows of only 11 CJD deaths since 1994.

Bypass protein animal feeds are deadly. Scientists who invented the "bypass protein" method of feeding livestock (taking the rendered corpse of a dead animal, grinding it into meat meal, and mixing it in with grains) have turned an attractive planet into a potential graveyard. Scientists who turned healthy herbivores into cannibals may have shot themselves and humanity in the collective hoof. In order to make a lot more money in the short term, the meat industry will eventually destroy itself.

Feeding diseased animals to grazing stock also produces other diseases in the people who later eat that livestock. Even if there were no prions lurking, when you feed an herbivore protein, its body produces ptomaines, which cause lesions or tubercles in its body. That means tuberculosis. In 1989, the National Association of Federal Veterinarians decided to create a "testballoon" state. They allowed California to sell meat infected with tuberculosis, a practice illegal since 1906. TB immediately went up 36% in the sunshine state. We do not need any more test balloons.

Hormones sicken the livestock you eat. Bovine immune systems have been destroyed by several other common practices. One example is the massive daily injections of synthetic growth/lactation hormones, which exhaust the cow who is chemically stimulated to give 40% more milk. It costs the dairy farmer $400 a year for all the drugs and chemicals he has to inject or feed his cows. They are walking chemical plants.

Antibiotics are given to keep the weakened livestock alive. All those medicinal drugs are necessary to ward off the multiple infections caused by the other chemicals given to the livestock. One problem leads to another.

And there is more. Consider the painful mutilation of cows with more than 4 teats. (Many have 8 teats; extras are amputated without anesthetics.) Then there's dehorning, also done without anesthetics. Keep in mind the hormones of grief created in Bessie when her offspring is calf-napped on its second day of life. This is followed for 305 days while the milk intended for the calf is stolen by the farmer. That ends with a two-day starvation period (no food or water), to dry up her milk and get her ready to "calve" again. A happy cow would live 25 years on a happy farm. A dairy cow is exhausted at 3 to 5 years of age. Her reward: She is slaughtered and her poor, suffering corpse is eaten by humans as burger.

The prusiner Report. The definitive U.S. report on prions was written by a leading prion researcher, Dr. Stanley Prusiner. He is a professor of neurology and biochemistry at the University of California School of Medicine, in San Francisco.

Although his large study goes into some depth on the habits of prions, he never once mentions the danger of eating meat. Unlike Dr. Lacey, Dr. Prusiner remained politically correct.

Hiding behind Alzheimer's. The puzzle pieces have stayed in the box; because, since the 1970s, CJD has been able to hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer's. The Alzheimer's Foundation itself seems to be clueless, saying that if current trends continue, 14 million people will have Alzheimer's by the turn of the century. No mention of CJD from them.

Extrapolating from Pittsburgh figures. It is possible to estimate the number of people who eventually will contract CJD. If, as the Pittsburgh veterans hospital disclosed, 6% of Alzheimer's cases are really CJD, in the next 4 years, 840,000 U.S. humans could die of CJD. If they were of childbearing age when they caught it, there is the possibility that millions of their offspring could carry it in their genes. Many people could eventually go into spasms, then idiocy and comas, costing their families and the health system $120,000 per patient. Likewise with all their descendants, forever. Prions are not something to play around with. Yet Western governments have done it for nearly 30 years.

A different estimate, based on the percentage of Kuru deaths. Among the Fore, the tribe of cannibals who got Kuru in New Guinea, only about one percent of the population seemed affected. This one percent figure suggests a genetic bias, and some genetic biases have been detected. This may serve as a model for predicting human death rates. Evidence suggests a one in a million rate of spontaneous occurrences among susceptible species. Once inserted into a food chain that recycles animal protein, one in a hundred may get it.

In America, that one percent would translate to wellover two and a half million slow, expensive deaths, a far worse epidemic than AIDS!

Genetic diseases do not double and triple their rate. Alzheimer's is a genetic disease, which is apparently doing something today that genetic diseases do not do: It is doubling and tripling its death toll. But it is so handy to blame Alzheimer's. Doing so helps the labs, because they do not want to autopsy anything savoring of mad cow disease. It helps the meat and fast-food industries; they can keep selling more burgers. It helps the television stations, because they do not want any more lawsuits. It helps the government, because they want it always said of them that they do everything right.

Silence is golden, even though it can be fatal. Admittedly, if even a whisper of prions in America was voiced, huge losses could result to the $50 billion-a-year meat industry in America.

In Britain, five days after Dorrell's admission that CJD was caused by BSE and there was the faint possibility of danger in prime ribs, the entire European Union ordered its second ban on British beef exports (the first had expired). A $6 billion-dollar-a-year beef export market collapsed in a single day. Loose lips sink world economies, but silences go before apocalypses.

Getting rid of the whistle-blowers. Dr. Richard Lacey was not the only warning voice. There were others: Haresh Narang, a microbiologist employed by the Public Laboratory Services in New Castle, said CJD in humans came from BSE. Microbiologist Dr. Steven Doeller said scrapie, CJD, and BSE were the same thing. But all the cries of the whistle-blowers were ignored.

Then, in 1995, when Dr. Lacey's book was printed, both the British Medical Journal and New Scientist, two of the most respected professional journals in England, declared the book unfit for the reading public. His book made the beef industry so nervous that, in December 1995, three more articles were planted in prestigious British journals: The Economist, Nature, and New Scientist, declaring that there was nothing to worry about; Lacey was dead wrong. Interestingly, all three articles were written by Anonymous."

US. sheep are still fed to cows. The FDA and public health officials all know that diseased sheep that die are fed to cattle. In the U.S., approximately 200,000 animals are slaughtered daily.

-vf