Mad Cow USA
When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our 1997 book, "Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?", it received favorable reviews from some interesting publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, New Scientist, and Chemical & Engineering News. Yet although the book was released just before the infamous Texas trial of Oprah Winfrey and her guest Howard Lyman, for the alleged crime of "food disparagement," the book was ignored by the mainstream media....
Apparently many people who never read it at the time bought the official government and industry spin that mad cow disease was just some hysterical European food scare, not a deadly human and animal disease that could emerge in America. In March, 1996, when the British government reversed itself after ten years of denial and announced that young people were dying from the fatal dementia called variant CJD -- mad cow disease in humans -- the United States media dutifully echoed reassurances from government and livestock industry officials that all necessary precautions had been take long ago to guard against the disease.
Those who did read "Mad Cow USA" when it was published in November, 1997, however, realized that the United States assurances of safety were based on public relations and public deception, not science or adequate regulatory safeguards. We revealed that the United States Department of Agriculture knew more than a decade ago that to prevent mad cow disease in America would require a strict ban on "animal cannibalism," the feeding of rendered slaughterhouse waste from cattle to cattle as protein and fat supplements, but refused to support the ban because it would cost the meat industry money.
...When the first North American cow with the disease was found last May in Canada, I told interviewers that if the disease was in Canada, it would also be found in the United States and Mexico, since all three NAFTA nations are one big free trade zone and all three countries feed their cattle slaughterhouse waste in the form of blood, fat and rendered meat and bone meal. In fact, in North America calves are literally weaned on milk formula containing "raw spray dried cattle blood plasma," even though scientists have known for many years that blood can transmit mad cow type diseases.
(This is why if you try to donate your blood to the Red Cross, you will be rejected if you spent significant time in Britain during the height of its mad cow epidemic. Britain is afraid that humans with mad cow disease may have contaminated the British blood supply, and they do not use its own blood plasma since as yet no test can adequately screen blood for mad cow disease.)
...The United States has spent millions of dollars on PR convincing Americans that mad cow could never happen here, and now the USDA is engaged in a crisis management plan that has federal and state officials, livestock industry flacks, scientists and other trusted experts assuring the public that this is no big deal. Their litany of falsehoods include statements that a "firewall" feed ban has been in place in the United States since 1997, that muscle meat is not infective, that no slaughterhouse waste is fed to cows, that the United States tests adequate numbers of cattle for mad cow disease, that quarantines and meat recalls are just an added measure of safety, that the risks of this mysterious killer are miniscule, that no one in the United States has ever died of any such disease, and on and on.
...Even if Canada does turn out to be the source of America's first case of mad cow disease, numerous questions remain: How many other infected cows have crossed our porous borders and been processed into human and animal food? Why are United States slaughterhouse regulations so lax that a visibly sick cow was sent into the human food chain weeks before tests came back with the mad cow findings? Where did the infected byproduct feed that this animal ate come from, and how many thousands of other animals have eaten similar feed?
...Veneman and her advisors should institute a complete and total ban on feeding any slaughterhouse waste to livestock. You may think this is already the case because that's what industry and government said they did back in the summer of 1997. But beside the cattle blood being legally fed back to cattle, billions of pounds of rendered fat, blood meal, meat and bone meal from pigs and poultry are rendered and fed to cattle, and cattle are rendered and fed to other food species, a perfect environment for spreading and amplifying mad cow disease and even for creating new strains of the disease.
The feed rules that the United States must adopt can be summarized this way: you might not be a vegetarian, but the animals you eat must be. The United States must also institute an immediate testing regime that will test millions of cattle, not the 20,000 tested out of 35 million slaughtered in the past year in the United States. Japan now tests all cattle before consumption, and disease experts like Dr. Prusiner recommend this goal for the United States. And of course, no sick "downer" cows, barely able to move, should be fed to any humans. These are the type of animals most likely to be infected with mad cow and other ailments -- although mad cows can also seem completely healthy at the time of slaughter, which is why testing all animals must be the goal.
...Our book, "Mad Cow USA," is temporarily unavailable until a paperback copy is released later in 2004. However, you can get the book in its entirety for free through the website of our Center for Media & Democracy. Simply go to www.prwatch.org and click on the cover of "Mad Cow USA." You'll be taken to www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf where you can download for free the entire book -- and read the warnings that went unheeded then, and are still being ignored by government regulators and industry.
John Stauber, AlterNet
December 30, 2003
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