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To: Rocket Red who wrote (25922)	12/24/2003 4:02:07 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 39344

Mad Cow disease has been known in Britain since the middle ages. Farmers would routinely separate cows and sheep that got scrapie or staggers from the herd and burn their carcasses. It is bound to surface now and then. I remember in the 1950's it was known about and also its resemblance to Kuru and the fact that eating head cheese allowed a certain chance of getting it, due to the Kuru connection with brain Cannibalism in the South Seas. This is nothing new, but few people seem to be able to remember that it is not new to our knowledge base. The practice of not chlorinating offal that they feed cattle to avoid creating PCB's has led to the rise in Mad Cow in modern herds. Where it is much rarer is in places where cattle is predominantly range fed, such as Argentina, and also Western Canada. As soon as they take cattle to the lot to fatten them in Canada, however, they feed them products that contain protein from slaughtered cattle which could have been raised on offal, and then they undo the advantage range fed cattle might have. It is obvious though, that there is a disease source in the wild somewhere, as Cattle in the middle ages in Britain would not be anything but naturally fed it would seem. This is hard to tell though. Where the fear is well founded today is from the widespread pool of feed that is sold throughout the country, that contains protein from cattle, and the dissemination of animals in country wide breeding programs. This guarantees that a small local problem could spread nationwide, which is unlikely to have been the case in time gone by. So in our times, with factory operations like Keystone having an international profile for their feeds and meat operations, it is justified to have a national concern for even one instance of the disease surfacing. Should we fear the worst? Perhaps not, but we should certainly institute testing and procedures in the future to make sure that the disease cannot spread through feeds and breeding programs in an insidious, unstoppable way. Since the general discovery of Mad Cow in beef in Canada, Great Britain and elsewhere in the 1990's I have not eaten Beef products. There is simply no guarantee that farmers, as poor and desperate and unthinking as they commonly are, will have co-operated to the extent necessary to completely eliminate the disease pool. Both the cattle and farmers are capable of hiding the disease. Between that fact and the common habit of injecting additives and antibiotics that guarantee the eventual fatality of hamburger disease, eating beef is a very bad health choice. With beef and a lot of other meats, you can enjoy toxic insecticides, sleep disturbing melatonin, carcinogenic and endocrine unbalancing animal hormones, xenoestrogens, super bugs bread on antibiotics, antibiotics to destroy natural intestinal flora, and now prions to eat holes in your brain. North American food is killing us and the government is industrially stupid in co-operating with chemical salespeople who make billion off selling poor farmers garbage they never needed before that improves tis kill ratio in a grand manner. Large scale concerns (the largest employer in Canada is Loblaws) make sure that the poisoned food is distributed as widely as possible so we can all commit suicide together. Nice. Merry Xmas. Enjoy your table poisons. EC<:-}