More on Mad Cow DiseaseMany are taking comfort in the fact that only 1 animal was found to have the disease. But who knows how many others made it to the dinner plates of America? And how many other animals will they find tomorrow, or the next day, week, month, etc? An article in the March 12,2001 issue of Newsweek, entitled The Slow Deadly Spread of Mad Cow Disease, laments the fact that "America's safeguards and surveillance efforts are far weaker than most people realize."
Spread by eating only the brains (yuk!) and spinal cord? Don't count on it! Slaughtering practices that contaminate meat with bits of brain and spinal cord tissue could easily spread mad cow disease to humans. Slaughterers use pneumatic stun guns or captive bolts to knock cattle out before slaughter, and both devices can blast fragments of brain and spinal cord into the cow's bloodstream and muscle tissue.
American slaughterhouses waste very little. To get as much meat from animal carcasses as possible, they use two methods that may contaminate meat further with spinal cord tissue. "Mechanically separated product" is a meat paste made by crushing the bones, including vertebrae, and then straining out the bond fragments. Products made with this paste (including lunch meats and hot dogs) are required to carry a label that lists "mechanically separated beef product."
Advanced meat recovery systems, mechanically remove the last bits of meat from bones. Tests have shown that the meat may contain fragments of spinal cord tissue, which can be used in ground beef, hot dogs and sausages. --Natural Health Magazine, Oct/Now. 2001.
Timemagazine, Jan 29, 2001 also carried an article showing that "while the disorder strikes primarily the brain and the rest of the central nervous system, these tissues may have contaminated other parts during slaughtering and thus entered the human food supply."
Repeat Performance? An article in the Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1996, notes that the first case of Mad Cow disease in the British Isles occurred in 1985, when a Holstein dairy cow suddenly became edgy and uncoordinated, then aggressive and unpredictable....(The rest is history). The Los Anteles Times, Dec. 24, 2003, pointed out that a Holstein dairy cow...tested positive for "mad cow" disease. The spinal cord and brain were removed and the remainder was sent to a processing plant. Elsa Murano, undersecrtary for food safety at the Agriculture Department, said it was possible that the meat had already made it to grocery stores. Can you believe it?
Indeed several days later a news item noted that this meat had been distributed in 8 states and Guam.
The World Health Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations, with headquarters in Geneva, disagrees with this deadly practice: "No part or product of an animal which has shown signs of a TSE (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy), should enter any (human or animal) food chain. Countries should not permit tissues that are likely to contain BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) to enter any (human or animal) food chain."
~Suzanne~
