-Caveat Lector-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ronnie Cummins)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subj: Center for Food Safety News #19 - June 4,1999
News and Analysis on Genetic Engineering,
Factory Farming, & Organics
by: Ronnie Cummins & Ben Lilliston
America's "Mad Deer" Epidemic:
A Public Health Time Bomb Set to Explode?
As we pointed out in an earlier issue (Food Bytes #2, September 24,
1997), there is increasing evidence that the US has a growing
number of people coming down with the human equivalent of Mad Cow
Disease, called CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease). Although the meat
industry, the blood plasma cartel, and the Centers for Disease
Control tell us there's no need to worry, that only 250 Americans a
year are dying from this incurable brain-wasting disease, we remain
skeptical. The CDC and the USDA tell us that it's not necessary to
make CJD an "officially reportable disease" (whereby doctors are
bound by law to look for it and report all cases to the federal
government), or to scientifically test farm animals and Alzheimer
patients for the disease, but mounting evidence indicates that as
many as 40,000 Americans (or 1% of the nation's 4-6 million people
diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease or dementia) may actually be
wasting away with CJD. See the book Mad Cow USA: Could the
Nightmare Happen Here? by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
<www.prwatch.org/> If you want to order Mad Cow USA, send us
$10 at our office in Minnesota and we'll mail you a copy.
To call attention to this growing public health hazard and to force
the government to take action (i.e. to stop the widespread practice
in industrial agriculture of "animal cannibalism," the feeding of
waste and diseased animal parts back to animals, and to make CJD
an official "reportable disease") lawyers at the Center for Food
Safety filed two legal petitions in Federal Court in Washington
on January 7, 1999. For details on the CFS legal petitions see
<www.icta.org>
In Britain and Europe the meat industry's former feeding practice
of animal cannibalism has unleashed a fatal Alzheimers-like
dementia that is killing a growing number of young victims who ate
contaminated beef from mad cows. Some experts predict hundreds of
thousands of Britons and other Europeans may die in the decades
ahead due to the long and invisible incubation period of this
brain-destroying illness, called "new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease" (nvCJD).
Europe has now banned the feeding practices that spread Mad Cow
and nvCJD. However, in the U.S. the dangerous practice of "animal
cannibalism" continues unabated -- with government approval.
Although the FDA passed a so-called "mammal-to-mammal animal
feed ban" in 1997, the regulation is filled with loopholes, and,
according to farmers and ag experts, is not being enforced.
As Dr. Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union stated in Genetic
Engineering News in July 1997 [the FDA] "rule exempts swine,
horses, blood, gelatin and milk from the feed ban... [and] still
leaves the door open to spreading of a TSE... [Transmissible
Spongiform Encephalopathy]"
Heretofore unpublished internal USDA and APHIS (Animal Plant
Health Inspection Service) documents such as "Bovine Spongiform
Encephalopathy in the USA" (July 1993) recently obtained by the
Center for Food Safety under the Freedom of Information Act and
published on the internet <www.mad-cow.org> make it clear that the
US government knows that a form of US Mad Cow Disease is already
likely present in US cattle and in the food chain. According to
government estimates it is likely that at least 36 animals per year
are slaughtered in the US with Mad Cow Disease. The Clinton
administration has prepared an elaborate contingency plan for
"damage control" once the first US Mad Cow is confirmed.
As evidence grows that TSEs (Transmissible Spongiform
Encephalopathies or Mad Cow-like diseases) are infecting sheep,
deer, elk, and other mammals in the US (including humans) billions
of pounds of rendered fat, offal, meat and bone meal continue to be
fed back to cows, pigs, chickens, fish, household pets, and elk and
deer. (On so-called deer and elk farms where hunters pay fees to
shoot them, deer and elk are often fed rendered animal protein).
Rather than invoking the "precautionary principle" to protect human
health, the powerful U.S. beef and industrial agriculture lobby has
convinced the government to issue a watered down feed ban while
waging war against free speech by lobbying for "food disparagement
laws" in more than a dozen states, criminalizing the actions of
those such as Oprah Winfrey and Howard Lyman who have spoken out
for food safety and warned of an impending Mad Cow-like crisis in
the USA.
Although the apparent increase in CJD deaths in the US hasn't yet
set off a major food safety or public health crisis, The New York
Times, USA Today, and CNN television have recently reported on an
emerging epidemic of Mad Deer Disease and Mad Elk Disease
(technically called Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD) in the Rocky
Mountain area of the US. Not only have up to 7% of mule tail deer
and 1.5% of elk in areas of Colorado and Wyoming been diagnosed as
having Mad Deer/Elk Disease (in comparison 1-2% of cattle had Mad
Cow Disease in England at the height of the epidemic there), but
the highly-publicized death in March of Doug McEwen, a 30 year-old
deer hunter in Utah from CJD -- and reports of several other young
deer hunters with CJD across the country -- has unnerved hunters
and wildlife officials as well as the entire beef and blood plasma
industry. (The World Health Organization warns that Mad Cow-like
diseases can likely spread through blood transfusions). Doug
McEwen was an avid blood donor, and his blood plasma products
-- marketed by the Bayer corporation -- ended up in more than
20 countries. In March the Canadian government temporarily
quarantined all blood plasma from the US because of the McKuen
case. Meanwhile US authorities are considering a ban on blood
plasma products from the UK, and barring anyone who's been to
the U.K. since 1980 from donating blood. On May 25, CBS News
in New York ran a story on yet another young US deer hunter,
27 year-old Jay Whitlock, who is dying of CJD.
Over the past several years Colorado state wildlife officials have
warned deer and elk hunters to send them the heads of animals that
they've killed in order that they may be tested for CWD. But while
the government delays and prevaricates several million Americans
-- especially hunters and their families -- continue to eat venison
and elk on a regular basis. Meanwhile thousands of sport hunting
and "road kill" deer and elk are routinely rendered into animal and
pet feed. Scientists warn that Mad Deer/Elk Disease is likely to
spread into cattle and sheep because the prion proteins in these
mammals are so similar. Captive elk have already infected wild
deer, apparently from fence line contact.
Government officials have tried to play down the emerging CWD
crisis, claiming there's no connection between the McKuen case
(the Centers for Disease Control claim it's "normal" for several in
a billion people to die from CJD while still in their twenties or
thirties) and the CWD epidemic in deer and elk, and emphasize that
most infected deer and elk are concentrated in a limited area in
Colorado and Wyoming. But according to a February 23, 1999 story
in the New York Times "Weighing 'Mad Cow' Risks in American Deer
and Elk" by Sandra Blakeslee:
"Game farms are another story. The disease is found in captive
deer and elk herds in three states -- South Dakota, Nebraska and
Oklahoma -- and in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, said
Dr. Beth Williams, the nation's leading expert on chronic wasting
disease, at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The disease was
reported in the mid-1960's at the Wildlife Research Station in Fort
Collins, Colorado, where it eventually wiped out 90 percent of the
animals. But before people knew what was happening, many infected
animals were sold to game farms or zoos elsewhere for breeding,
thus spreading the infection. Ranchers made large profits selling
antlers to Asia, where they are used in making herbal remedies and
aphrodisiacs." Stay tuned for further developments.
Campaign for Food Safety News #19
(formerly Food Bytes) June 4, 1999
Campaign for Food Safety
<www.purefood.org>
Affiliated with Organic Consumers Association
<www.organicconsumers.org>
and the Center for Food Safety (Washington, D.C.)
<www.icta.org>
.
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