After writing in my Blog “Blame the Pigs For E. coli? – 28 October
2006” about the latest publicized E. coli 0157:H7 fiasco, and the
reluctance of those in charge to place blame where it belongs and to
make the necessary changes – to stop intensive feeding of grain to
cattle, I started to think about another fiasco that continues to be
“swept under the carpet” so as not to offend the powerful flesh and
dairy industries.
I’m referring to prions and the diseases that these infectious
proteins, that survive sterilization at extremely high temperatures,
cause: Mad Cow Disease, the common name for Bovine Spongiform
Encephalopathy (BSE), Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, and
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer and elk. Obviously, these animals
in the wild have had access to contaminated farm feed.
Denial is so strong that (as far as I’ve been able to ascertain)
cattle remains are still boiled down and legally fed to pigs and
chickens in this country. Cow brains, eyes, spinal cords, and
intestines, which are now excluded from the human food supply, continue
to go into animal feed for chickens, other poultry, pigs, and pets.
Laboratory experiments show that pigs can be infected by Mad Cow
brains, yet hundreds of thousands of downer pigs, too sick or crippled
by injury to even walk, arrive at U.S. slaughterhouses every year.
Twenty percent or more of people clinically diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease are found at autopsy not to have had Alzheimer’s at
all. In fact a number of those deaths are due to CJD which is caused by
prions. Stanley Prusiner, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his
discovery of prions, speculates that Alzheimer's (the eighth leading
cause of death in the United States) may even turn out to be a prion
disease as well.
Of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who die with dementia every
year, possibly thousands may actually have died of CJD caused by eating
infected meat, yet very few people take these risks seriously. Instead
we are all encouraged to live in denial.
For more information and documentation, see:
http://www.all-creatures.org/health.html
http://www.all-creatures.org/health/sub-madcow.html
