Customer Reviews

Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Like kuru, scrapie and CJD, BSE ("mad cow disease") is a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE), a fatal neurological disease transmitted by prions. That is, the infectious agent is a defectively folded prion protein, not a living pathogen like a virus or bacteria. It can survive being incinerated, or being buried for years in the ground with only a modest reduction in its disease-causing ability. The epidemiological model for the danger of BSE is kuru, a fatal but otherwise rare neurological disease that was common among New Guinea highlanders back in the 50's and 60's. Kuru reached epidemic proportions due to the practice of human cannibalism, usually of the brain. The regional government finally banned the practice, which (eventually) led to the decline of kuru incidence.

So what's this got to do with hamburgers? "Rendering" is the innocuous term for the practice of grinding up left-over animal organs, tissues, spinal cords etc that are considered unfit for human consumption, then selling it as Meat & Bone Meal (MBM) or Tallow. Agribusinesses use MBM as cattle and pig food and fertilizer (like on vegetables...); tallow has many uses including in the pharmaceuticals and cosmetics industries. Rendering is cow cannibalism, as it were, which is believed to have amplified the incidence of BSE in Britain, just as cannibalism amplified kuru in New Guinea. If you have never heard of rendering then you need to read this book. The British experience of CJD should have been a lesson to US politicians, bureacrats, cattlemen, and the FDA, because the "new variant" of CJD that has killed numerous British persons is actually a prion disease derived from the BSE prion, that is, from cattle. That is, people have died from from eating prion-infected beef.

It is also worth noting that CWD, or Chronic Wasting Disease, is another prion disease currently becoming a major health problem in wild cervids (deer, elk and so on)--and potentially in the people who hunt and eat them. Large, prion-infected deer populations have been reported in several states, including Wisconsin and Colorado. As of today (14 July 2002), Wisconsin opened deer season several months early & intends to keep it open all year, in order to decimate a population of 25,000 prion-infected deer. Guess what? The NBC news report did not mention that CWD is a prion disease related to BSE, probably because they didn't know (& didn't bother finding out). But guess what else? Prions rather easily jump species boundaries: mink to cattle, cattle to human, squirrel to human....Once opened, its a real Pandora's box that sets one's mind to wandering.

[To really be in the know, try a Web search on "cattle rendering" and read what you find. It's enough to make you sick. Cow and pig tissues are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry and in many products intended indirectly for human consumption: hog feed, chicken feed. It is also used in pet food--to think that even my cats might be eating this stuff. There was also a report of a British vegan--a *vegan*, mind you, for a dozen years--who inadvertently got CJD from her pet cat food.]

Despite the flambuoyant title, this is a well-researched and closely reasoned book. It is also well-written and an exciting read. The frightening thing is how unknown these dangers are... This may or may not be the final word on the subject (an update on progress since 1997 would be nice), but it is certainly an eye-opener. If you don't do anything else, read the quote from Nobel laureate Carleton Gadjusek on page 218 (Gadjusek solved the Kuru mystery). In my opinion, the broad public health and policy implications of prion diseases and the practice of rendering make this book a must-read for every informed citizen.

Wow! Judging from the prices of these used copies, the scalpers are out in force now that we have MCD in USA. You can get this book FREE as a download at www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf .

It is a great book, with a great history of the disease, its epidemiology, and uncovers the truth about the beef industry and their ties to the Dept of Agriculture. Get it!

When a topic as potentially sensationalistic as "Deadly Disease Being Spread to US Population with Covert US Government Cooperation" needs to be dealt with seriously, it takes responsible journalists to keep hysteria from distorting the facts. Rampton and Stauber have succeeded where others would have failed. The topic of the book is how the meat industry, their public relations firms and the governments of the USA and Britian worked together to attempt to conceal important information about a newly discovered disease that was abroad in the human food system. The truly frightening truth is that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or Mad Cow Disease) is a real thing. It is one disease in a class known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy that have, until recently, been little researched and little understood. This book does not describe an episode of "The X-Files." People have died from it and are continuing to die from it. The authors documented the entire process of a growing crisis that has potentially world-shattering implications to millions of Americans. Pulling together original source material from obscure (and perhaps at time even hostile) sources they describe how the events unfolded and reason the events unfolded as they did. An important note is that this book is not, and does not pretend to be, a scientific treatment of BSE, TSE's or any other topic. Its approach is more realistic. The authors lay out the occurances as they transpired, uncovering innumerable bits of information that were never before collected together or presented to the general public. The book details the scientific minutae only to the degree it is relevant and stops short of either lecturing or preaching. Explaining who the players have been, their position the entire affair (including the financial risks and implications to the meat industry, the pharmacutical industry and the cosmetic industry) and where they are at the time of printing is a real life detective story whose final chapter has not been written. The only significant frustration I had with the book was the "99%" nature of some of the time oriented information. The footnotes were excellent in identifying th original sources, yet were not always clear as to if the dates were referenced were to indicate when information was released or when the actual experiment / event / discovery occurred. In fairness, I cannot level this criticism with much force, as my scrutiny of the footnotes comes from my intent to develop a fully documented timeline and collection of original source material. That they failed to do my chosen job while undertaking their own agenda can hardly be a cause for blame. As the facts concerning BSE and TSE's continue to unfold it becomes clear that the cricis is far from over. There are still more revelations to come. As more court cases come up based on the Food Disparagement / Veggie Liable Laws, the war rages on. This book give a powerful reference to help understand new events as they unfold over the next several years. Caution in reading this book may be advised, though. The material can be sufficiently frightening in its implications, you may feel the need to make new choices in lfe.

This review appeared in the October 97 issue of Chicago Ink

Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber reviewed by Heidi Thompson If you aren't a vegetarian, now might be a good time to convert. If recent outbreaks of e-coli in contaminated beef, added to knowledge that meat contains enormous amounts of fat and cholesterol, haven't convinced you of the enormous health risks associated with eating meat, this book will. Rampton and Stauber detail the incidences of several types of transmissible spongiform encphalopathy (TSE). TSE's include BSE (bovine spongiform encphalopathy) otherwise known as "mad cow disease", as well as variations of these diseases typically found in sheep, mink, and humans. Rampton and Stauber provide details of experiments that clearly link various types of TSE's to each other--in other words, it is now almost certain that a human could contract a variant of TSE from eating an animal which was similarly infected. This terrifying realization gets worse: it is possible that the governments of various countries (primarily Britain) could have stopped the outbreak had the meat industry not consistently denied that there was any connection between BSE and human illness. (Does anyone else see a parallel to the tobacco industry's constant denial that smoking causes lung cancer?) One of the main problems with TSE's (aside from being completely incurable) is that they are extremely difficult to diagnose. It is impossible be for certain whether or not the disease is present until the victim is dead and the brain can be looked at under a microscope. At that point the signs are unmistakable: the brains of TSE victims (animal and human) resemble Swiss cheese-full of holes. Another huge difficulty is that the incubation period can range from a few months (mainly in small animals such as mice) to several decades. For humans, the incubation period could be up to forty years. The TSE which normally occurs in humans is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD. It used to be that CJD was an extremely rare neurological disease that sporadically occurred in people between the ages of sixty and seventy; however, in March of 1996, England announced that at least ten young people had contracted a new form of CJD, known as nvCJD. These new cases seem to have only one consistent factor: all the victims had consumed beef. And it was possible that many more people had died of this new form of CJD without the government's knowledge. Even worse news is that as many as hundreds of thousands of people could have been dying of nvCJD, but because the disease was so rare, doctors tended to diagnose people as having other conditions. Autopsies done on many people who were believed to have died of Alzheimer's disease revealed that in fact they had CJD. The diagnosis of CJD is further complicated by the long incubation rate. It is theoretically possible (and, according to the authors, fairly likely) that many people have contracted the disease already but will not begin to show signs for several years or even decades. The obvious question at this point is, why is CJD (and TSE's in general), much more prevalent than before? Whether you like it or not, anyone who eats meat is almost always consuming an animal which was involuntarily a cannibal. A process known as rendering is the main source for most livestock feed. Rendering is a very simple process: dead animals and the leftover parts of slaughtered animals are ground up in a huge machine and becomes food for a new generation of livestock, pets, etc. This may seem to go against all natural instincts; since, after all, cows are herbivores. Unfortunately for the cows, however, whether or not they are natural carnivores seems to be irrelevant to the meat industry. It is much cheaper for a farmer (about $1,500 a year for a 100 cow herd) to feed livestock food containing rendered material than to feed them only natural food. Rendering has managed to continue for so long because most of the general public are not aware that it is a common practice. In fact, many farmers claimed to be surprised to find out that the long Latin words on the side of the food bags stood for ground up dead animals. Theoretically, at least, rendering itself doesn't pose a real problem. It appears to be a cheap, easy way for livestock to get the nutrients they need. Unfortunately for the renderers (and meat eaters in general) cannibalism has historically turned out to be a bad idea. Indeed, studies of a cannibalistic culture in New Guinea revealed that those members of the society (mostly women and children) who consumed other humans often suffered from a strange ailment known as "kuru". Under a microscope, the brains of those who had died of kuru looked remarkably like those of cows who had died of BSE. Before rendering, it was rare for one cow to pass the disease to another. All that had to happen was for one infected cow to be rendered back into the food chain for the disease to begin to spread. Once rendering was common there was no stopping TSE's from spreading in cows, sheep, mink, pigs and other animals. Because it is so hard to tell whether or not an animal is infected, merely trying not to render sick animals is not enough. In order to ensure that no sick animals were recycled back into the food chain the meat industries would have to stop rendering altogether, and that is not likely to happen any time soon. It wasn't until very recently that the meat industry was willing to even admit that rendering might potentially be harmful. After the announcement in England and the realization that not only was BSE spreading, but it might be spreading to humans, American beef industries and related groups decided to take steps against it. Actually, what they did was propose a voluntary ban on rendering. Rampton and Stauber think that "voluntary ban" is a contradiction in terms, and I certainly agree. They also proposed steps to prevent BSE from entering the USA. Amazingly enough, these few wishy-washy recommendations were actually more than what the British government had originally done. Up until 1996 the British government consistently denied that there was any possible link between mad cow disease and the rise of CJD in humans. They insisted that scientific experiments proving that BSE could be transmitted from cows to monkeys to mice and back again were flawed. Indeed, the experiments were flawed. But, they were flawed in the same way all lab settings are: they aren't natural. In addition, no tests had proved that BSE was transmissible to humans. The moral implications against attempting to transmit a fatal disease to humans are fairly obvious (more obvious than the moral implications of doing the same thing to thousands of animals of various species in a vain attempt to prove something to an unresponsive government). Setting moral implications aside, a test on humans would potentially have no results for forty years because of the incubation period. In addition, scientists had conflicting beliefs about BSE's and CJD. Some scientists thought the diseases were separate viruses, others considered them genetic mutations and therefore only transmissible from parent to child, and others came up with different theories. Some scientists working on CJD were not even aware of previous studies which could have helped the information come together more quickly. Therefore, the beef industry easily maintained its position that there was no scientific proof that humans were at risk for mad cow disease. Mad Cow Disease U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? is an apocalyptic nightmare tale. While the scientists and authorities associated with CJD and BSE do not agree on much, they do agree that this is a horrible disease. Howard Lyman of the Humane Society of the United States is quoted as having stated that CJD "could make AIDS look like the common cold." The idea that hundreds of thousands people could be infected with such a horrible disease is terrifying. Even vegetarians are at risk: it has not yet been proved that TSE's are transmittable through milk an

This is an excellent activist book on the discovery of a new type of disease, BSE, also called Mad Cow Disease. The story involves a very interesting history of the science as well as the reactions of the beef and fast food industries.

In a nutshell, the disease appears to be caused by an improperly folded protein (a "prion"), which when it enters the bloodstream can multiply and eventually turn the host's brain into mush, with horrible consequences of course. What the authors highlight is that the mode of transmission appears to be ingestion of these bent proteins, principally from infected cows, years if not decades before symptoms appear. They also stress that the manner in which cows are raised in industrial agriculture makes transmission far more likely: they are directly fed ruminants (leftover cow remains that cannot be eaten by humans), thereby transferring the prions on a massive scale. Humans can then eat them and perhaps become infected by BSE.

After this fascinating and beautifully writtern history, the authors then explore what should be done. While some ruminant feeding has ceased, they argue, the actions of beef producers are both too little (because they are voluntary) and inadequate (because they allow certain forms of ruminant, such as blood, to be fed to cows today). This part of the book is pure advocacy and, I believe, effective in arguing that all ruminant feeding must cease. While I cannot weigh in on the science, it really got me to think in a more informed way.

Recommended. This could become a far greater debate if, it turns out, a lot more infected beef-eating Americans are found. The authors stimulate debate.

As if multiple resistant salmonella, arteriosclerosis and hormones were not enough the meat and dairy industry is now literally beseiged by a new plague and has responded with a massive public relations spending effort They have sponsored regressive laws and lawsuits that threaten freedom of speech. This journalist team bares the PR fluff by showing an exact parallel to the tactics used in Britain so successfully to defraud the populace of quality health protection in the food industry. Both industry and government were involved there and the same formula is at work here. Scientists were forbidden to do needed research and were gagged by politicial forces who cut off their grant money. The book includes comment on the mid 1997 USDA token guidelines and a scathing analysis of them by Consumers Union. Politics aside the book has a great deal of medical information as well. Spongiform encephalopathy is an always fatal degeneration of the brain whereby the tissue takes on a Swiss cheese consistency at the microscopic level as the brain looses function. The causative agent is like a virus in that it is not a living microbe. However, unlike a virus it has no nucleic acids, it is pure protein. This means it is almost impossible to destroy by traditional sterilization techniques like boiling, radiation, alcohol and autoclaving. The known cases in Britain came from farm/slaughterhouse workers and from meat eaters. The disease crosses the species barrier and is found in mice, cats, mink, squirrels as well as farm animals. There is some medical evidence that these diseases are also transmissible in milk, yet the CDC has not invoked mandatory reporting for the disease in the U.S. Vegeburgers and mock pork are here to stay. Unfortunately cow protein is present in hundreds of drugs and serums, not just in meat and milk, so as our coming epidemic rises insulin users and others will also be found to be at risk. Insightful quotes and snippets from the life of outspoken Nobel scientist Carleton Gajdusek add spice and human interest to this fine work. His smear tactics arrest on questionable charges by the FBI is described as well. A glossary and 14 pages of citations are included. An important book.

Six years before the appearance of mad cow disease in the US, this book predicted it. Mad Cow USA warned that the meat industry and the government were failing to take the necessary steps to prevent the disease here, and using falsehoods and PR to cover-up their failings. Unfortunately, this book nailed it.

Certainly a must read for today. Despite the alarming and out-there subject, it was quite well-written (genuinely a page turner for me), convincing, and horrifying! It seems to take just such water in the face to wake up us British/Americans from our protect-the-economy-at-all-costs mentality, as the book illustrates. (The British are only now admitting to mad cow in humans--reminding me a little of the tobacco industry here, but the danger is so much worse).

Eeeek! After reading this I am never, ever eating non-organic meat again. And if I win the lottery I think I'll raise my own critters for eggs & milk (or better yet pay someone else to do it!). This book is frightening but helps explain why many of us feel so damned cruddy most of the time. There are so many toxins and chemicals and other assorted grossities in our food supply it's a wonder many of us are still breathing.

Parts of the book are a bit meandering and repetitive but I am very glad I took the time to get through it.

Three years after this superb analysis was published, Mad Cow Disease remains an underreported and largely neglected topic (by mainstream Americans, anyway). If one checks out the Mad Cow Disease Homepage, however, one finds that the problem not only has not disappeared but also seems to be spreading throughout both Europe and the U.S. Buy this book; share its contents with everyone you love; and beware overconsumption of candy altoids (made in the UK with beef gelatin)!