The recent case of mad cow (BSE) in Hanford, CA was a result of the generations of cattle housed in CAFOs and having access to rendered meat and feces from chickens in their feed. When will humans return to their common senses and eliminate the CAFOs? People should reconsider getting their beef directly from ranchers, and ONLY from free range grass fed beef. The CAFO model is a breeding ground for diseases and plagues. The cattle in CAFOs are unhealthy, mistreated and depressed. You are what you eat!!

background on prions;

The Prion...Be Very Afraid

The prion is apparently immortal; it won't die. It laughs off high pressurized, superheated steam in the hospitals autoclaves used to sterilize medical instruments.

Hit it with hours of hard radiation and it just smiles. Bury it for decades, soak it in formaldehyde for months, freeze it for years, or zap it in a 700 degree fiery furnace and it still survives.

Prions infected humans from cannibalism in New Guinea and they infected sheep and cattle in the UK when farm animals were fed the remains of their brothers and sisters. Then it infected humans across Europe when they ate the meat from those animals.

Then it infected a lady gardener, a vegetarian, who used bone meal made from infected animals to fertilize her roses and breathed in microscopic prion particles which were transmitted to her brain. It turns out that one didn't actually have to eat the meat of infected animals, breathing it would do the trick.


In one sense, the prion is payback to humans from animal factory beef and mutton.



Spongiform Encephalopathy


It plain language, spongiform encephalopathy is a disease that leaves holes in the brain. This is what the prion does and it is not a nice way to die; yet death is always the end result.



In New Guinea the disease was called Kuru. The progression was generally the same, beginning with an unsteady gait that lasted about a month. Then came a month of tremors accompanied by slow, continuous writhing movements of the hands and feet (athetosis), and blurred speech. The third month involved total incapacitation with the inability to swallow or move.

Death came by either starvation or thirst; or maybe sooner due to pneumonia or gangrenous bedsores from lying in their own filth, unable to move. The worst part was that the victim was aware of their suffering, being conscious and alert although unable to speak.



Much of the material presented here is credited to Richard Rhodes and his book Deadly Feasts, 1997, Simon & Schuster, under their Touchstone trademark, New York, NY. Rhode's book takes prion research through 1998 in his Afterword, the final chapter in the book.

For information into the latest spongiform encephalopathy developments, he directs his readers to http://www.mad-cow.org, The Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page. Mad-Cow.org is now essentially a repository for archived data and information from 2001 onward is now found at The Organic Consumers Association website. Richard Rhodes book, Deadly Feasts, is a must read; your life could depend on it. Please click the link below to Amazon.com and buy it now.



Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health









The Prion Protein


So far we have been using the word "prion" rather loosely and generically. To be precise, there are two forms of protein that make up the Prion Protein, PrP.

The normal one is called "cellular", or sometimes "common", and designated as PrPC. It is "common" because it is found throughout the bodies of humans and animals and is not infectious. Its structure is well defined.



The infectious PrP is designated as PrPSc where the Sc superscript stands for "scrapie", the prion disease found in sheep. The infectious prion shows abnormal folding patterns and has the ability to resist the enzymes that break down protein.



Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies, TSE


TSE is an umbrella term covering all the known prion diseases. It is found in quite a few animals including sheep (scrapie), cattle (bovine spongiform encephalopathy mad-cow disease), and also hits mink, cats, dogs, ostrich, various antelope species, deer and moose.



In humans it is covers all the forms of CJD or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the very rare Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome (GSS) and the even more rare Fatal familial insomnia. There is also the ground zero cases of Kuru in New Guinea among the practicing cannibals of years ago.


Characteristics


Early investigators compared human Kuru with sheep scrapie and found astonishing similarities, giving a number of clues. In both Kuru and scrapie the following was noted:

No microbiological agent isolated
No evidence that Kuru or Scrapie is an infectious disease in the usual sense
Onset is insidious and occurs without any antecedent illness
Develops without fever
Relentlessly progressive
Fatal within 3 to 6 months of onset
Loss of coordination becoming progressively more severe
Tremors
Changes in behavior
Widespread nerve degeneration
Astrogliosis
Lack of inflammation
Large single or multilocular "soap bubble" holes in nerve cell bodies


The fact that there is no inflammation response in indicative that the body's immune system doesn't recognize the prion as an invader or the immune response is so small as to be negligible.

The more likely scenario is that the misfolded protein is one of the body’s own proteins that has been highjacked and altered. Thus the body assumes it is an indigenous protein and presents no threat.

The video below from YouTube shows an animation of how an infectious prion might replicate itself by capturing and transforming a normal protein into its "clone".





Another thing about human prion diseases is the long time from infection to manifestation of symptoms which means that the incubation period could be years or even decades.

Since animals are typically slaughtered at market weight or when they become sick, the long incubation period was easy to overlook in livestock.

Transmission


It has been proven that spongiform encephalopathies can be transmitted between species, from animal to human and furthermore, the means of transmission are numerous.

Humans can acquire it from eating meat, by receiving a transplant from an infected donor, from working around infected animals or possibly by breathing it in via direct transmission from the olfactory organ to the hippocampus, that part of the brain that interprets smells.

It sounds easy to say that the transmission modes have been proven but it was extremely long, hard road getting there.



One major breakthrough was showing that TSE could be transferred from humans to chimps.

Another big step was that transmission of CJD from human to human was confirmed in cases of human growth hormone harvested from the pituitaries of cadavers given to young children; it was seen in a cornea transplant from an undiagnosed CJD cadaver and it was seen in transplanted dura matter used for patching after brain surgery.



Finally someone was able to put a face on the infective agent. Patricia Merz was a researcher looking into brain diseases in young children. After teaching herself how to use an electron microscope and how to stain sample tissue for viewing by the microscope she made an amazing discovery.



In 1978 she was working with an English colleague and examining some of his sheep scrapie specimens and saw something that looked like "sticks" scattered among cell debris; they had the appearance of short, broken lengths of twisted thread, fibrils as it were.


She also observed that as the disease progressed, they increased in quantity. After seeing the same fibrils in the spleen of infected guinea pigs and human CJD subjects she realized that she was looking at the infectious agent itself. Patricia Merz labeled it scrapie associated fibrils (SAF).


Photo left: Prion at 100,000 times magnification showing threadlike fibrils, courtesy NIAID-RML.


Another researcher, Stanley Prusiner, had been studying scrapie and concluded that he knew enough about the scrapie agent to publish a paper in April 1982. He titled the paper "Novel Proteinaceous Infectious Particles Cause Scrapie".




Playing on the name proteinaceous infectious particle, he christened the agent "prion". Prusiner is widely credited with discovering the prion although Patricia Merz arguably beat him by at least four years.

The UK Mad-Cow Epidemic


In April 1985, a dairy cow made history in Britain. She was acting very strangely, exhibiting odd movements, wasting away, behaving differently, losing motor control in its hind legs and eventually was killed.

Its condition was misdiagnosed and she went to the rendering plant where it was made into commercial meat-and-bone meal. Seven more cows succumbed over the next 18 months and by 1986 there were cases in herds in widely separated counties.



Based on the spongiform damage and astrogliosis, the star shaped glial cells, they designated it as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). By the end of 1987, it had spread to herds throughout England and Wales.

By the end of 1988, there were 2,185 reported cases of BSE, almost certainly very under reported. Actually it was criminally underreported since by February 1995 the cases had risen to 143,109.



Through exhaustive investigation and process of elimination, the source was determined to be meat-and-bone meal that was fed to dairy herds but not usually beef cattle. Beef cattle are fed grass, hay or alfalfa while growing then fattened with grains such as corn or soy.

Dairy cows require a fortified diet in order to maximize their milk production and since not much soy or corn was grown in the UK, meat-and-bone meal was the added protein of choice.



Worldwide, cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens are routinely fed the cooked and dried remains of dead animals, including downer cattle and dead sheep of undiagnosed disease.

Beef cattle are often fed meat-and-bone meal during the finishing phase just before slaughter and calves are fed the meal to maximize their growth. Thus food animals are turned into cannibals in the interest of more and cheaper meat and milk and higher corporate profits.



When dairy cows have reached the end of their milk production they are slaughtered and made into hamburger or chopped for meat pies in England. Even cattle brains used to go into hamburger, thankfully no longer. Nevertheless, every part of both beef and dairy cattle is eaten; recycled back into the next generation of food animals or processed into commercial products.



Some of those commercial products were pet food and it turned out that cats could get TSE as well as sheep, cattle, mink and deer. In May 1990 a pet cat started acting strangely, very similar to sheep with scrapie or the failing hind legs of downer cattle. It was euthanized and diagnosed as spongiform encephalopathy.



Typical of a government bureaucrat, the chief veterinary officer dismissed it, after all, he said there was no evidence that the condition is transmissible nor is there any known connection with the other animal encephalopathies.

He opined that this was only one cat death in 7 million UK cats. Over the next four years, 62 other pet cats died of TSE however no one will ever know how many unreported cats used up their nine lives. Finally the government admitted that it was likely contaminated pet food that did them in.



While all this was going on, a variety of zoo animals were dying of strange spongiform encephalopathies. How odd that they also had meat-and-bone meal incorporated into their feed.



Then the unthinkable happened; people started dying from mad cow disease. In 1993, two dairy farmers died from CJD. Their deaths were dismissed as being within the normal statistical incidence of CJD. Then a fifteen year old girl came down with it and died. Her parents were consoled by a government investigator who told them to keep quiet about it; "Think about the economy, think about the Common Market".

Next, in March, 1994, a sixteen year old Muslim girl who liked hamburgers died of TSE. Then it was an 18 year old schoolboy who had often visited his aunt's farm in his early years and would have drank lots of unpasteurized milk and been in close proximity with the cows.

By the start of 1996, in addition to these cases, seven other young people had died of TSE.



All of these cases had something in common...their brain samples were different from the CJD cases previously seen. The stains of these brain slices showed very large amyloid plaques spread throughout the brain, not just the cerebellum.

Unlike the smaller CJD plaques, these were surrounded by a destructive halo of spongiform holes. These exhibited the diagnostic signs of the Kuru spongiform that had killed the cannibals in New Guinea.



What did the British government do? Well, Prime Minister, John Major, emphatically claimed that human beings do not get mad cow disease.

The Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC), set up to advise the government on BSE, tried to suppress any announcement of this new form of CJD, saying the scientists could be wrong.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State for Health, Stephen Dorrell, went public on March 20th, 1996. In front of the House of Commons, he informed the country that BSE had in all likelihood spread to humans from eating beef.



Next France, then Switzerland reported TSE cases. The source of all these infections became very uncertain. Since meat-and-bone meal had been routinely fed to pigs, chickens and dairy cattle, the source could very well be pork, bacon, leather, butter, milk and chicken-pot-pies.

Pigs and chickens did not exhibit any symptoms because they were usually slaughtered well before the time that incubation symptoms could appear.

The prognosis


The bottom line is that humans contract spongiform encephalopathies from eating infected animal products and animals contract TSE from eating animal protein from other animals.

It is possible that even vegetarians could be at risk in that when meat-and-bone meal is fed to chickens or hogs, it goes through them so fast and their manure is routinely spread on growing crops to be absorbed by food plants.

There is evidence that minute, nanosized particles of the infectant can be inhaled and carried to the brain to start its incubation period.



Currently CJD cases and other TSE's are closely monitored and the new cases seem to be holding steady. The big question however is what will happen in the next decade or two when those infected 20, 30 and 40 years ago start reaching the end of their infections incubation period. Industrial animal factories are still feeding hogs, chickens and cattle ruminant protein.



Governments don't seem to get it. The British government chose to protect its livestock industry over the protection of its citizens and in the US, the USDA is following a similar path based on denial, cover-ups and measures designed to protect large scale CAFO operations to the peril of the industries consumers.



According to Dr. John Collinge, a neurologist at St. Mary's Hospital in London, there are two PrP genes, M and V, and we inherit one from each parent. Therefore it is possible to have an MM or VV or MV combination.

In fact Dr. Collinge claims that 38% of us have MM, 51% are MV and 11% are VV. His experiments showed that the BSE agent can infect all three gene combinations. He noted that since only the MMs have reached the stage of showing symptoms in people, there could be two remaining waves of infection when the VV and MV start dying.



It is still possible that the actual trigger of infection will prove to be viral which would be a great embarrassment to both the 1997 Nobel Medical Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Stanley Prusiner to whom they awarded the Nobel honor.

Ongoing research, particularly by Laura Manuelides may yet uncover the elusive virus. In the meantime, Prusiner and others still contend that the prion is able to reproduce without the use of nucleic acid to convey the information needed to reproduce.

This would make the prion totally unique in nature and there are many voices stating that non-nucleic reproduction is an absolute impossibility.



The significance is that if the virus is found, then the door is opened to create a protective vaccine. Until then the beat goes on.

Farmers are still incorporating composted, fermented manure into their cattle feed. About 3 billion pounds of waste blood from slaughterhouses is still allowed to be mixed in with animal feed.

Even though the FDA prohibited the use of most animal protein in the manufacture of feed for cattle, sheep and goats back in 1997, it excluded blood, blood products, gelatin, milk and milk products, pig and horse protein and restaurant and institutional plate waste.



According to Richard Rhodes in Deadly Feasts, CJD is the human manifestation of BSE and nothing that the rendering plants or slaughterhouses can do will reliably make the infectious prion or virus, whichever it turns out to be, safe for consumption.

Current Research


There are still many, many ongoing research programs in the field of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and we will close by mentioning two; one having to do with detection, the other with prevention.



Research at the NIH's National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, may provide a way to quickly detect very small amounts of prions.


From the NIH NIAID website we learn that "miniscule amounts of infectious prions found outside the brain can be detected by current diagnostic tests, but these methods lack the speed and convenience needed for routine use.

Other quicker approaches aren't sensitive enough to detect low levels of infection. A research team led by Dr. Byron Caughey of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has been working to develop a better method for quickly detecting small amounts of prions.



The researchers described their new method—called real-time quaking-induced conversion, or RT-QuIC—in the December 2, 2010, online edition of PLoS Pathogens. RT-QuIC is about 50-200 times faster and much less expensive than animal bioassays that detect similarly small amounts of disease-causing prions.



RT-QuIC takes advantage of the ability of tiny amounts of prions to seed the misfolding of normal prion proteins in a test tube. The method involves testing a range of dilutions to see at what point the sample loses its seeding activity.



The scientists tested tissue samples from infected deer and sheep and were able to distinguish infected animals from normal ones in 2 days or less. They were also able to detect prions in nasal washes from infected hamsters."



Concerning prevention, from PhysOrg.com, we read that "antibodies that stick to a brain prion protein called PrP could be the key to treating prion diseases like variant CJD and preventing people accidentally exposed to prions from going on to develop the fatal brain disease.

Using a precise visualization technique, called X-ray crystallography, carried out at the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at the Science and Technology Facilities Councils (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, scientists have identified an antibody that has the best ability to bind to PrP in the brain.


Experiments using cells in the laboratory and in mice have suggested it could stop prion infection in its tracks.


Photo left:Crystallographic structure of prion protein


Neither of these items concerning detection or prevention has been applied to humans but great discoveries usually start with the ubiquitous lab mouse, hamster or guinea pig. At least the research is ongoing.

http://www.factory-farming.com/prion.html

The recent case of mad cow in Hanford could be a result of including chicken feces in cattle feed, as the chickens are fed dead cattle, the prion from the dead cattle can pass through the chicken's digestive system and remain viable as the chicken feces with the prion is recycled into cattle feed. Saving money at CAFOs doesn't always work so well within natural systems. Nor under normal circumstances would chickens consume dead cattle or cattle consume chicken feces!!

Mad Cow California: Stop Feeding Cows Chicken Manure

by Michael Greger, M.D.

Posted: 04/26/2012 8:52 am

More than a decade ago, the World Health Organization called for the exclusion of the riskiest bovine tissues -- cattle brains, eyes, spinal cord and intestine -- from the human food supply and from all animal feed to protect against the spread of mad cow disease. Unfortunately, the United States still allows the feeding of some of these potentially risky tissues to people, pigs, pets, poultry, and fish. Cattle remains are still fed to chickens, for example, and the poultry litter (floor wastes that include the feces and spilled feed) is fed back to cows. In this way, prions -- the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease -- may continue to be cycled back into cattle feed and complete the cow "cannibalism" circuit blamed for the spread of the disease.

Because poultry litter can be as much as eight times cheaper than foodstuffs like alfalfa, the U.S. cattle industry may feed as much as a million pounds of poultry litter to cattle each year. A thousand chickens can make enough waste to feed a growing calf year-round. Although excrement from other species is fed to livestock in the United States, chicken droppings are considered more nutritious for cows than pig feces or cattle dung.

A single cow can eat as much as three tons of poultry waste a year, yet the manure does not seem to affect the taste of the subsequent milk or meat. Taste panels have found little difference in the tenderness, juiciness, and flavor of beef made from steers fed up to 50% poultry litter. Beef from animals fed bird droppings may in fact even be more juicy and tender. Cows are typically not given feed containing more than 80% poultry litter, though, since it's not as palatable and may not fully meet protein and energy needs.

The industry realizes that the practice of feeding chicken feces to cattle might not stand up to public scrutiny. They understand that the custom carries "certain stigmas," "presents special consumer issues," and poses "potential public relations problems." They seem puzzled as to why the public so "readily accepts organically grown vegetables" grown with composted manure, while there is "apparent reluctance on the part of the public" to accept the feeding of chicken excrement to cattle. "We hope," says one industry executive, "common sense will prevail."

The editor of Beef magazine commented, "The public sees it as 'manure.' We can call it what we want and argue its safety, feed value, environmental attributes, etc., but outsiders still see it simply as 'chicken manure.' And, the most valid and convincing scientific argument isn't going to counteract a gag reflex." The industry's reaction, then, has been to silence the issue.

According to Beef, public relations experts within the National Cattlemen's Beef Association warned beef producers that discussing the issue publicly would only "bring out more adverse publicity." When the Kansas Livestock Association dared to shine the spotlight on the issue by passing a resolution urging the discontinuation of the practice, irate producers in neighboring states threatened a boycott of Kansas feedyards.

Maybe this new case of mad cow disease will reinvigorate consumer campaigns to close the "no-brainer" loopholes in feed regulations that continue to allow the feeding of such filthy feed to farm animals.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/mad-cow-disease-california_b_1450994.html

Brain Trust: The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer's Disease

Do you enjoy a nice big steak? Juicy hamburgers? Enjoy them while you can. If even half of Colm Kelleher’s Brain Trust: The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease is true, the writing’s on the wall for our lives as carnivores.

Kelleher opens with descriptions of cattle mutilations in Washington state (undertaken, in his theory, to hide evidence of Mad Cow disease), but then backtracks swiftly to provide a history of the disease’s pathology and discovery. Otherwise known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and caused by infectious proteins known as prions that turn organs like the brain into spongy useless blobs, it was not first discovered in cows but in humans.

When medical researcher D. Carleton Gajdusek first visited Papua New Guinea in 1957, he found hundreds of Fore tribespeople dying from a mysterious disease they called kuru. Eventually he prepared a traveling exhibit on the disease, which was seen by an American pathologist who thought it might be related to his own work with sheep that had died from a disease called scrapie. From there and over the course of decades, scientists would eventually find a host of similarly related diseases across species and continents: kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows, Chronic Wasting Disease in deer and elk, and transmissible mink encephalopathy in mink.

Confused? Yeah, I’m not sure of all the details myself, but I do get the main points: these diseases are always fatal. They are caused by prions, which can live in the ground or animal bodies for years. And, as Kelleher explains in brisk and concise chapters, they can be transmitted from one species to another, through various food sources, and can take years to cause the debilitating symptoms for which they are famous.

For the historical detail alone, this is an important and readable book on the subject. Kelleher’s true genius, however, is in his ability to speculate, convincingly, that the 8,902 percent increase in deaths from Alzheimer’s Disease over the past twenty-four years can be attributed to this infectious agent’s presence in the human food chain. As if that weren’t disturbing enough, Kelleher also relates how one of the early pioneers in the field, the highly respected Gajdusek, simply carried vials of different strains of scrapie and kuru from Great Britain into the United States, disregarding USDA rules. From 1963 through 1970 he and other researchers injected a wide variety of animals with those materials at their laboratory in the middle of a wildlife refuge in Patuxent, Maryland. Just picture it: hundreds of animals, some as small as mice, all infected and housed together in converted barns/labs in the middle of a heavily animal-populated refuge. Look no further, Kelleher suggests, for the origin of this family of diseases on the North American continent.

Reader reviews at Amazon.com focus on the book’s unpleasant revelations about the mammalian food chain, and many reviewers state their intentions to eat only “organic” meat as a result of reading it. Myself, I think they’re missing the point. Perhaps I’m just vindictive, but does anyone else think that Gajdusek, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976, should lose it as punishment for walking dangerous and largely misunderstood infectious agents around the globe? For that matter, what kind of punishment can we plan for all the government agency bureaucrats and politicians who not only tried to cover up incidences of the diseases, but also kept trying to export animal food containing contaminated blood and brain matter, to other countries?

Kelleher, a biochemist, does end his book with a note of optimism regarding our chances of containing this epidemic. Although comparisons will inevitably be drawn between this work and Eric Schlosser’s huge bestseller, Fast Food Nation, I think this book is too subtly horrifying, even with that optimism, to do as well commercially. Schlosser’s self-righteous reporter’s voice often struck me as almost unnecessarily hysterical, whereas Kelleher’s descriptive scientist’s voice and calm recitation of lax experimental methods and petty bureaucratic squabbles is extremely unsettling in its understatement.

It’s a good book. It’s a scary book, and it will undoubtedly be disdained by many for its conspiracy theories regarding cattle mutilations and Alzheimer’s Disease, but ultimately, whether it scares you out of eating meat or not, it should at least cure you of any trust you may still place in the scientific and governmental establishment.

Brain Trust: The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease by Colm A. Kelleher
Paraview Pocket Books
ISBN: 0743499352

http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2005_03_004689.php



Interview - Colm Kelleher - Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer's Disease

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2g1gxQuFpM


Does the CDC want people feeling zombified?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRz_qIicOg&feature=related