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

by Colm A. Kelleher PhD

"My book Brain Trust argues that that this is definitely an American problem. Not only do we have evidence that mad cow disease has been in the United States for over 20 years, but we also have an epidemic of deer and elk disease that has spread like wildfire through nearly 20 states. The Europeans have only to deal with mad cow disease. We have both mad cow and deer/elk disease. With eleven million hunters beginning hunting season as we speak, it is a matter of some urgency that they be warned about possible dangers of field dressing deer/elk or eating venison. Cooking mad cow or mad deer meat does not make it safer to eat. You have to carbonize meat at 600C to make it safe. By the time it is safe it is a black lump of charcoal.

Mad cow disease is caused by an infectious protein called a prion. A prion is not a virus and it is not a bacterium. It is simply a different shape of a protein. Normal prions play a helpful role in the cell, but when they change shape, they can become lethal. They then kill brain cells by the billions.

Prion diseases kill humans (CJD), cows (BSE aka mad cow disease), sheep (scrapie), deer/elk (Chronic Wasting Disease: CWD) and an assortment of other animal species including mink, squirrels, cats, ostriches etc. More worryingly, prions can jump species. This lead to questions for hunters like: can prions jump from deer/elk to humans? Or can prions jump from deer/elk to cattle?

In the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of cows died from mad cow disease. For years, health authorities issued press releases telling the anxious British public that eating beef was perfectly safe. It was routine for officials to go on television to assure the public there was nothing to worry about. And then the unthinkable happened. Beginning in the 1990s, scores of teenagers and young people in their twenties began to die from eating tainted beef.

Can the same thing happen in the United States?

We will not know until it is too late unless the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) actually begins to test the beef being sold to consumers. Currently, there are 35 million cattle slaughtered in the United States, and under pressure, the USDA has agreed to begin testing about 200,000 animals per year for mad cow disease. The huge majority of cattle that reach our dinner tables are never tested for mad cow disease. In Japan and in Ireland, every cow that is eaten gets tested and in Europe over 30% are tested. In the US, even with “expanded” testing, less than 1% of animals are tested. What’s wrong with that picture?

Consumer groups have long criticized the USDA for looking out for big cattle interests rather than looking out for the consumer. Their obstinate refusal to test more cattle in the US for mad cow disease is simply because the cattle industry has deemed it unnecessary. USDA scientists argue that more testing is “unscientific”, but Professor Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for his discovery of prions, recently stated that the level of testing for mad cow disease in the USA is grossly inadequate. Should we believe a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or should we believe a USDA spokesperson? And when Creekstone Farms in Arkansas decided to test all the cattle in their plants for mad cow disease, the USDA stepped in and, invoking an obscure 1913 law, prohibited the company from testing their cattle!! It is this surreal situation that led to charges by consumers that the USDA does not have the interests of American consumers in mind.

Prions diseases, whether in humans (CJD) in cows (BSE) or in deer/elk (CWD) are 100% fatal. And prions are almost indestructible. They contaminate surgical instruments, even ones that are sterilized. They remain lethally infectious after two years in a pasture. Most viruses or bacteria die within days. Not prions.

And new evidence shows that prions are passed via blood transfusion. Both blood donors and acceptors have died in the UK and in France. A looming question for the health authorities in the United States is: how safe is the American blood supply?

So what is the connection between the human prion disease (CJD) and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)? Firstly, the astounding recent increase in AD in the United States has not been sufficiently highlighted by the media. In 1979, only 653 people died of AD. In 2002, that number had increased to reach 50,000 deaths. A 9000% increase in deaths for any disease in a mere 25 years should be cause for a national emergency. Instead, old people now are almost expected to die of AD. This was not the case a few generations ago. AD was a rare disease in the 1960s.

AD is quite difficult to diagnose. Mood swings, psychiatric problems, sleep problems, eye problems, memory problems are all loosely associated with dementia. There are some overlaps between symptoms of CJD and AD making them difficult to distinguish during the early stages. CJD kills within a few months of diagnosis, while AD victims take years to die. In both cases, the victims die a horrible death. The gold standard for diagnosing CJD is via autopsy followed by pathology of the brain.

Two shocking studies, one from Yale University and the second from University of Pittsburgh really opened my eyes when I first saw them. When researchers studied the brains of dead Alzheimer’s disease patients, they found that between 5-13% had actually been wrongly diagnosed. These people had really died of CJD. Now, what does this say regarding the supposed rarity of CJD in the USA?

We are routinely told that CJD is so rare, only 1 in a million people get it. But with 4-5 million Alzheimer’s Disease patients putting an enormous strain on the US healthcare system, if even a small percentage of these people actually have CJD, not AD, then CJD is much more common than we have been told. These figures imply thousands of CJD cases in the US that are going undetected because of a lack of autopsies. Recent reports indicate that most pathologists do not want to conduct autopsies on CJD patients for fear of contaminating their facilities with the indestructible prions. And to make matters even worse, CJD is not even a mandatory reportable disease in about half the states in the USA. That means authorities have no real idea of how many CJD cases actually exist.

Recently (October 2004), a suspected cluster of CJD was spotted in Ulster County New York. Several months ago (March 2004), another cluster of CJD was noticed in New Jersey. Clusters are worrying because they may point to an infectious entity. In both New York and New Jersey clusters, the health authorities assured the public that these were “sporadic CJD” and hence there was nothing to worry about. Sporadic CJD has no known cause, the health authorities tell us. Both USDA and CDC tell us that sporadic CJD arises randomly and has nothing to do with eating tainted beef. According to health officials, only variant CJD or vCJD, is caused by eating tainted beef. We are also told that there has never been a case of human mad cow disease in the US.

But is that really true scientifically?


New research from Professor John Collinge in London suggests that some cases of sporadic CJD may also be caused by BSE. This research was conducted in transgenic mice with human prions, so critics have argued maybe the same does not apply to humans. But, if Professor Collinge’s data are indeed true, then it is much more likely that people in the US have died of CJD from eating tainted beef (or venison). We will never know until we (a) dramatically increase the number of autopsies of people dying from “dementia”, AD and CJD and (b) dramatically increase testing for mad cow disease in the US.

If we look at the current low level of testing for mad cow disease in the US and we combine it with the current epidemic of deer/elk disease in this country and with the lack of autopsies to determine how many people in the US are actually dying of CJD, we may be facing a grim reality. When the Europeans, who have just gone through ten years of devastating disease and have lost billions of dollars, look across at the United States, they shake their heads in disbelief.

Surely, we can learn from the mistakes made in Europe?"

Brain Trust was published on October 19, 2004 and is currently in bookstores nationwide. For more information, click on:
http://www.colmkelleher.com

Interview - Colm Kelleher - Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer's Disease
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2g1gxQuFpM


Background on BSE;

"Swine flu, bird flu and BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, widely known as mad-cow disease) are the most well-known plagues caused by factory farming and poor animal welfare—there are others. And because illnesses spread quickly between animals reared in tight spaces on cannibalistic diets, it’s only a matter of time before other such viruses mutate into strains that can infect humans working on or living near factory farms—and then spread to the rest of us.

BSE
BSE spreads between animals and humans through the consumption of infected meat rather than airborne viruses. The feeding of dead cows to live ones is a major contributor to the rapid spread of the illness. And it is just one part of a growing concern over the contents of animal feed—including growth hormones and antibiotics—passing up the food chain to humans.

BSE causes cows’ brains to waste away, and spreads when they are fed bovine tissues contaminated with BSE. Humans who eat infected beef develop the human variant, CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), which lies dormant for many years before producing symptoms similar to dementia, and eventually death.

A new form called variant CJD (vCJD), discovered in the UK in March 1996, has been disproportionately affecting younger patients (a median age of 29 instead of 65). From October 1996 to November 2002, 129 cases of vCJD were reported in the UK, six in France and one each in Canada, Ireland, Italy and the US.

How we treat our feed animals is not only a moral issue.The antibiotics, steroids and other substances we administer to them; the food—including their diseased brothers—we serve them; and the illnesses they contract, are bound to pass onto humans, if not directly through our stomachs, then by way of the air, land and water we share,.Is it worth sacrificing our own health, the animals’ wellbeing and the environment for the sake of marginally increased business profits? If you think not, buying from local, family-owned, free-range and organic farms is an option you should seriously consider."


http://ecohearth.com/eco-zine/food-and-garden/865-swine-flu-bird-flu-and-bse-three-legacies-of-factory-farming-.html


Stopping the "Zombie Disease" (aka Mad Cow or Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease)


Almost two years ago the Obama administration banned the slaughter of "downer" cows, cows that exhibited neurological dysfunction. The move was aimed at lowering the chance of infecting consumers with "Mad Cow Disease," more appropriately known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

The disease attacks the brain, destroying a person's ability to think and speak, destroying his memories and personality. In effect, the symptoms are hardly different from dementia or Alzheimer's.
While the ban was a needed move in the right direction, the USDA and other government agencies are not going far enough. "Downer cows" are cows that have hit the very last stages of mad cow disease—cows whose brains are swimming with the particle responsible for this disease: the prion.

A prion is a protein that has the unique ability to take other proteins and turn them into its own shape. Prions are like zombies (or for you Trek fans, the Borg) who take normal human beings and turn them into one of them. Eventually, so many of these proteins accumulate in the brain that it results in brain damage. If your brain cells (neurons) are the pipes that deliver information, the plaques that form from the proteins clumping together are like sewage stopping up the pipe. In this case, the pipe can burst: those protein clumps can destroy entire brain cells.

This disease spreads because our beef industry is insane enough to feed cows the inedible remains of other cows. The parts that humans are loathe to eat—such as the brain and spinal cord—are ground up and fed to cows to save money on feed. Of course, an infected cow's brain and spinal cord are full of prions. These prions go on to infect more cows, creating more of themselves, and so forth. Unfortunately, a cow can still seem somewhat healthy and be infected with a lot of these prions. That's why banning "downer cows" just doesn't go far enough.



Frankly, it's not difficult for ranchers and beef companies to test their beef. It costs only a few more cents per pound. Some companies, in fact, volunteered to test, only to be stopped by the USDA. Of course, a few more cents per pound results in millions to billions of dollars of lost profit, according to big corporations' calculations. However, I'm sure that most consumers would gladly pay a few more cents per pound in order to eat safer beef, if these companies would simply pass on the costs to the consumer. They do it all the time with taxes!

Unfortunately, the beef industry is incredibly politically powerful, even since the 1800s. They've been getting subsidies for a long, long time. Yes, you heard right—your very own tax dollars are supporting our massive beef industry. (I'm sure vegetarians and vegans reading this are already grinding their teeth.) So I'm quite cynical as to how well we can rely on the government for a solution to this.

Mad Cow Disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) works very very slowly in human beings. It can be up to 30 years after initial infection before the disease manifests itself. There's also some evidence that suggests that a lot of these cases are misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's or dementia, which is frightening—we may have an emerging epidemic in 30 years with thousands or even millions of people literally losing their minds

http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/stopping-the-zombie-disease-aka-mad/

So how many people being misdiagnosed with dementia already have CJD? Are we creating a nation of zombies by feeding rendered cattle to chicken, then feeding chicken feces to the cattle? This creates a cycle where the prions can be returned to the cattle.

The symptoms of CJD are slow onset, usually over several years. People may not be aware that their brain is being eaten by prions until it is too late. Economy does not trump human health. Time to shut down the CAFOS before my extraterrestrial alligator friends lasso an asteroid and drop it on the CAFO. They tell me this is the only temperature hot enough to destroy the prion.



Once you get zombified by mad cow (BSE) prions and get CJD, there is no known cure;

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

by Saturday Apr 28th, 2012 4:13 PM

Posted on August 31, 2011 by NerdyOne

When I say that prions are one of the coolest biological phenomena in existence, I mean to say that they are one of the most sci-fi and potentially frightening things you could encounter. They are the causative agent behind mad cow disease, which you’ve probably heard of, and which might not seem too terrifying. But the way prions work, and the fact that there is a “human form” of mad cow disease, will be enough to give you the creeps.

Did I mention that prion infection is the closest thing there is to real-life zombie-ism? Okay, okay, what IS a prion?




So, there are viruses, which are responsible for the flu, and there are bacteria, which cause tuberculosis; these are well-known. Even the lesser-known protists, which give rise to malaria, are similar to bacteria (although more complex in structure). Prions, on the other hand, are an altogether different infectious agent.

In simple terms, a prion is an rebellious protein, a protein that has failed to fold up into the proper configuration. And prions take their frustration out on normal proteins by making them fold up improperly, too, thus propagating more prions. In fact, the word “prion” is a contraction of “protein” and “infection.” How do prions work? Not by any means so taxing as invading a cell and hijacking its DNA, or anything like that. As far as we know, normal proteins fall prey to prions simply by physical contact, thus leading to a domino effect of prion creation, which I have tried to illustrate below (afterwards, I’ll show why prion infection is really, really bad).

Let’s say we start with 20 blissful blue proteins, and they’re blissful because each one of them is a nice square shape:



But then a vindictive prion comes along, and it’s angry because it failed at being a square (and because it has a unibrow):



So this prion, like a real class act, takes its feelings out on the nearest normal protein by making contact with it:



And what was a normal protein is now a disgruntled, misshapen prion:



It’s all downhill from here. Two angry prions become four:



Four become eight:



And finally everybody is an angry, bent out of shape (literally) prion:



So why does prion infection matter? And what was I saying about zombies? This is where things get interesting.

As it turns out, cells do not like being full of misfolded proteins. The real problem with prion proteins is that they get tangled up and stick together, forming very large, stable aggregates inside of cells. This leads to cell death and tissue damage, specifically in the brain, where prions wreak their havoc. The picture below on the left shows a brain suffering from prion infection, riddled with holes due to tissue destruction (normal brain tissue is shown on the right at a lower magnification):


The effect of prions on the brain is also visible on a macroscopic scale, as seen in these brain sections where the prion-infected brain is on the left and is visibly deteriorated:



When a cow is infected with prions, it has mad cow disease. When a human is infected with prions, he/she has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD; not as catchy). The symptoms of CJD start with dementia (memory/personality loss), followed by speech impairment, jerky movements, and poor balance (not to be insensitive, but this could all describe a zombie, no?)

There are three main ways you can end up with CJD: 1) acquire it, by somehow getting prions into your system from the environment, 2) inherit a mutation that dooms your proteins to become prions, or 3) have the bad luck to spontaneously develop prions in your brain.

Fore tribe membersWhile some people worry about eating beef when mad cow disease breaks out, you would have to consume beef that had picked up traces of brain and prion during processing in order to get CJD. What’s more, this and all other acquired forms of human prion diseases make up less than one percent of cases. But since I’m on the topic, I’ll briefly mention that there is a tribe in Papua New Guinea called the Fore tribe, and in the 1950s they had an epidemic of a prion disease called kuru. This happened because it was traditional in this culture to eat the bodies (including the brains) of deceased family members. All it would’ve taken was one person with prion disease to die, then the family would’ve eaten prion-infected brain, which would eventually cause all of them to die, and then be eaten…and so on, until cannibalism was banned later in the ’50s. (Eating brains, developing zombie-like symptoms…the connections are hard to ignore.)

So the #1 rule if you don’t want to acquire prion disease is to not eat brains. Unfortunately, the vast majority (85%) of human prion diseases apparently arise sporadically, perhaps from some spontaneous mutation or conversion of normal protein to prion protein. Researchers say there is no amount of prions too small to cause full-blown disease, and once you’re affected there’s no cure and it’s always fatal. The only real variable is that it can take years of incubation before prion levels rise to symptom-causing levels.

I don’t mean to scare you! Despite all this, a human with prion disease is statistically one in a million. If anything, this post will hopefully prove useful to you the next time you’re in the company of nerdy friends, watching zombie movies, and you can sound extra nerdy: a lot of movies depicting a zombie apocalypse rely on the spread of zombie-ism through an aggressive virus, so when that tidbit comes up in the movie, you can turn to your friends and say, “Well, this would be more realistic if the virus precipitated prion formation….”

http://trynerdy.com/?p=936

think about factory farms and the idea of ground beef.
Do you know just how many cows/steers have gone into your hamburger? Does the idea of playing the odds bother you?
A partial solution to reduce risks if you love beef ( and who doesn't, with garlic and a bit of lemon ) is to buy a cut and grind it yourself.
Yummmmm......
Also, remember, a healthy diet should use meat as a flavoring instead of a main course unless you're a smooth gut carnivore.
Like my cat.

Nothing wrong with a game of 21 in the casinos. Maybe you'll get lucky, if not you'll just lose money.

If you gamble with mad cow disease (BSE/CJD) by eating cattle from CAFOs, you will lose more than money if fortune isn't smiling down on you.

You will lose your mind!



"In December, 2003, tissues from a cow from a Washington State confinement dairy tested positive for BSE or mad cow disease. The cow contracted BSE by being fed meat and bone meal made from other cattle that were infected with BSE. This was common practice in the U.S. until 1997. In essence, grass-grazing herbivores were being turned into cannibals. Tragically, people who ate these meat-eating cows ran the risk of acquiring a human form of mad cow disease called Creutzfelt-Jakob disease that killed more than a hundred people in Europe. To date, two other US cattle have been diagnosed with BSE.
Since the 1997 USDA ban on meat and bone meal in cattle feed, the risk of mad cow disease has gone down substantially. But there is always the risk that feed producers will inadvertently mix meat and bone meal designated for other animals into approved cattle feed.

When you choose products from cattle and dairy cows that have been raised on pasture all of their lives, there is no possibility that they consumed feed that contained any animal tissue, virtually eliminating the possibility of mad cow disease."

http://www.eatwild.com/foodsafety.html


Roughly 150 people worldwide have died as a result of a vCJD infection since the first case was identified in 1995.vi It is possible for a person infected with vCJD to live for 30 years before showing any symptoms of the disease, and since it is impossible at this point to diagnose vCJD before symptoms are experienced, it is likely many more people are carrying the disease completely unaware. vii With the onset of symptoms a person will experience depression, psychosis, debilitated motor skills and eventually complete immobility. Those infected experience these increasingly dramatic symptoms over the course of about 14 months in a downward spiral toward death.viii


Currently, American cattle feed may legally include any of the following risky materials:xxii

Plate Waste. This includes restaurant scraps and leftovers that may contain beef products. (cooking infected meat does not destroy the disease)

Poultry Litter. This is the waste swept up from the floors of chicken houses. The litter usually includes spilled chicken feed, which may contain cow parts, and chicken feces, which may contain BSE prions since they do not break down in the digestive tract.

Cow and Pig Blood. Plasma (the liquid part of blood) from cows and pigs is often used as a protein supplement in milk replacer for young calves.

http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/madcow/



Members of the coalition are threatening to file a lawsuit or to push for federal legislation establishing such a ban if the FDA doesn't act to do so in the coming months.

Farmers feed 1 million to 2 million tons of poultry litter to their cattle annually, according to FDA estimates.

Using the litter -- which includes feces, spilled chicken feed, feathers and poultry farm detritus -- increases the risk of cows becoming infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union.

That's because the spilled chicken feed and the feces contain tissue from ruminants -- cows and sheep, among other mammals. The disease is transmitted through feeding ruminant remains to cattle.

"It takes a very small quantity of ruminant protein, even just 1 milligram, to cause an infection," said Steve Roach, public health program director with Food Animal Concerns Trust, a Chicago-based animal welfare group that is part of the coalition.

Although it is rare, people can contract a fatal form of the disease by eating meat from cows with BSE.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/31/business/fi-feed31