Hours after confirming to reporters that the United States had found its fourth-ever case of mad cow disease, John Clifford was ready to answer the world’s questions about the safety of U.S. beef.
Clifford, the government’s chief veterinary officer at the agriculture department, had quickly called his counterparts in Mexico and Canada, the first and second-largest buyers of U.S. beef, to tell them about a California cow found to have an “atypical” type of the brain-wasting disease.
The USDA is deceiving the public about the true risks from mad cow prion diseases.
Out of about 35 million animals slaughtered, only 35,000 are tested for mad cow –1/10th of one percent. There are 1.9 million “Downers” – diseased, disabled, dead or dying cows each year. At least one million of the downers are rendered into pet and animal feeds. These downers are the animals most likely to have mad cow disease. But ONLY 5000 downers are BSE tested at the renderers – less than 0.005%: “Samples are collected from renderers and 3D/4D facilities, with a quota set at 5,000 samples.”
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/animal_diseases/bse/surv_in_usa.shtml
{USDA has not disclosed what happens to the other 900,000 downers each year.}
-Bovine Amyloidotic Spongiform Encephalopathy is a strain of mad cow disease which the USDA says
presents no risk to humans or animals “because it is not transmissible”.
Published, peer reviewed studies reveal otherwise:
“Intraspecies Transmission of BASE Induces Clinical Dullness and Amyotrophic Changes”
‘Several lines of evidence suggest that BASE is highly virulent and easily transmissible to a wide host range. ”
( Lombardi, G, et al 2008)
“Atypical BSE in Germany— Proof of transmissibility and biochemical characterization”
(Buschman, A. et als – 2006)”
” Atypical BSE (BASE) transmitted from asymptomatic aging cattle to a primate”
(Comoy, E.E. et als – 2008)”
Dr. Claudio Soto, et al, have confirmed that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a prion disease – 6 million US victims – new case every 69 seconds.
http://www.alzheimers-prions.com/pdf/CLAUDIO-SOTO-CONFIRMS-AD-IS-PRION-DISEASE-OCT-2011.pdf
The common neuropathy in both AD victims and BASE mad cows is the presence of amyloid plaques in the brains.
Aging asymptomatic dairy cows infected with BASE mad cow, are ending up untested and undetected in huge industrial mixing vats of hamburger, each containing meat from 50 to 100 animals from multiple states and two to four countries http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/burger21904.cfm
Helane Shields, Alton, NH 03809 XXXXXX@XXXXXX http://www.Alzheimers-prions.com/
I don’t think much of some of your sources, to be honest and I find Soto et al to be, ahem, less than compelling.
We do have evidence of heritability (familial alzheimer’s) where mutation of one of three genes (and possibly more) yields affliction in a predictable pattern in offspring.
Similarly we have archival evidence indicating this variety of dementia has appeared throughout the ages (in people fortunate to live long enough to exhibit symptoms) which leaves us no known infection point from which to infer spread of disease as in prion diseases becoming evident following the introduction of carcass rendering and meat and bone meal introduced into cattle feed, although granted I believe this remains an unproven mode of transmission. Do you have any references where transmission has been achieved by means other than direct injection? I can’t recall any from the papers that have crossed my desk over the last dozen or so years but I freely admit not having searched for any such.
BTW, I’ve masked your email address, posting in public comments is possibly not a good idea unless you are particularly fond of spam. People with a legitimate reason to contact you can so note in comments and email addresses can be exchanged in the background by moderators.