The Saga of Angry Bovine

Though Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) -- better known as Mad Cow Disease -- hasn't been in the forefront of recent news, the USDA assured consumers this past week that there is only a slight risk that the disease exists in the US today.

For some reason, these assurances don't instill me with great confidence. As the USDA admitted, BSE doesn't show up in cattle for years and the human-equivalent disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), doesn't show up after exposure for an average of 13 years. Consequently, while everything might APPEAR to be hunky-dory today, we could well find ourselves in a medical quagmire a few years down the road.

According to a PETA-sponsored site, It's Mad to Eat Meat, BSE is a scary disease.

Spongy brains, whether in humans, cows, or other animals, are caused by malformed proteins called prions. Researchers have traced recent outbreaks of the bovine version of the disease to farmers’ cost-cutting practice of mixing bits of dead sheep’s neural tissue into the feed of cows, who are naturally herbivorous. If cows eat the brains of other cows who already have BSE or of sheep suffering from a sheep disease called scrapie, the animals can develop mad cow disease. When people eat infected animals, thus far presumed to be cows, they could develop the human version of the disease...

The very idea of adding the remains of dead animals to cattle feed is a relatively new idea. Margot Ford McMillen, writing in The Progressive Populist explains it this way.

Government research, driven by industry, led to the decision to add leftover animal parts to animal feed. Each piece of the decision made perfect sense to researchers learning how to produce large amounts of food quickly. First, confine and raise huge herds in a small space. Exercise, which allows animals to walk off some of their fat, is an enemy if the goal is to raise animals to a large size very quickly, so good-bye to the wide open spaces.

To raise the animals even faster, researchers needed a source of protein more potent than grains like soybeans and corn. The researchers added bone meal and blood meal, two dry and relatively tasteless leftovers that could be mixed easily with the grains that animals are accustomed to eating. To make these palatable, researchers used molasses, a sweetener originally raised by farmers as their own sweetener. This was a familiar additive that didn't raise too many eyebrows; it had long been a treat for hard-working horses.

After researchers recorded gains with the bone meal and blood meal, they became more adventurous until animal feed became a dumping ground for all the leftovers of the livestock industry. "Offal," as the leftovers are called, consists of skin, bones, brain, intestines and so forth. These unprofitable parts are heated to a high degree, then dried, powdered, and added to grains and put in bins and 50-pound sacks marked "chicken feed," "hog feed," "cattle chow" and so on.

Many people know that, after a BSE scare in 1997, the FDA moved to change the requirements of the ingredients of feed fed to cattle. If you have a lot of time on your hands and you enjoy reading technical jargon, you can download 21 CFR Part 589.2000 from the FDA website.

While both the government and agribusiness believe the new feed restrictions are adequate to safeguard the health of American consumers, critics don't agree. Writing in the January 12, 2005 edition of In These Times, John Stauber reports,

Most Canadians and Americans believe that their governments have taken the necessary measures to stop the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy...For a decade the official line of both governments and the corporate meat and livestock industry has been that the disease could not occur in either country because of extensive safeguards such as the “1997 firewall feed ban” that officials claimed prevented the feeding of cattle protein to cattle, the means of infection for the deadly brain disease.


However, the regulations adopted by the United States and Canada in 1997 were too little and too late. For example, it is still legal in both countries to wean calves on formula containing cattle blood as a protein source.

In other words, the assurance by the USDA amounts to not much of anything. Beef cattle in both the US and Canada -- where most of the beef Americans consume comes from -- continues to be fed substances that we KNOW can cause BSE. Since, as indicated above, BSE doesn't show up in infected cattle for years, we could have a national epidemic on our hands and not even know it!

Personally, I'm not worried. I'm a vegetarian. ;-)