I recently returned from my first trip to Japan. It was wonderful for a lot of reasons, but it was very wonderful to see a country that was really doing the wrong thing on this issue and then detected mad cow disease four years ago, and since then has become the international leader. As mysterious as these 100 percent fatal, food-borne diseases are, it’s really simple to solve this problem. The solution is this: You may not be a vegetarian, but any animals you eat have to be vegetarians, because as far as we know, mad cow disease is really only spread through the practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste as supplemental fat and protein back to livestock.Of course, we’ve heard over and over that we stopped doing that in the United States in 1997 with our firewall feed ban. It would be wonderful if that were true, but it’s not. The United States, right now, continues to legally feed billions of pounds of slaughterhouse waste to cattle in the United States. This waste includes cattle blood, cattle fat contaminated with protein, meat and bone meal, fat and blood from pigs, and something called poultry litter – two billion pounds a year of what’s bulldozed up from the pit of these giant poultry factories is fed to cattle in the United States. Lester Crawford, who recently resigned or was pushed out of FDA is on record as saying 30 percent of that two billion pounds of poultry litter, nice little euphemism there, that’s fed to cattle in the U.S. consists of meat and bone meal that’s been spilled or defecated.
Rather than having a firewall feed ban, what’s happened in the United States is that ever since 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made sure that the nation’s meat industry, dominated by Tyson and Cargill and other giants, can continue to take their slaughterhouse waste, 50 percent of every animal slaughtered, and feed it back to living animals, amplifying and spreading this disease.
In 1993, I started the Center for Media & Democracy, and we investigate corporate and government propaganda. Mad cow disease is an incredible case study of how propaganda has been used for 20 years to maintain industry’s dangerous practices while misleading us into thinking that the correct steps have been taken.
So it was wonderful being in Japan because they do the right thing, as does Britain, as do the rest of the EU countries. It’s really rather simple: a total and complete ban on feeding animal protein back to livestock. In Japan, they test 100 percent of their animals so that they can be sure that the feed ban is being followed and that infected animals are not reaching the public.
Until the first mad cow was discovered here in the U.S. in December 23, 2003, we did almost no testing. We now know today—and this is stunning and should have been front-page news, but it wasn’t—that we have been amplifying and spreading mad cow disease in the United States for a decade. We know this because of the Texas cow. In November 2004, headlines said it looked like maybe the second mad cow has been discovered in the United States. Information leaked out, and this is all incredibly secret and protected by the federal government, that maybe this cow was from Texas. The word was that this cow, in a minimal testing program we do have in the United States, had tested positive twice for mad cow disease, which meant that this was almost certainly a mad cow.
Under U.S. law, only the USDA can test for mad cow disease. It’s illegal for anyone else to test. The USDA shipped what remained of that animal to its lab in Ames, Iowa, for further testing, and guess what? This was the one in a quarter million. This was the mad cow that wasn’t a mad cow. They said that further testing at the lab is showing that the cow didn’t have mad cow disease. Dr. Michael Hansen at Consumers Union, who’s been the best public interest scientist on this issue, went ballistic and really got in USDA’s face and said, “What test did you do? Did you do the Western blot test? This is the gold standard everywhere in the world except the U.S., apparently, for mad cow testing. The USDA came back, finally, with a written letter from an undersecretary to Dr. Hansen in March 2005, saying, “No, we didn’t do the Western blot. We won’t do the Western blot because it won’t give us any useful information.
In May, Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association and I discovered that the Secretary of Agriculture was coming to St. Paul, Minnesota, to put on a dog and pony show with all the biggest lobbyists of the meat industry. We couldn’t understand why this was going on. In retrospect now, it’s clear what was going on. The Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Johanns, was obviously preparing to announce that this slightly escalated USDA mad cow testing program was going to be, probably, discontinued because they had tested a few hundred thousand animals out of the 35 million that had been slaughtered and didn’t find mad cow disease.
Ronnie and I organized a press conference and a demonstration. We had a bag of conventional calf starter, this is the stuff you wean cattle on in the U.S., which contains cattle blood and cattle fat. It’s perfectly legal under our firewall feed ban, even though blood can transmit these diseases and the fat is contaminated with cattle protein.
Coincidentally, the next day the USDA announced that the Texas cow did have mad cow disease. What happened? We’ll find out more as time goes on, but the best I can piece together is that the Inspector General of the USDA, Phyllis Fong, obviously a courageous public servant, tricked the USDA lab into actually conducting the Western blot, which showed positive. The USDA Secretary was clearly furious. The remains of this animal were sent to Britain and they, again, confirmed it was mad cow. Then, in August of 2005, the USDA concluded its investigation and basically said, “Well, we think this mad cow disease came from eating infected cow, probably a decade ago.” The USDA said that they’ve identified twelve different companies that supplied the farm where the animal was raised with feed, but they weren’t going to tell the public the name of the farm it was raised on nor identify the companies. Case closed.
This animal was born in Texas, so we now know we’ve been amplifying and spreading mad cow disease for a decade. We haven’t seen it because of the refusal to do the sort of food safety testing program that is done in Japan and the EU nations. If we were testing equivalently, we would be testing tens of millions of cattle a year.
When I was in Japan, people wanted to know, what’s wrong in the United States? Why don’t people in the United States become outraged and concerned over this issue? Are they just asleep? Don’t they care? I explained that when the people in the United States hear the facts about this issue, they do become outraged and concerned. In fact, a large and unfortunately very successful effort by the U.S. government and the food industry has gone into all this propaganda and PR that’s kept us ignorant and dumb downed.
Then people always say, “Well, what about the news media in the United States?” I always laugh a little before I answer, but I talk about the Oprah lawsuit, because the story of mad cow disease is really an amazing story. No one saw mad cow until 1985 when cattle started developing this horrible dementia and dying in Britain. They very quickly identified it as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy or TSE disease, what we now call prion disease. Behind closed doors, the British government said this was really startling because they had never seen it in cattle. They had seen it in sheep and in people in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Rather than saying to the British people that we don’t know why we have mad cow, we’re seeing more and more, and we don’t know that this disease won’t spread into people, the British government launched a PR campaign to say, “Don’t worry, this could never kill people.” By 1988, they had shown the disease was caused by feeding slaughterhouse waste from cattle back to cattle, amplifying and spreading it. Hundreds of thousands of cattle were infected. They began shutting down that practice, but they didn’t take it seriously and do what they had to do, which we’ve still not done, until ’96, and even in 2000, they were still feeding cattle blood to cattle in Britain. But finally shutting that down has controlled the problem, and the EU nations have almost all had mad cow disease because in the early ’90s, when Britain was shutting down the feeding practice, they were exporting the feed, and it spread it worldwide.
But, again, remember here in the U.S., we’re still feeding billions of pounds of slaughterhouse waste back to cattle. I was looking at some statistics and the size of the slaughter industry in this nation is unfathomable. Imagine that half of every slaughtered animal is a waste product. These big companies like Tyson and Cargill are benefiting here in two ways: Rather than disposing of a waste product safely, they’re turning it into a feed resource by feeding it back to their livestock.
In 2004, in the United States, 33 million cattle, 103 million hogs, 252 million turkeys and 8.8 billion chickens were slaughtered, and half of all that was the waste that was fed back to livestock. That’s what amplifies and spreads mad cow disease.
It wasn’t until March 20, 1996 that Britain announced people were dying. A month later, Oprah did her show and Howard Lyman, Mad Cowboy author and my good friend, was on and said we’re feeding cattle to cattle in this country and if we don’t stop, we’re going to end up with mad cow disease. They were sued by the cattle industry and that just shut up media coverage of the issue in this country.
Sheldon Rampton and I were writing Mad Cow USA then, and it came out in the fall of ’97. We didn’t know how many people were going to die from this disease. Millions of people in Britain were exposed. If there’s any good news here, it’s that, so far, only 160 people are confirmed dead. This is one reason why the livestock industry just doesn’t take this seriously. They say, hey, 5,000 people a year in the United States are killed from unsafe food, what’s 160 dead people worldwide? Here’s the problem: This disease incubates invisibly in people. It can be decades before it emerges. It’s 100 percent fatal. There’s no cure. Cooking doesn’t kill it. It’s also, we now know, spread through the blood supply.
Last year, Britain announced that two people dead of human mad cow disease in Britain most likely got it from blood products, human blood products they received from people infected with the disease, even though Britain stopped using its own human blood back in ’97. They didn’t stop soon enough.
Surgical instruments have spread this disease person to person, and when they’re contaminated, there’s no way to disinfect them. Autoclaving doesn’t kill it. We’re beginning to see the secondary infections of this.
The thing to remember here is that we now know we’ve had mad cow disease in the United States for a decade. We’re beginning to see mysterious cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people in the United States, young people, and we’re continuing to do the feeding practices that we’ve known since 1988 amplify and spread the disease. The only way the big meat industry is able to continue this is because they have the Bush administration in the palm of their hand, and the media is not reporting on the issue.
In the months ahead, probably the best place to go for information on this will be the web site of the Organics Consumers Association. Probably the best public interest science information will be coming from Dr. Michael Hansen at Consumers Union. It’s very important that vegetarians and vegans pay attention to this issue because vegetarians have died of mad cow disease, and because there are some 600 biological medicines made from animals that could transmit the disease, and now that we see the disease is infecting the blood supply in Britain, we’ve got to be really concerned that a similar situation may be happening here. From a personal standpoint, if you’re going to eat meat, eat certified organic, and, again, it’s really the simple rule of thumb, you may not be a vegetarian, but the animals you eat should be.
