Mad Cow Disease. Been in the news a lot lately. At first I didn't care, because I don't eat meat. I've thought about this a lot more lately though and now it's starting to freak me out. I haven't been a veggie long enough to not worry about it.
First off, let's get the facts straight. There's a lot of postulating about what exactly causes the wasting disease known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE (aka Mad Cow's Disease). Nobody 100% agrees on what it is, but there are widely accepted and popular theories. The most popular one being that Mad Cow's disease is caused by a mutated protein known as a prion.
A prion is an abnormal PrP protein. These can arise spontaneously through mutation, or can be introduced into the body. They infect the nervous tissue and slowly destroy nerve cells. Unlike bacteria and virii, they can not be destroyed. What makes them so malicious is that every normal PrP protein they come into contact with will transform itself to match the abnormal one for some reason. And normally, a cell can dispose of PrP proteins. Nerve cells naturally make and destroy PrP protein molecules. However, they do not destroy prions. This causes them to build up, eventually killing the cell and releasing the prions to destroy other cells. It's quite a nasty chain reaction that happens over a long period of time.
Prions from bovine nervous tissue can infect human nervous tissue just as easily. And because a prion is a protein, it can't be destroyed by cooking or burning. I'm no expert, but from what I understand, proteins can only be destroyed or altered through chemical interaction. It only infects the nervous tissue and marrow of an organism. It also can only be tested post-humously, i.e. after the cow has been killed and their brain is dissected. These factors alone make this disease much worse than a simple virus or bacterial infection. When you weigh into account the horrible job that the international meat industry (especially the US) is doing with regards to health and safety you've got a much bigger nightmare.
Cattle slaughter in the US is generally carried out the same in all slaughter houses, except Kosher ones, which we'll get into later. A cow is led onto the killing floor on a conveyor, hung up by it's hind legs, electro-shocked until unconsciousness and killed with a steel bolt through it's head. Don't get confused, the electro-shock is so the workers don't get hurt by a wildly thrashing cow. There's nothing humane about it. The steel bolt is effective and efficient enough to be used on cow after cow. This bolt is not cleaned. It is generally assumed that if a cow has made it this far on the line, it's not a downer (i'll explain later) and is healthy enough for slaughter.
This pneumatic bolt pierces the brain of the cow. The part of the nervous system most infected with Prions. More often than not, a cows autonomic nervous system remains intact enough to allow it's heart to continue beating for a few seconds. This is long enough to spread tissue from the obscenely damaged brain of the cow throughout the bloodstream. Now if the cow is badly infected, prions will be in most of the nerves and bone marrow all through out the body. When the cow is "cleaned" it is very very easy for spinal fluid and marrow to come into contact with the meat. This is not considered to be a problem because the fluids and substances that packers want to avoid are the bile, feces and acid. Even some of those fluids still make their way into your sausage. Luckily you can cook those nasties out unlike prions.
Kosher houses do not use the bolt system, instead they slice the cows jugular veins and let it bleed to death. Very messy. They are also a little more careful about how the cow is cleaned as some types of kosher requires special handling. I am no expert, and was a little confused by the nice Jewish gentleman who explained this to me once. No beef is safe beef, but Kosher is the safest apparently.
The reason that slaughter houses (and the FDA) think that this practice is okay is because of the very selective and highly accurate (sarcasm here folks) method of screening out sick cows, called downers. The only guideline in classifying a cow as a downer is if it is too sick to stand up. Some houses are more leniant than others. To not be able to stand up from BSE, a cow must have a very advanced case of it. There is currently a ban on using downer cattle in food for human (only, not pets) consumption, but it is very new and was stronly opposed by the beef industry and their good friend George Bush. If a cow is REAL sick, they might consider killing it and testing it for BSE. As it stands, the US only tests 0.06% of it's slaughtered cattle for BSE. That's compared to 70% in the EU, and 100% in Japan. It is not only likely that BSE has been fed to unwitting US citizens, but I can almost guarantee it.
And oh my God, it doesn't even stop there! If you thought improper testing and handling procedures were enough, you didn't consider the feed issue. A cow, by nature, is a herbivore. It likes to eat plants, especially grass. Well, there's just not enough grass in Texas for 35 million cattle. Along with surplus corn and potatoes, cows are fed the ground up remains of their brethren, freshly killed in the slaughter house. There is currently a "ban" on this practice by the FDA. But this ban is also fairly new (1997) and is essentially nothing more than a label law that requires manufacturers to label their waste as "not suitable to feed to ruminants". It can still be put in pet food, as long as it's labeled as such. The USDA and FDA have no good records on compliance and it's widely assumed that a lot of slaughter houses still do this.
The USDA only tested 20,000 heads of cattle for BSE last year. They caught one case. 35 million cattle were slaughtered last year. Even if only one in 20,000 cattle have BSE, that is still 1750 cows. At 500 pounds of meat per cow, that's 875000 pounds of potentially infected meat floating around. 3.5 million quarter pound hamburgers.
If you've eaten beef in the past 6 years, you have every reason to be nervous. That's a lot of fucking tainted meat.
And because of the pervasiveness of this malformed protein, everyone is at risk. Proteins don't die. They'll go on forever long after we're gone and the sun is burnt out. Incinerating the meat will only circulate it in the air. Burying it won't help either. After the cow has long since decomposed, the prions will remain in the soil. And forget about disposal, what about improper food handling? Hey thanks for cleaning that knife after making that roast beef sandwich, Mr. Deli-man.
I can't wait to go senile.
-slacker
