Chicago Life Magazine, August 17, 2003 Issue

    Why isn't the F.D.A. adopting the same rules as the European Union to
protect Americans from Mad Cow Disease?
    Since 1996, Chicago Life readers have been learning about a very serious
human and animal health issue, Mad Cow disease spurned by most media. The 
facts surrounding this issue are being heavily spun by government agencies and 
representatives of the multi-billion dollar livestock industry. Most Americans 
probably think that the United States has been doing everything it can to prevent 
Mad Cow disease from emerging here, but that is not the case, according to 
John Stauber, co-author of Mad Cow U.S.A.
     Now something that supposedly could never happen in North America has
occurred-on May 20, a single cow in the Canadian province of Alberta was
announced to have Mad Cow disease. The U.S. immediately banned all shipments
of Canadian cattle, beef and rendered animal feed from entering the U.S. As
we go to press, Canada is lobbying hard to get this ban lifted because it
has already cost the country's beef industry hundreds of millions of
dollars. But as Stauber points out in this exclusive interview, this issue
will not go away because the dangerous animal cannibalism feeding methods
that spread Mad Cow disease remain widespread in both the U.S. and Canada.
    John Stauber is a life-long consumer and public interest writer who has
co-authored four books: Toxic Sludge is Good For You, Mad Cow U.S.A., Trust
Us, We're Experts!, and his latest, Weapons of Mass Deception.  In 1993 he
founded the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin. He and his
co-author and colleague Sheldon Rampton edit the Center's quarterly PR Watch
(www.prwatch.org) and specialize in investigative reporting on corporate and
government propaganda. Their 1997 book Mad Cow U.S.A. predicted the likely
emergence of the disease in North America, and since BSE's discovery in
Canada, he has been featured in USA Today and on Canadian television and
radio.
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Chicago Life: How does the recent discovery of Mad Cow disease in Canada
affect the U.S.? Is this a one-in-a-million case or just one among many?

Stauber: This is not a one-in-a-million case of sporadic disease. British
scientists have definitely confirmed this case as bovine spongiform
encephalopathy, BSE, or Mad Cow disease. The Alberta cow was infected with
Mad Cow disease that it almost certainly picked up from eating rendered
animal byproduct--slaughter-house waste--fed to it as protein, fat or
mineral supplement. How many more animals might be infected, and whether the
infected feed came from Canada, the U.S. or Mexico, we simply do not know
and may never know. After all, the infected feed was probably consumed by
this cow and others more than three years ago. This cow was rendered into
animal feed, and so were the others that ate the feed that infected this
cow.
    It is important to realize that this is not a Canadian problem, it is a
North American problem. This cow might just as well have come from Juarez,
Mexico, or from Sonoma, Calif., because cattle, cattle feed, and meat
products flow freely across the borders of the three NAFTA nations. In all
three countries, unlike Britain and Europe, cattle are still fed rendered
byproduct documented in Mad Cow U.S.A., the U.S. government and livestock industry
manipulated and mislead reporters and the public in 1997 when they claimed
to have ended the practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste to livestock. The
practice has never even slowed down, and today billions of pounds of blood,
fat, meat, bone meal and such are legally fed back to livestock. Until that
practice is completely banned, the Mad Cow problem in North America will
likely spread and worsen, although rather invisibly.

Chicago Life: Can the U.S. still consider itself BSE-free when more than
three quarters of Canadian cattle exports (about one billion pounds of beef)
end up in our country each year?

Stauber: The U.S. livestock industry desperately wants us to believe that
Mad Cow disease can't happen here, but that's nonsense. With the disease now
in Canada, it could be in the U.S. and in Mexico too. As long as we continue
to feed cows to cows, weaning calves as we do on milk formula containing
cattle blood protein, the level of infection can spread and grow. There are
about 96 million cattle in the U.S., and last year less than 20,000 were
tested for mad cow disease. Contrast that with Britain and Europe where 10
million out of 40 million slaughtered for human consumption were tested
before eaten. The U.S. livestock industry is terrified of testing millions
of animals, because testing would likely find the disease.

Chicago Life: Can you talk about the U.S. practice of rendering. How has the
practice changed since 1996? Are we any safer?

Stauber: About half of every animal slaughtered is unfit for human
consumption. This slaughter-house waste pets, restaurant cooking fats material, is 
sent to rendering plants--giant factories that take all this offal and biological waste 
and cook it. Since the 1970s, a major product of rendering has been supplemental 
fat, protein and minerals that are fed back to livestock to promote bigger, faster 
growth. In 1988, just a few years after the first appearance of Mad Cow disease 
in Britain, scientists realized that it was this rendered byproduct that was amplifying and
spreading BSE. BSE is a prion (pronounced PREE-on) disease caused by an
infectious protein, which can survive rendering, cooking and even
irradiation. Britain began banning the practice of feeding rendered
byproduct to its livestock in the late 1980s, but for years the banned
British feed was exported and spread around the world so that any country
might develop Mad Cow disease. Since we still feed livestock back to
livestock, it can further amplify and spread.
    In 1997, under pressure from activists such as Oprah's guest Howard
Lyman and Michael Hansen of Consumers Union, the Food and Drug
Administration announced that the U.S. would ban the feeding of
slaughterhouse waste to livestock. However, the actual regulations were
deceptive. Most of the news media merely repeated the phony assurances of
government and industry that the practice was banned. In reality, it was
just tweaked a bit. The FDA said that meat and bone meal from ruminant
animals--cows, sheep, deer, elk--should be labeled do not feed to
ruminants. However, blood and fat from ruminants were exempted, and since
1997, the weaning of calves on cattle blood protein used in milk formula has
really taken off. The meat and bone meal from cattle is legally fed to pigs,
pets and poultry. Those animals are fed back to themselves and to cattle. In
fact, sheep and deer known to be infected with diseases similar to Mad Cow
disease can even be rendered and fed to pigs, pets and poultry, which are
then fed to cattle.

Chicago Life: What are some immediate actions that the meat industry could
take to avoid an outbreak of Mad Cow disease in the U.S. cattle population?

Stauber: What the U.S., Canada and Mexico must do is very simple. These
NAFTA nations must put in place the same regulations that have succeeded in
preventing additional cases of Mad Cow disease in Britain and Europe. This
would mean completely banning the practice of feeding any slaughterhouse
waste back to livestock, and testing every animal before it is eaten.
Government and industry know what to do, but they refuse to do it because
feeding this waste back to livestock is so lucrative and helps the U.S.
produce cheap meat and milk. So instead of doing the right thing, government
and industry have permitted gaps in the defenses against this disease to
appease industry.

Chicago Life: Can you talk about chronic wasting disease (CWD)? Are the
recent increases of CWD in the deer and elk populations in Wisconsin and
Illinois related to Mad Cow?
Stauber: Chronic wasting disease, or mad deer disease, is in the same family
of diseases as Mad Cow and sheep scrapie. For the past decade, CWD has been
spread across North America by the explosive growth of deer and elk farming.
Both in the wild and on game farms, deer have been fed rendered byproducts
to grow big antlers, and there is evidence that this practice has been a
factor in the disease. In addition, CWD seems to spread deer to deer, like a
cold or the flu. Whether or not CWD can infect people and other livestock is
unknown, but there is some evidence that it can. And we seem to be seeing a
small Disease, the human equivalent of Mad Cow and chronic wasting disease. Is
U.S. CWD or Mad Cow already spreading into hunters or beef eaters? We don't
know, and it could take years to find out.

Chicago Life: Can you explain the idea of a species barrier and how Mad Cow
can be passed on to people?

Stauber: The most dangerous form of byproduct-feeding is within a species.
Once Mad Cow disease spread rapidly via feeding cows to cows. This fact has 
been known for 15 years, yet in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, cattle blood 
and fat is still fed back to cattle. So far, the number of people in Britain who 
have died from the human version of Mad Cow disease, called new variant CJD 
(nvCJD), is less than 200, but the death toll is rising and will continue to rise for
years because of the long invisible latency period that can last decades. No
cure exists for the disease; it is always fatal.
    Britain no longer uses its own human blood plasma for transfusions
because people who have died from nvCJD have given blood, and blood can
transmit such diseases in laboratory tests. We'll have to wait years before
we know exactly how many people will die from eating Mad Cow parts, or
possibly from picking up nvCJD from contaminated blood or surgical
instruments. By the way, autoclaving does not destroy infectious prions on
surgical instruments. Any surgical or autopsy instruments used on people
with CJD must be destroyed.

Chicago Life: According to the CDC, Alzheimer's Disease is now the 8th
leading cause of death in the U.S., affecting as many as 4 million
Americans. What are the chances that some of these deaths are misdiagnosed
cases of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD)?
Stauber: In Mad Cow U.S.A. we cite a study showing that as many as 25
percent of the human dementia diagnoses were found to be inaccurate when the
victim was properly examined after death. A dementia disease might look like
Alzheimer's and be diagnosed as such, but prove to be CJD or another
dementia under autopsy. Almost no one who dies of dementia disease is
properly autopsied; there is a strong aversion to performing autopsies on
persons suspected of having CJD to report CJD cases, we do not know exactly 
how many CJD cases might be in the U.S. every year, and whether or not they 
are increasing.
    Britain keeps careful track of all CJD deaths, and we should too. We
should be especially concerned if we see an increase in CJD that is
non-familial in anyone 50 or younger, and it seems to me that we are seeing
an unusual number of such cases.

Chicago Life: The American meat industry seems reluctant to deal with this
issue. Britain and other countries have changed many practices to ensure the
safety of their meat. Why does the U.S. seem so resistant to acknowledge Mad
Cow as a potentially devastating public health issue?

Stauber: The American meat industry is dominated by executives and lobbyists
who use their advertising clout to bully and manipulate the media their political 
contributions to influence the USDA and F.D.A.
    The typical farmer and livestock producer isn't calling the shots inside
his or her industry Industry Association, the American Meat Institute and the National
Cattleman's Beef Association, and corporations like Cargill and Archer
Daniels Midland. 
    Unfortunately, it may take international financial  pressure to affect
change in F.D.A rules. For example, if a major importer of U.S. beef the nation of 
Japan adopted the same Mad Cow protections that are in Britain and the EU
countries, that would get the attention of the industry. If more and more
people start dying of mysterious cases of CJD, that might get attention. But
with the government refusing to mandate the reporting of CJD, it could take
a long time for increased deaths to be noticed.

Chicago Life: How can Americans avoid Mad Cow? Who do we contact to change
meat production practices?
Stauber: Look for meat and meat products that are certified organic or
personally certified by the producer to have been raised without the use of
rendered byproducts, including meat, bonemeal, fat and blood. Be prepared to
pay more for meat raised without these byproducts, and your selections will
be diminished, because at the moment, almost all meat comes from animals
that were pumped up on drugs such as hormones and antibiotics, and fed
slaughterhouse waste.
    Call senators and congresspeople, and write letters to the editor,
demanding that the identical Mad Cow protections working in Europe be put in
place in the United States. And, of course, there is always the option of
going vegetarian. But even vegetarianism isn't 100 percent protection if
prion diseases were to be spreading in U.S. livestock and rendered products.
For instance, hundreds of prescription drugs are made from animals, and if
Mad Cow-type diseases were infecting cattle and pigs in the U.S. through
byproduct feeding, those drugs would also be a theoretical source of human
infection. The sooner we act, the better, and we are already much too late.
Mad Cow disease is now in North America
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Other Resources 

Websites:
    For the sake of public education, Mad Cow U.S.A. is available free
online in its entirety at: www.prwatch.org/books/madcow.html
    Dr. Michael Greger of the Organic Consumers Association updates
information on Mad Cow at: www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm
    Articles on chronic wasting disease in deer and elk can be found at:
www.maddeer.org/

Books:
    Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Sheldon Rampton & John
Stauber. Common Courage Press, 1997
    The Pathological Protein: Mad Cow, Chronic Wasting, and Other Deadly
Prion Diseases. Philip Yam. Copernicus Books, 2003