July 12, 2002
By John Stauber

Mad Cows, Mad Deer and Mad People

    Most Americans never heard of British mad cow disease until the shocking
news of March 20, 1996, when the British government was forced to admit they
had been wrong for a decade.   The mysterious and always fatal dementia
disease that had felled hundreds of thousands of cows was now killing
people, especially younger Brits who are dying of the devastating illness
apparently from eating contaminated beef.  Today, six years later, the
growing British death toll is at about 130 confirmed dead or dying from new
variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the name given to human mad cow
disease.  Unfortunately, British deaths are doubling every three years  now,
and thousands who ate British beef a decade ago might die in the decades
ahead because of vCJD's long and invisible latency period during which
people appear healthy until dementia begins and they die a horrible death as
holes and plaque destroy the brain.
    Britain no longer uses its own human blood plasma  because lab tests
demonstrate that the infectious prion (pree' on) agent that causes mad cow
disease is spread by blood, and CJD victims have been blood donors.  The
British government realized fifteen years ago that mad cow disease resulted
from the widespread practice of taking slaughterhouse waste, rendering it
through cooking, and then feeding it back to livestock as mineral, fat and
protein supplements.  Britain began banning the practice of feeding
mammalian protein to mammals, but it took years to do so properly and in the
meantime Britain exported contaminated feed so that now countries across the
globe from France to Israel to Japan are seeing cases of British mad cow
disease, and fearing their own human deaths.
    The US government insists that there is no British mad cow disease here,
but since the US refuses to do as other countries have done and extensively
test cattle, this claim rings hollow.  We do know that we have other strains
of mad cow-type disease in the US, including scrapie in sheep, TME in mink,
and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in wild and farmed deer and elk.  Could
these strains of TSE move into people, say, through infected venison
sausage?  No one knows for sure, but the best available new evidence
indicates that yes, CWD could infect people.   A National Institutes of
Health laboratory study has shown that CWD, like British mad cow disease,
can convert normal human prions into infected prions.  Indeed we might have
already seen the first human deaths from mad deer disease.  Three years ago
two young Western hunters, Doug McEwen and Jay Whitlock, came down with
so-called classic or sporadic CJD in their late twenties and died.   In
1996 Kevin Boss, a Minnesotan who hunted there and in western Wisconsin,
died of CJD at age forty-one.  Mary Reilly of Waupaca died not long ago of
CJD at age forty-three.  These are a handful of young CJD deaths, but there
are more and they seem to be increasing.  No one knows what CWD or other US
strains of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) would look like in
humans, but as in Britain they would possibly first appear as increasing
cases of classic CJD in people under fifty years of age.
    Unfortunately, both the federal and state governments are badly bungling
this issue and falsely reassuring people that what happened in Britain could
never happen here.  The Centers for Disease Control should have made all
cases of human CJD reportable to monitor the true number, but in 1999
refused to do so.  The Food and Drug Administration and the United States
Department of Agriculture realized a decade ago that feeding rendered
slaughterhouse waste to livestock should be completely banned, but to
appease the meat industry has not done so.  Instead, five years ago the FDA
passed a poorly enforced regulation that all meat and bone meal from
ruminant animals (cattle, sheep, deer) should be labeled not to be fed to
other ruminants.  However, the blood from ruminants is exempt, and in
Wisconsin and other states calves are fed raw cattle blood plasma as a
protein source in milk replacer and calf starter.  Cattle  meat and bone and
blood meal is fed to pigs, which are fed to cattle, by the billions of
pounds a year.  Deer, elk and sheep known to be infected with mad cow-type
disease can legally be rendered and fed to pigs, and pigs are fed to pigs.
Deer and elk on game farms and in the wild are fed supplemental fat, protein
and minerals even to this day.  In other words, the US is widely engaging in
practices almost guaranteed to spread TSE disease in the US.
    In 1995 alone, more than 26,000 road killed deer were picked up off
Wisconsin roadways and rendered into meat and bone meal used for animal
feed.  It¹s possible CWD has already been spread to deer, cattle and other
livestock via such feeding practices.
    In April 1998, Tommy Thompson was governor and Scott McCallum lieutenant
governor when the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture was warned that elk
from CWD infected western herds were coming into the state.  Almost nothing
was done.  Later that year a recommendation  that all imports of live deer
and elk be stopped to prevent CWD from entering the state was rejected, and
instead a state CWD advisory committee was quietly set up and stacked with
the owners of deer and elk farms.
    Now that CWD has been found in western Wisconsin, the state has
announced there will not be any extensive testing for CWD outside of the 361
square mile Eradication Zone until November, conveniently after the
gubernatorial election, a decision that smells of political cover-up.  Is
the Eradication Zone the only place in the state with CWD?  That seems very
unlikely since Wisconsin has over 900 deer and elk farms and such game farms
are suspected of spreading the disease.  Probably Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois
and Michigan already have CWD, but since testing is so minimal or
non-existent and infected deer appear healthy during most of their lives,
CWD has not yet been detected.
    Some entrepreneurs see a market selling CWD tests to hunters who could
then determine whether their deer has CWD. However, the US Department of
Agriculture has recently refused to help certify such tests before the Fall
2002 gun season.  One would-be test developer, Butch Johnson of Hayward,
accuses the feds of fearing that testing deer would lead to testing
livestock and the possible discovery of BSE or CWD or other TSEs,  a finding
that could devastate US beef sales.  He has a good point.
    Indeed, it's plausible that CWD could turn out to be worse that British
mad cow disease.  Mad cow disease can only be transmitted with difficulty
from one cow to another, and once  the practice of feeding rendered
mammalian proteins to cows ended in England, their epidemic went into
decline. Chronic wasting disease,  by contrast, appears to spread
comparatively easily from deer to deer, possibly through casual contact. If
it is transmissible to cattle or other livestock, CWD could become the
starting-point for an epidemic of mad cow disease -- or mad pig disease, for
that matter --  which would devastate agriculture and raise new human health
fears.   And what if CWD transmits to humans, where it spreads as easily
through casual contact as it spreads in deer?
    Venison sausage and hamburger is especially a concern, because it
contains the least desirable parts of many deer. In England, hamburger and
sausage were the meats most suspected in spreading mad cow disease to
people. One of the reasons for this is that ground-up meats pool tissues
from more than one animal, multiplying the risk of infection. If your
venison sausage contains parts of 50 deer, only one of those deer has to
have had CWD for the meat to be contaminated.
    What will it take to wake up the bureaucrats in Washington and Madison
and make them follow the example of Britain and ban all feeding of mammalian
protein to livestock?   That is a political question, and like all political
questions it  depends upon the amount of pressure that well informed
citizens can bring to bear upon the officials who are allowing the threat of
US mad cow-type diseases to fester and grow.

John Stauber, co-author, Mad Cow USA
www.prwatch.org

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