Mad Cow Facts

By Cathy Bussewitz
Forbes.com
July 20, 2007

Excerpt…

TOKYO - As U.S. baseball strikeout champion, Nolan Ryan used to hurl a lot of cowhide. In Japan on Friday, he pitched a different bovine product: U.S. beef.

The retired Hall of Famer - and now Texas cattle rancher and beef promoter - visited Tokyo to assure Japanese consumers and regulators that U.S. beef is safe and urged them to expand their imports.

“I believe our product is totally safe,” Ryan said, adding the beef he exports to Japan is the “same quality as that which I serve in my house.”

Japan banned American beef imports in 2003 for two years after the first case of mad cow disease - or bovine spongiform encephalopathy - was found in the U.S.

Now, Japan allows only imports of U.S. beef from cattle 20 months or younger, and Washington is pushing Tokyo to open its doors to meat from cows up to 30 months old, arguing that they are free of disease….

Full article at Forbes.com.

Only 3 vCJD cases in the U.S. were confirmed; all had links to U.K. beef.

Fort Wayne News Sentinel
Jennifer L. Boen
June 21, 2007

Excerpt…

The news that since January four northeast Indiana residents are suspected to have died from a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease often mistaken for “mad-cow disease” should not overly concern residents, public health officials say.

The cluster of suspected cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD, is not unusual, they say, and similar occurrences have been recorded in other states, including New Jersey and Wisconsin.

The disease cannot be transmitted through direct human-to-human contact.

Often, what is thought to be CJD turns out to be something else altogether, said Ryan Maddox, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who tracks CJD. Two years ago nine suspected cases were reported in Idaho, but after further investigation, several deaths proved to be from other causes.

“What starts out as a high number drops dramatically after an investigation is completed,” said Maddox, who is involved in the local investigation.

It will be several more weeks before autopsies are completed on two of the four suspected local cases; the other two were not autopsied.

Findings will be forwarded to the CDC, said John Silcox, spokesman for the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health. The CDC’s investigation could take several more months. Between 1985 and 2005, the most recent year data is available, Allen County had five confirmed CJD deaths.

When people hear of CJD, they often jump to the conclusion it is “mad cow disease,” which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. The steer or cow gets infected from eating contaminated bone meal and other ground-up parts, usually neurological tissue, of BSE-infected animals.

If humans eat meat from a BSE-infected animal, they may develop variant CJD or vCJD, but only three U.S. cases of vCJD have been confirmed.

“Two had very strong ties to the United Kingdom, and in the third case, the person grew up in Saudi Arabia and was likely exposed to British meat,” Maddox said. No cases of vCJD have been recorded in which the deceased did not have ties to a country where BSE had occurred or was occurring.

Dr. Deborah McMahan, Allen County commissioner of health, said she has talked to the families of the four northeast Indiana residents suspected to have died from CJD. None traveled to or had ties to an at-risk country, she said.

The UK reported 147 human cases of vCJD between 1994 and August 2004, comprising about 98 percent of all cases known in the world during that period. When the UK changed its animal-feed requirements, cases there consistently dropped, although France has reported vCJD cases from time to time, Maddox said.

In total, about 200 known cases of vCJD have been recorded worldwide, Maddox said.
About 85 percent of all CJD cases, or one per 1 million people, are classified as classic or sporadic CJD. Another 5 percent to 15 percent of CJD cases can be attributed to inherited mutations of the prion protein gene. CJD is called a prion disease because a normal brain protein spontaneously changes into an infectious abnormal form called a prion. Two inherited forms of CJD include Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome and fatal familial insomnia.
“Prion diseases are not a virus, not bacteria, which distinguishes these diseases from pretty much everything else out there,” Maddox said. “There isn’t as much known about them.”

A few vCJD cases in other countries have occurred when a person received a transplant of neurological tissue such as a retina from an infected person. In 2003, the cause of death in a 62-year-old UK man with vCJD was traced back to a transfusion of vCJD-contaminated blood. Since then, the British government and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have established deferral policies for donors who have traveled to high-risk countries.

Half of CJD victims die within six months of the onset of symptoms; 80 percent are dead within a year, Maddox said. In vCJD, exposure to the disease likely occurs many years, even decades, prior to the onset of symptoms. The symptoms with vCJD last, on average, twice as long before death.

A key difference between vCJD and sporadic CJD is the age of death. For vCJD victims, the average age is 28, compared to 68 in CJD. One of the local deaths was a man in his 70s and the other a 53-year-old man. Health officials have not released the ages of the other two.
Although CJD and/or vCJD can be diagnosed only through an autopsy, other tests can help classify a probable case of either. The patterns seen on an electroencephalogram – a test of the brain’s electrical functions – are different when CJD and vCJD are present. A cerebral spinal fluid test has proved effective in confirming CJD, but the test carries risks, Maddox said.

In 43 states, local health officials must report CJD deaths to state officials, but Indiana is not among them. McMahan has asked state officials to put CJD on the list of mandatory reportable diseases, which includes meningitis, measles and salmonella….

Full article at Fort Wayne News Sentinel.

The New York Times
Nina Planck
May 21, 2007

This is an excerpt from a great article on the long-term effects of veganism published in The New York Times.

WHEN Crown Shakur died of starvation, he was 6 weeks old and weighed 3.5 pounds. His vegan parents, who fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice, were convicted in Atlanta recently of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty.

This particular calamity — at least the third such conviction of vegan parents in four years — may be largely due to ignorance. But it should prompt frank discussion about nutrition.
I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

Indigenous cuisines offer clues about what humans, naturally omnivorous, need to survive, reproduce and grow: traditional vegetarian diets, as in India, invariably include dairy and eggs for complete protein, essential fats and vitamins. There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run.

Protein deficiency is one danger of a vegan diet for babies. Nutritionists used to speak of proteins as “first class” (from meat, fish, eggs and milk) and “second class” (from plants), but today this is considered denigrating to vegetarians.

The fact remains, though, that humans prefer animal proteins and fats to cereals and tubers, because they contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio. This is not true of plant proteins, which are inferior in quantity and quality — even soy.
A vegan diet may lack vitamin B12, found only in animal foods; usable vitamins A and D, found in meat, fish, eggs and butter; and necessary minerals like calcium and zinc. When babies are deprived of all these nutrients, they will suffer from retarded growth, rickets and nerve damage.

Responsible vegan parents know that breast milk is ideal. It contains many necessary components, including cholesterol (which babies use to make nerve cells) and countless immune and growth factors. When breastfeeding isn’t possible, soy milk and fruit juice, even in seemingly sufficient quantities, are not safe substitutes for a quality infant formula.

Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development.

A vegan diet is equally dangerous for weaned babies and toddlers, who need plenty of protein and calcium. Too often, vegans turn to soy, which actually inhibits growth and reduces absorption of protein and minerals. That’s why health officials in Britain, Canada and other countries express caution about soy for babies. (Not here, though — perhaps because our farm policy is so soy-friendly.)…

Nina Planck is the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why.”

Full article at The New York Times.

Center for Consumer Freedom
May 9, 2007

Excerpt…

Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) president Wayne Pacelle. Yesterday’s animal-welfare hearing in a U.S. House Agriculture subcommittee was anything but the love-fest he may have expected. First of all, we were there — testifying on the same panel, telling members of Congress and the media about HSUS’s hidden agenda. Then an immigrant foie gras farmer stole the show with his heart-rending account of being pushed around by animal-rights extremists. Finally, a Virginia Congressman declared in front of a packed hearing room that a key part of Pacelle’s own testimony was flatly “false.” Not a good day on the Hill for a man who says his group “has committed itself to political activity as never before.“We made the most of our opportunity to address the nation’s lawmakers, advising: “When the topic of discussion is how to make livestock farming better, the complaints of radical vegans should be seen for what they are: an attempt to dismantle animal agriculture, not improve it … Encouraging the input of people who want to crush you is a strange way of seeking sensible reform.” 

Our hats are off to Salvadoran duck farmer Guillermo Gonzales, who told Congress that animal activists “trespass, damage our property, steal our animals, and sometimes do much worse.” HSUS and other groups, he said, are trying “to drive us off our land and out of business … Acting in the name of ‘animal welfare,’ some seem to have forgotten the welfare of human farmers.”

Our research director, testifying right after Mr. Gonzales, added: “I’ve never tasted foie gras. But who are these people to decide I shouldn’t have the chance to try it? When zealots ban books because of their politics, millions of people rise up. Why isn’t banning food for political reasons viewed the same way?”

Among the things we pointed out was the habit of some groups, HSUS included, of distorting facts in order to turn the public away from eating meat. We noted, for instance, that HSUS’s website (like that of the PETA-connected Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) overstates the fat content of chicken — a big vegetarian no-no — by more than 500 percent (they say it’s 23 percent; the real number, 5 grams out of a 140-gram portion, is less than 4 percent).

But Pacelle himself provided an even better example of the fine line between animal-rights fact and fiction. Talking about mad cow disease, Pacelle said that the meat from a diseased cow identified in 2003 “went on the markets and consumers in various states” — claiming that it had actually entered the U.S. food supply. An alert Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) pounced, assuring the hearing room that this testimony was simply “false.”…

Full article at Center for Consumer Freedom.

FoxNews.com
By Steven Milloy
March 29 , 2007

Excerpt…

Consumers were frightened this week by media reports about a new study claiming to link mothers’ consumption of beef with reduced sperm counts in their sons ( “Sperm Count Low if Mom Ate Beef, Study Finds” ). But the study amounts to nothing more than a transparent effort to resurrect an already debunked 1990s-era health scare with appalling science and sensational headlines.

From “Mom’s beef puts son’s sperm count at stake” (Los Angeles Times) to “Meaty momma’s boys lose” (Edmonton Sun, Canada) to “Sunday roasts could have hit male fertility” (Daily Mail, UK), gullible media around the world once again fell for science-by-press-release committed by longtime environmental activist-researchers.

The supposed findings of the study were that “men whose mothers had eaten more than seven beef meals a week had a sperm concentration that was over 24 percent lower than in men whose mothers ate less beef “and that three times more sons of high-beef consumers had a sperm concentration that would be classified as sub-fertile, according to World Health Organization standards, in comparison to men whose mothers ate less beef.”

But for anyone who makes the effort to look past the press releases touting these findings and to examine the study that supposedly backs them up, these findings fall apart as easily as slow-cooked pot roast.

First, the researchers approached the question of what caused the reduced sperm counts exactly backwards. Rather than investigating all possible causes and eliminating those for which there are no supporting evidence, the researchers, according to their own admission, set out to link maternal beef consumption with fertility problems while ignoring other possible causes.

There are myriad causes of infertility. Focusing on a novel one that might make for good headlines — while overlooking established, but less newsworthy, causes — simply does not constitute bona fide scientific investigation.

Then, of course, none of the men studied seemed to have fertility problems in the first place. In fact, the men had all fathered children. But they were nonetheless targeted by the researchers because “[their] rate of consulting a doctor in the past for possible infertility was significantly higher.”

Simply consulting a fertility specialist, however, does not necessarily indicate that a man has fertility problems.

The researchers’ hypothesis is not that beef itself causes infertility, but rather that the hormone-like medicines and chemicals to which cattle may be exposed are at fault. But even if it were true, for the sake of argument, that hormone-like chemicals were linked with male infertility, the researchers would still be obligated to rule out other potential exposures to these chemicals, such as through other foods or occupational exposures in both the mothers and sons, before blaming beef consumption by mothers.

But the study gets worse.

Although the researchers tout a study size of 387 subjects, only 51 of the sons had mothers who allegedly ate beef more than seven times per week when they were pregnant. So the researchers drew an awfully sweeping conclusion from a minuscule study population.

Moreover, the data on mothers’ beef consumption during 1949 to 1983 were collected by surveying the mothers during 1999 to 2005, as long as 50 years after they were pregnant.

Such self-reported dietary data were not verified by the researchers and are subject to phenomena known in scientific circles as “recall bias” (memory-impaired responses) or “response bias” (intentionally incorrect responses to, say, avoid embarrassing answers). No one really knows what or how much these women actually ate.

It’s also not necessarily true that more frequent beef consumption is greater beef consumption. Someone who consumes four 8-ounce portions of meat per week consumes 14 percent more beef than someone who consumes a 4-ounce portion every day — yet, in this study, the everyday-meat eater is assumed to be the greater consumer of beef.

Although the researchers say in their media release, “We don’t have enough information yet to make any recommendations, and this is not what this study was designed to do,” they then proceed to make dietary recommendations including eating only organic beef and generally reducing beef consumption. This study is about causing alarm, not about sound scientific research.

So just who are these researchers and what’s their real beef?…

Full article at FoxNews.com.