Things you must know about mad cow disease

Mad cow disease

Mass-diseases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) is caused by the artificial spreading of retroviral particles bred in Campylobacter microbes.

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) was not introduced by food prepared out of sheep. For several decades meat and bone meal from sheep and cattle have been fed to cattle and sheep without causing BSE.

Since its official recognition in 1986, Britain BSE has not in a single study, been induced in cattle, by feeding commercially made from sheep or any other commercially available material, “no evidence of an association with any single compound of proprietary feedstuffs.”

None of the companies selling the material has been made responsible for causing the mass slaughter of 180,000 cows.

There are no comparable numbers of diseases in the north of France and Denmark, even though the same feedstuff from the United Kingdom is sold there. About 220 cases of BSE occurred in cattle in Switzerland.

In Portugal, 940 inborne cattle plus 300, had been imported from Britain, France, and Ireland without connection to feedstuff giving rise to Mad Cow Disease from the United Kingdom.

The appearance of BSE diseases was a simultaneous emergence in a large number of flocks in defined regions of the United Kingdom. Percentage-wise rarely affected were cattle herds of farmers in the counties Buckinghamshire and East-Sussex, Durham, Yorkshire South, Derbyshire, Merseyside, and Essex, in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man.

The diseases were allegedly provoked by “commercially induced changes in the rendering of abattoir, butchers and knackers waste, resulting collectively from a fall in the value of tallow, a rise in the cost of energy and a need to replace the old plant with safer systems.”

No single detail of the pretended changes is given. The accused changes were not introduced in 1981 but the late sixties.

According to scientific articles, the agent causing BSE can only be inactivated by heating up to 180 or even 270º Celsius and hardly by chemical means. In Scotland, few cattle were affected by BSE, because allegedly the old plants were not replaced.

In reality, the agent is inactivated by the old and the new methods. The World Health Organization (WHO) for example, considers gelatine, produced from infectious bones, to be safe for medical capsules. The product only allows a processing temperature of 140º Celsius.

The theory of S.B. Prusiner of the undetected prions transmitted in food and genetic material is stated without any proof and contradicts basic laws of nature, for example, of the Physico-chemical binding capacities in proteins. It cannot be followed.

The British government could have reintroduced the former – the Scottish – extraction methods in the whole United Kingdom.

Allegedly the mass diseases started in 1981 because cattle were exposed to a meal made from the Scrapie-infected brain from sheep. To fulfill that condition, there must have been a many-fold stronger increase in Scrapie of sheep before the BSE wave. There are no statistics that would underline that. The available numbers of Scrapie and the respective numbers of BSE are:

Scrapie BSE
1980- 104, 1981-112, 1982- 139, 1983-155, 1984-169, 1985-149 15, 1986-156 63,

1987-179 662, 1988-215 2184, 1989-246 7137, 1990-348 14181, 1991-989 25032

1992-666 36681, 1993-93 34370, 1994-73 23944, 1995-75 14282.

And if there was an increase of Spongiform Encephalopathy among sheep, it is unexplained, what has caused that increase? But there was also, at the same time, the mass infection in cattle and sheep.

In 1996, eight years after the ban of feeding, the accused material to ruminants, 300 cases of BSE/week are occurring in the United Kingdom. The majority of them are descendants born after 1992 to cows that were born after the implementation of the feed ban.

Contrary to the impression which the British government tries to create, today the diseases are transmitted to a large extent from cows to calves. In Portugal, 1994, the great-granddaughter of a cow imported from Great Britain was affected by BSE. But even the British government concedes that a nonsignificant part of BSE is transmitted by this route.

By this claim about the significant part of transmission in food produced before the feed ban in 1988, the British government expresses that thousands of British farmers bought at the time of the feed ban in advance food for many years and intentionally infect their cattle; and that the cattle ate that horrible smelling material today.

On August 1, 1996, the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food quoted the forming of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC), SEAC statement on the maternal transmission of BSE … Of the 273 animals born to dams with BSE, 42 have developed histological confirmed BSE.

This is a 15.4% transmission rate from cows with BSE to calves. The SEAC quoted by the British government converts this fact: The average transmission from cow to calf over the 60 months duration of infection in an animal before developing the clinical disease will be 1%.

Mass diseases affecting the brain and immunosystem like BSE in other animals and other areas

Cows in Great Britain

Other mass diseases of cattle in the United Kingdom must be seen connected with the occurrence of BSE. Of 24,000 cows slaughtered in 1994 in the United Kingdom because of symptoms suspicious of BSE, 25% did not have pathological findings of the brain indicative of BSE.

These 6,000 were affected by neurological symptoms and immunodeficiency. Especially in March/April diseases reminding of BSE but without visible lesions in the brain are observed. They correspond, for example, Downer Cows in the USA.

Since about 1977 there was an increase of lameness of dairy cows connected with lactation, especially occurring in March and April, in the same regions of the British island were later increased BSE incidences appeared.

Cows in the USA, Canada

In the USA annually about 100,000 cattle are slaughtered because of a brain-damaging neurological disease named Downer Cow Syndrome.

This disease affects milk fever cows. It occurs in heavy milking cows… related to the calving period and if after futile treatment with calcium hypocalcemia is excluded as causing disorder the hind legs… extended… posteriorly… hyperaesthesia… and…. non-alert… of this Downer Cows should be compared with the BSE-symptoms.

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