BSE
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (more commonly known as BSE or 'mad cow disease') is an infectious and incurable disease which attacks the brain and the nervous system of cattle. Spongiform encephalopathies also include scrapie, a disease which is very common in sheep and has been around for about 200 years. BSE was first identified in cattle in the mid-1980s. It affects all breeds of cattle. More than 90% of BSE cases have been recorded in the dairy herd.
Cheap Feed
Feed has been implicated in the cause of BSE which by December 1996 had claimed the lives of over 1 million cattle over 30 months of age which were ordered to be slaughtered by the government and removed from the food chain. Around 18,000 cattle were slaughtered each week in 1996. By late December 1996 the Government had announced a further cull of 100,000 cattle in 1997 who are feared at risk of BSE to try to convince Europe to lift the ban on British beef.
The Observer newspaper reports: Our nation's dairy industry has, for some 20 years been pushing hard - and been pushed - for profit at the expense of the consumer. The rationale was simple: cheap milk and beef at all costs. In the 1970s, cows began to be faced through a series of three or four pregnancies, stimulating maximum lactation, before being slaughtered around the age of 6 or 7. Towards the end of that decade, to further maximise yields, it was decided to wean calves even earlier, feeding them, and older milk cows, with concentrated rations which were rich in proteins. According to an independent brief on BSE drawn up by Commons library researchers, it was about here that the disease originated. "In the best quality feeds," it explains, "the protein comes from soya or fish meal." In the dispassionate words of the Commons brief: "In the late 1970s, rendering plants in Britain changed the way they processed batches of carcass materials at high temperatures, they adopted a system of continuous processing at lower temperatures. They also abandoned the use of solvents to remove excess fat from the meat and bone meal. This was done with the express approval of the Ministry of Agriculture; having already begun using every scrap of animal offal at its disposal, it now urged the industry to try the even cheaper option of minimum treatment." More important, concludes the brief, was "probably the loss of the final heating stage, involving very high temperatures to drive off the solvents" - and the sludge they by then contained. This meant that cows, which are herbivores, were eating sheepmeat, some of which was infected with scrapie. It was this practice that probably allowed the agent to cross the species barrier. It was first identified by scientists in 1985.
By December 1996 Bibby was the latest feed company to withdraw fish protein from all compounds, except those for pregnant ewes and high yielding dairy cows. Bibby claims the withdrawal of fishmeal is not based on any technical reason but in response to consumer pressure for absence of animal protein in diets. Pete Kelly, ADAS (MAFF policy advisory agency) nutrition consultant says "We can take fishmeal out of every ration and not miss it except for high yielding, over 9,000-litre, dairy herds where fishmeal has a magical effect on fertility."
Animals Suffer Appallingly with BSE
The first indicator of BSE in cattle is when an animal starts to stagger. BSE animals appear very frightened, over reacting to the slightest noise or movement. They might stand away from the remainder of the herd holding their heads in an awkward way. The animals lose a lot of weight and the muscles waste, despite a healthy appetite. In the dairy herd the amount of milk produced declines. BSE has now affected tens of thousands of animals and has occurred in just over half of all cattle herds in Britain. The last major health crisis in cattle occurred in 1967, when 400,000 animals had to be killed following an epidemic of foot and mouth disease.
BSE & CJD
For years the Government has been telling the public that meat from animals infected with BSE is safe to eat. At the end of March 1996 it was forced to admit that there was an "extremely small" risk of contracting CJD from eating meat infected with BSE. Panic broke when it was clear that Britain could face an epidemic of CJD. The beef industry collapsed. Europe and the rest of the world became increasingly concerned and banned the import of British beef.
Human Death Toll
BSE belongs to a family of prion diseases, several of which can affect humans. The most commonly known disease in this group among humans is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rare and fatal form of dementia. In 1996, scientists discovered a new strain of CJD that occurs predominantly in younger people, known as variant CJD or vCJD. The most likely origin of vCJD is believed to be human exposure to the BSE agent, for example, through eating infected beef. As of July 2002, 115 people have died from vCJD in the UK. Like BSE in cattle, vCJD in people is always fatal. [2]
Dairy Products - a Possible Risk
The Government says the BSE prion agent has not been found in milk or milk products. The prion agent is contained in white blood cells and milk is theoretically free of these cells. However, 30% of dairy cows suffer from mastitis which results in the painful swelling of the udder together with the discharge of pus from the teats. Pus contains white blood cells and therefore the prion agent. Whilst cows with mastitis are not supposed to be milked, the implementation of this rule is dependent entirely upon the farmer. BSE is primarily found in cattle that produce milk for human consumption and Britain consumes around 200 million pints of milk a week. Professor John Collinge from the Imperial College School of Medicine, St Marys, London adds: "What we can say ... is that if there is any infectious material for instance in muscle or milk, it is of a very very much lower order than there is in the brain and spinal cord. At least a million fold less." However, if the new prion is accumulative (the Horizon programme, November 1996, suggests it might be) then everyone drinking cow's milk may be at risk.
The Real Figures on Infected Cattle
In November 1996 the Horizon Programme reported work by Professor Roy Anderson at Oxford University. Professor Anderson was denied access to information for 8 years on ALL cases of BSE in the herd. He was only allowed the data in April 1989 and it was then that an analysis began of the real statistics of the epidemic. The government only published the numbers of animals diagnosed with BSE.
But BSE has a very long incubation period. In this study Professor Anderson added on the cattle that were incubating the disease but who went to the slaughterhouse looking healthy while actually infected. When the new figures were calculated it was a surprise. Whilst only 160,000 cases were reported, 1 million cows were infected. Most of the 1 million cows ended up in food. It was only in 1989 that the specified offals ban came into force and the brain and spinal cords were removed from the food chain. 440,000 infected cattle would have entered the food chain prior to November 1989 before the ban came into effect. That figure assumed that after the ban all brain and spinal cord was removed from the carcase. It later came to light that abattoirs were definitely not implementing the ban properly and infected tissue was still getting into the food chain until the end of 1995. It is impossible to estimate the number of humans infected by this malpractice. In future most meat will come from animals under 30 months old, except for a small contribution from the beef assurance scheme. All cohorts are now removed from the food chain. By July 1997 it was confirmed that 1 in 100 infected cows will pass BSE on to their offspring.
From Bad to Worse by the end of 1997
In 1997 Britain's Health & Safey Executive had classified tissue from the nervous systems of cows infected with BSE as a dangerous biological agent; the Agriculture Minister had announced a public inquiry into BSE, adding that there is now overwhelming evidence that the agent which causes BSE is the same as that which causes the nv-CJD; signs of CJD had been found in white blood cells and there were fears over blood products; over 1700 cattle over 30 months of age had entered the human food chain in error; Beef on the bone and bone marrow had been banned because it was found that the prion agent may attach itself to the bone area but many restaurants and butchers defied the ban; new rules on processing mammalian meat and bone meal were announced bringing standards up to EC requirements; British beef had been smuggled abroad illegally by some companies; a vegetarian of 11 years had been diagnosed as having nvCJD raising fears that milk and cheese might be a source of infection.