Mad cow disease in California: Should humans be worried?

CBS

(CBS News) A cow's positive test for mad cow disease has prompted health officials to alert a concerned public that humans are not at risk for contracting the deadly human variant of the disease.

VIDEO: Mad cow disease discovered in Calif.
New case of mad cow disease discovered in California; First since 2006

A dairy cow in California tested positive for mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the first case since 2006, CBS News reported on Tuesday. If a human eats meat contaminated with BSE, they can contract a form of the degenerative brain disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) that rapidly decreases a person's mental health and movement ability. To date, there have not been confirmed human cases of this type of CJD in the U.S., but a massive outbreak of mad cow disease in the U.K. that peaked in 1993 was blamed for the deaths of 180,000 cattle and more than 150 people. CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports there have been three deaths in America tired to mad cow disease but all three victims had spent many years eating beef overseas.

Americans are not at risk from this latest positive BSE test since the cow was not bound for the nation's food supply, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who touted the agency's system for catching contaminants in food supply.

"The beef and dairy in the American food supply is safe and USDA remains confident in the health of U.S. cattle," Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. The systems and safeguards in place to protect animal and human health worked as planned to identify this case quickly, and will ensure that it presents no risk to the food supply or to human health."

The infected cow, the fourth ever discovered in the U.S., was found as part a USDA testing program that tests about 40,000 cows a year for BSE.

The Associated Press reports the discovery was a "stroke of luck" since tests are only performed on a small portion of dead animals. This cow in particular was not showing outward symptoms of mad cow disease before it died, which for cattle include unsteadiness, lack of coordination, a drastic change in behavior or low milk production, officials told the AP.

Federal agriculture officials tried to ease any concerns, saying the cow had an "atypical" form of mad cow disease that was not caused from eating infected cattle feed.

It was "just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal," Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University, told the AP. "Random mutations go on in nature all the time."

"Are you worried about all of the meteors that passed the earth last night while you were sleeping? Of course not," BSE expert James Culler, director of the UC Davis Dairy Food Safety Laboratory in Calif., told the Associated Press. "Would you pay 90 percent of your salaries to set up all of the observatories on earth to watch for them? Of course not. It's the same thing."

The mad cow disease finding has also caused concern internationally in countries where U.S. beef is imported.

The British government's U.K. Food Standards Agency said "No extra precautions or bans are being enforced in the United Kingdom in response to the Mad Cow case that was discovered in America yesterday," spokesman Bradley Smythe told CBS News, saying there are already preventative measures in place for all beef imports to the EU.

In South Korea, two major grocery chains pulled U.S. beef from their stores. Home Plus and Lotte Mart said they halted beef sales because customers were worried, CBS News reported. Within hours Home Plus had resumed sales, citing a government announcement of increased inspections. South Korea is the world's fourth-largest importer of U.S. beef, buying 107,000 tons of the meat in 2011.

The National Institutes of Health has more on Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

[deadstocker]

The feed ban 1997 prohibits the feed of cow to cow, but allows that meat and bone meal to be feed to other species. the feed ban 2007 prohibits srm of the feed chain, srm tissues in america is the short list to the rest of the world. So there is more parts of the cow entering the feed chain in the United States, so get your facts straight.

[flounder91]

15 years later, and it still amazes me the bull **** the USDA puts out, of which most of the media follows. both of which are oblivious. very sad...



OIE says the animal was sub-clinical ;


http://web.oie.int/wahis/public.php?page=single_report&pop=1&reportid=11893



also, officials have confirmed it was a atypical L-type BASE BSE.


I am deeply disturbed about the false and terribly misleading information that is being handed out by the USDA FDA et al about this recent case of the atypical L-type BASE BSE case in California. these officials are terribly misinformed (I was told they are not lying), about the risk factor and transmissibility of the atypical L-type BASE BSE. these are very disturbing transmission studies that the CDC PUT OUT IN 2012. I urge officials to come forward with the rest of this story.


It is important to reiterate here, even though this animal did not enter the food chain, the fact that the USA now finds mad cow disease in samplings of 1 in 40,000 is very disturbing, and to add the fact that it was an atypical L-type BASE BSE, well that is very disturbing in itself. 1 out of 40,000, would mean that there were around 25 mad cows in the USA annually going by a National herd of 100 million (which now I don't think the USA herd is that big), but then you add all these disturbing factors together, the documented link of sporadic CJD cases to atypical L-type BASE BSE, the rise in sporadic CJD cases in the USA of a new strain of CJD called 'classification pending Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease' cpCJD, in young and old, with long duration of clinical symptoms until death. the USA has a mad cow problem and have consistently covered it up. it's called the SSS policy. ...



see full text with updated transmission studies and science on the atypical L-type BASE BSE Jan. 2012 CDC. ...


***Oral Transmission of L-type Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in Primate Model

***Infectivity in skeletal muscle of BASE-infected cattle

***feedstuffs- It also suggests a similar cause or source for atypical BSE in these countries.

***Also, a link is suspected between atypical BSE and some apparently sporadic cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.



now, for the rest of the story, the most updated science on the atypical BSE strains, and transmission studies...



Thursday, April 26, 2012

Update from USDA Regarding a Detection of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States WASHINGTON bulletin at 04/26/2012 10:11 PM EDT

http://transmissiblespongiformencephalopathy.blogspot.com/2012/04/update-from-usda-regarding-detection-of.html




I lost my mom to the hvCJD, 'confirmed' DOD 12/14/97, and just made a promise. ...



Terry S. Singeltary Sr. Bacliff, Texas USA 77518 [e-mail]

[karek40]

They have tied mad cow to eating the meat of an infected animal and to using its bones as bonemeal, but I wonder about the dairy products. Politically they must deny the possibility but we all know how trustworthy our government and politicans are, they constantly lie when the truth would fit better.

[cheybree101]

Was this farm checked to see if they were using the Bovine Somatatropin Hormone? If so should we be concerned that it is in our milk?

[varigdc10]

There is a very small ( 1 in 10,000,000 or so )chance that Botox users may catch this disease. Botox type A and B are made from botulin toxins derived from bovine hemoglobin. Although all lots of the stuff are meticulously tested and controlled the chance is still there. So, all you beautiful Botox users be aware, years from now you wake up wrinkle free but mooing like a cow, its the Botox you've been getting in the past !

[newsterrrr]

There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.

There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels.

Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown.

All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.

[newsterrrr]

The crooked meat industry ONLY cares about maximizing profits, just read the first 100 pages of Upton Sinclare's 1906 book "The jungle" (free on archive.org) and you'll never eat meat again!
Here's a sampling, and THIS book is why the USDA was created;

Chapter 14

With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles.

For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose.

In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent."

Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron.

After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.

There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it.

It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

[Rodeo_Joe]

When Lehmann Bros. bit the dust, they said everything was cool.

And we know how that turned out.

Bon Appetit !

[deadstocker]

So no part of this cow enter the food chain, it went to feed chain, so we are still going to eat it when they feed it to pigs and chickens

[agTeach85]

Actually there is a feed ban that prohibits the feeding of bovine meat and bone meal to other species, period.

There is a 1 in 10 billion chance of actually contracting the human form of BSE. More over, in regards to Lrn2Lrn's comment, the three deaths were not due the consumption of beef in the United States. Those individuals contracted BSE from meat from other countries - which remains dormant for years in both humans and livestock- and died after transplanting to America.

Please get your facts straight before spreading misconceptions and hysteria. We should be so lucky to live in a country where we can track and even test for things such as this so quickly.

[deadstocker]

bovine meat and bone meal is make from dead cattle and parts of the cow from the packer and it can be use in feed for pig, chicken and petfood just can't feed it to cattle and that is the fact

[Lrn2Lrn]

three deaths in America tired to mad cow disease
tired to mad cow disease
tired

so very tired

[TruthBeSold]

I know someone who died from this...and she wasn't eating beef abroad for many years. When she was suffering through this cruel, cruel illness, I read of other cases here in the States and there is an opinion, that this is being covered up. Beef industry is very powerful.

[law90807013f]

I think it's the chicken that should be worried.
The human that is scared of MCD (Mad Cow Disease, not McDonalds) will stop eating beef to eat more chicken; more chicken will get killed to feed the scared human.