Worried about mad cow? Other foodborne illnesses a bigger threat

CBS

(CBS/AP) Mad cow disease is on Americans' minds after a dairy cow in California tested positive for the deadly disease this week. But when it comes to food safety fears in the U.S., mad cow disease isn't exactly high on the list.

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Just in the past few months, Americans have been sickened by contaminated sprouts, raw milk and sushi. Thirty people died last year from bacteria-tainted cantaloupe. And when it comes to hamburger, a dangerous strain of E. coli that can lurk in ground beef sickens thousands of people every year.

"What we know is that 3,000 Americans die every year from preventable food-borne illnesses that are not linked" to mad cow disease, said Sarah Klein of the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Things like E. coli, salmonella - that's where we should be focusing our attention, outrage and policy."

Last year a listerosis outbreak linked to cantaloupes swept the country, sickening 146 people across 28 states and killing 30, HealthPop reported. This year a 20-state salmonella outbreak linked to yellowfin tuna in sushi that has sickened 116 people has drew concern among federal officials. And those weren't the only foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S. over that time.

As for mad cow disease? Four sick cows have been discovered in the U.S. ever, the one announced Tuesday being the first since 2006, and no human version of the illness linked to eating U.S. beef.

"From simply a public health issue, I put it very, very low," Cornell University food safety expert Martin Wiedmann said of the level of concern about mad cow disease.

Maintaining confidence in exports fuels the nation's monitoring of the beef supply as much as continuing safety concerns, he said.

Tuesday's news came from that monitoring: Routine testing of a dead dairy cow from central Calif. showed the animal had bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a degenerative disease that gradually eats holes in the animal's brain. U.S. health officials were adamant that there was no risk to the food supply - the cow never was destined for the meat market, and the World Health Organization says humans can't be infected by drinking milk from animals with BSE.

The U.S. has been guarding against BSE for years, since a massive outbreak in Britain that not only decimated that country's cattle but showed that eating BSE-contaminated meat could trigger a human version of the disease. A key part of the safety net: The animal tissues that can carry the BSE - including the brain and spinal cord - are removed from cattle before they're processed for food.

In addition, the U.S. surveillance program tests brain tissue taken from about 40,000 dead cows a year for BSE. That testing is designed to target the animals most at risk, said Dr. Richard Breitmeyer, who heads the University of California, Davis, laboratory that initially discovered the latest case.

High-risk animals include those with symptoms of neurological disease, "downer" animals at slaughterhouses, animals that die at dairies or cattle ranches for unknown reasons, and cows older than 30 months like this Holstein, because BSE occurs in older cows.

The USDA hasn't released details about the California cow, but a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes of California said the sick 5-year-old came from Tulare County, the No. 1 dairy-producing county in the nation.

In other countries, BSE's spread through herds was blamed on making cattle feed using recycled meat and bone meal from infected cows, so the U.S. has long banned feed containing such material. That was key to Tuesday's announcement, too: USDA testing found the cow had a different form of the disease, so-called atypical BSE that means it didn't come from feed - good news.

Instead, it was a sporadic disease - the cow developed it from a random mutation, something that scientists know happens occasionally. Somehow, a protein the body normally harbors folds into an abnormal shape called a prion, setting off a chain reaction of misfolds that eventually kills brain cells.

The last two cases found in the U.S. were atypical as well. Only 10 cases around the world have been found with atypical characteristics, according to Lyndsay Cole of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

"It's very, very rare," said Wiedmann, adding that some research suggests that this sporadic type would be even less easily transmitted to people through meat than traditional BSE.

U.S. officials have shipped samples to laboratories in Canada and Britain to confirm that the cow had atypical BSE, and investigators will test other cows from the same herd as a precaution. Similar "spongiform" diseases affect other species: It's called scrapie in sheep and chronic wasting disease in deer. There's a human form completely unconnected to contaminated meat called classic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

CSPI, the consumer group, points to other issues that advocates call more relevant for public health - such as stemming the food poisoning that the government estimates sickens 50 million people a year. For example, the government hasn't finalized pending rules to improve the safety of produce, after a series of high-profile disease outbreaks.

On the animal side, CSPI's Caroline Smith DeWaal said 12,000 to 13,000 samples of ground beef and beef trimmings are tested for E. coli every year. Last fall, the government did say it would expand some of that testing, to look not just for the most worrisome strain of E. coli but some additional strains that have begun causing outbreaks.

Click below for some of the most common food safety mistakes, and ways to protect yourself:

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10 dangerous but common food safety mistakes

[hvshields]

Testing should be increased for BOTH mad cow and e. coli.

In 2006, after the third US mad cow was found, the USDA cut back from 300,000 tests a year to under 40,000.. And only 5000 of those reduced tests were on downers, the animals most likely to be infected. The USDA was determined to avoid trade and financial problems by not detecting any more mad cows.

Even after the recent 4th US mad cow, USDA still proclaims US mad cow free. In fact mad cow has been circulating and amplifying in the US herd since 1985, when Dr. Richard Marsh proved Wisconsin farmed mink fed downer cows contracted transmissible mink encephalopathy

Alzheimer's is a prion disease with over 6 million victims and a new case every 69 seconds. www.alzheimers-prions.com/ Pathways of risk to livestock and deer (chronic wasting disease) are ingesting soil with fodder from land spread sewage sludge infected with human and animal prions. (human and animal prion victims have infectious prions in their urine, feces, saliva, mucous and blood). Tainted feed is also a risk: Over a million UNTESTED downer cows each year are rendered into animal feed. Chickens are fed the infected feed and chicken feces are then fed back to cows, Also, calves are fed blood from untested livestock.

The USDA deceived the public by saying the most recent "atypical" (BASE = Bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy) mad cow case presented no risk of infection to humans. The truth from Dr. EE Comoy, et al:

"Our results point to a possibly higher degree of pathogenicity of BASE than classical BSE in primates and also raise a question about a possible link to one uncommon subset of cases of apparently sporadic CJD. [Creutzfeldt Jakob = fatal prion disease] Thus, despite the waning epidemic of classical BSE, the occurrence of atypical strains should temper the urge to relax measures currently in place to protect public health from accidental contamination by BSE-contaminated products."

The route of human prion disease infection (AD & CJD) are aging asymptomatic dairy cows infected with BASE mad cow, which are ending up UNTESTED in huge industrial mixing vats of hamburger, each containing meat from 50 to 100 animals from multiple states and two to four countries http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/burger21904.cfm

Scraps from the slaughterhouse floors are the hamburger (and pink slime) feedstock and the source of e. coli and salmonella.

Helane Shields, Alton, NH [e-mail]

[notmilkman]

New Case of Mad Cow Found in California

"The destruction of milk from suspected cows was recommended in England to insure the public's safety...Experiments also indicate that temperatures reached during pasteurization of milk and household cooking does not kill the agent. In the United Kingtom on December 1, 1988 the government announced a ban on the sale of milk from infected cattle..." - Mad Cows and Milkgate, Virgil Hulse, M.D.

"A 24-year-old vegetarian has been diagnosed with Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease. Scientists fear that milk and cheese may be the source of infection." - London Times, August 23, 1997 Michael Hornsby

Let's assume for the moment that this was not a California Happy Cow. Happy Cows, as you know, are disease-free, or so we are told by USDA. We are also being told that meat and milk are safe to eat, so that sure must be a relief to American consumers.

A cow filters through her udder 10,000 liters of blood cells each day.

One cannot donate blood if he or she has spent more than two weeks in England, home of the original Mad Cow Disease outbreak. If one cannot donate blood because the infectious mad cow disease protein (Prion) can be passed in the blood; AND; If Mad Cow Disease sometimes has a 40 year incubation period; AND; Since Mad Cows are clearly in our milking herd before their lethal diseases are detected; THEN; Do you still conclude that Mad Cow Disease cannot be passed on from cow to human in milk? Milk is white blood.

Robert Cohen - i4crob at earthlink dot net

[nourish9billion]

Mad-cow disease (or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) is the tip of a nasty iceberg called "feeding livestock 'rendered' animal wastes." (These include slaughterhouse wastes, animals that died before slaughter, supermarkets and restaurants refuse, as well as waste from animal farms including manure and poultry litter.)
Such a practice was banned in the UK in 1996, after it was discovered that the epidemic of BSE could spread to humans through exposure to contaminated beef. The European Union followed suit in 2001.
In 1997, the US and Canada prohibited feeding cattle "any protein derived from mammalian animals"... with quite a few exceptions: " blood and blood products; gelatin; tallow containing no more than 0.15 percent insoluble impurities (...); inspected meat products which have been cooked and offered for human food and further heat processed for feed (such as plate waste and used cellulosic food casings); milk products (milk and milk proteins); and any product whose only mammalian protein consists entirely of porcine or equine protein." In other words, beef and dairy cows can still be fed poultry, horse and swine proteins (including poultry litter), as well as cattle proteins with some restrictions.

Note that the diet of all other food animals, including pigs, poultry and even herbivores, is NOT affected by this partial ban on rendered animal wastes (including from their own species). This means that the risk of BSE contamination is still present, since non-ruminants being fed proteins from cows infected with BSE could be rendered into proteins fed to... cattle. The 2008 regulation 589.2001 that prohibits the use of high-risk cattle material in feed for all animal species is nothing but a legal safeguard that has enabled the feeding of rendered animal waste to food-producing animals to continue unabated.

Now, what is the consumer to do about this? Unless it is certified "organic", "pasture-raised", "pasture-centered", or "grass-fed/grass-finished", the meat and milk that you buy at the supermarket or that you consume at restaurants comes from animals that were fed "animal proteins."

Such a practice is not only a serious threat to public health. It also violates best animal husbandry practices.

Sign this petition to make it stop: http://www.nourish9billion.org/sign-the-petition

[manxbeanie]

its a disgrace the lies we are being fed, and i am thoroughly discusted by the lies our government is feeding us, and disgusted by ranchers pouring human feces on lands that animals graze on, come to Polk County,MO and see how many ranchers do this on a regular basis.