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WASHNGTON, DC - On Friday night, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns announced that a non-ambulatory beef cow that had twice tested positive in November 2004 for mad cow disease with rapid tests (but then tested negative on a follow-up immunohistochemistry test) recently tested positive for mad cow disease, using a more definitive Western Blot technique.
The Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, urged the USDA in January 2005 to re-test the suspect animal using Western Blot, considered to be the most accurate test for mad cow disease. Although the USDA says it will now send samples to Britain, further testing is expected to confirm that this animal is the second case of mad cow disease in the United States and the fifth in North America, in two years. Various media have reported that the cow is from Texas.
"The mad cow testing and cattle feed regulations in the United States are simply a sham," said Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association. "The USDA has never disclosed how the relatively small number of U.S. cattle tested are actually chosen. The United States refuses to conduct the food safety testing for mad cow disease that protects consumers in the European Union and Japan, which would require testing millions of U.S. cattle each year. The USDA has also declared it is criminal for any private U.S. meat plants or beef producers to test their own animals for mad cow disease. In effect, the USDA is covering up mad cow in the United States through secretive, inadequate testing and a lack of transparency."
Dr. Diane Farsetta, senior researcher for the Center for Media and Democracy, noted, "The Bush administration refers to the current U.S. cattle feed regulations as a 'firewall,' but they are more like pouring gasoline on the fire. A real firewall feed ban exists in Japan, Britain and the rest of the European Union. However, the feed regulations adopted by the United States in 1997 allow hundreds of millions of pounds a year of rendered slaughterhouse waste to be fed to cattle in the form of cattle blood and fat, and blood, fat and meat and bone meal from pigs and chickens. Two billion pounds of chicken litter, containing meat and bone meal, is swept up from poultry barns and fed to cattle each year in the United States. These dangerous feeding practices must be banned, as they have been in Britain, Japan and other countries."
Mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is an always-fatal dementia disease spread through consumption of animal products, such as the slaughterhouse waste fed to U.S. cattle. The infectious agent is a type of protein named a prion {pree' on} by Nobel laureate Dr. Stanley Prusiner. Dr. Prusiner has called for a total ban on feeding slaughterhouse waste to cattle, along with testing all cattle at slaughter to ensure food safety. However, the United States has refused to take these measures.
Worldwide, nearly 160 people have died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which is primarily caused by the consumption of mad cow-infected meat. vCJD can incubate invisibly for decades. This long incubation time, along with recent results from Britain identifying silent vCJD "carriers," suggests that vCJD could be infecting thousands of people who have yet to show symptoms. In addition, two people in Britain died from vCJD after receiving blood transfusions from people infected by mad cow-tainted meat. Britain no longer uses its own human blood supply. Lax regulations mean that the U.S. blood supply is also at risk.
"This latest U.S. mad cow case demonstrates how the USDA has been effectively covering up the disease by failing to use the Western Blot test and by failing to test millions of cattle a year," said John Stauber, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and co-author of the book that predicted the emergence of the disease in the United States, Mad Cow USA. "The Bush administration is putting the livestock industry's desire to keep feeding cheap slaughterhouse waste to cattle above the urgent need to protect human health and the human blood supply. All feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock must be banned. In addition, the USDA must allow private meat companies and producers to test their cattle for mad cow disease. Private testing would rescue foreign beef sales, give foreign and domestic consumers the choice of buying meat tested free of mad cow disease, and would help determine the real number of U.S. mad cow cases."
The Center for Media and Democracy was founded in 1993 to investigate and report on deceptive government and corporate public relations campaigns and propaganda. The Center publishes the award-winning quarterly PR Watch. The Center's senior staff members Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have also co-authored five books.
The Organic Consumers Association was founded in 1998. It is a nationwide network of 700,000 organic consumers, carrying out public education around issues of food safety and environmental sustainability, while promoting organic agriculture and Fair Trade.
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