- Note - This is an *extremely* important book and I personally
urge everyone to get a copy and read it. We are facing a probable crisis...many
cases of Alzheimer's are Mad Cow. That's my opinion and the facts appear
to support it 100%. I most highly commend Colm for this timely and crucial
effort to warn and inform the American public, most especially those who
consumer meat and dairy products. -Jeff Rense
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-
 Brain Trust summarizes a
possible looming public health emergency in the United States. Health and
Agriculture authorities in the United States and in Canada like to play
down any suggestion that the food chain is unsafe, particularly when it
comes to the dreaded mad cow disease that has killed over 150 people in
the UK and Europe. Authorities assure us that there is nothing to worry
about over here. Mad cow disease is predominantly a European problem, they
say.
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- My book, Brain Trust, argues that that this is definitely
an American problem. Not only do we have evidence that mad cow disease
has been in the United States for over 20 years, but we also have an epidemic
of deer and elk disease that has spread like wildfire through nearly 20
states. The Europeans have only to deal with mad cow disease. We have both
mad cow and mad deer/elk disease.
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- With eleven million hunters beginning hunting season
as we speak, it is a matter of some urgency that they be warned about possible
dangers of field dressing deer/elk or eating venison. Cooking mad cow or
mad deer meat does not make it safer to eat. You have to carbonize meat
at 600 C to make it safe. By the time it is safe, the meat is an unpalatable
black lump of charcoal.
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- Mad cow disease is caused by an infectious protein called
a prion. A prion is not a virus and it is not a bacterium. It is simply
a different shape of a protein. Normal prions play a helpful role in the
cell, but when they change shape, they can become lethal. They then kill
brain cells by the billions.
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- Prion diseases kill humans (CJD), cows (BSE aka mad cow
disease), sheep (scrapie), deer/elk (Chronic Wasting Disease: CWD) and
an assortment of other animal species including mink, squirrels, cats,
ostriches etc. More worryingly, prions can jump species. This lead to questions
for hunters like: can prions jump from deer/elk to humans? Or can prions
jump from deer/elk to cattle?
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- In the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990, hundreds
of thousands of cows died from mad cow disease. For years, health authorities
issued press releases telling the anxious British public that eating beef
was perfectly safe. It was routine for officials to go on television to
assure the public there was nothing to worry about. And then the unthinkable
happened. Beginning in the 1990s, scores of teenagers and young people
in their twenties began to die from eating tainted beef.
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- Can the same thing happen in the United States?
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- We will not know until it is too late unless the United
States Department of Agriculture (USDA) actually begins to test the beef
being sold to consumers. Currently, there are 35 million cattle slaughtered
in the United States, and under pressure, the USDA has agreed to begin
testing about 200,000 animals per year for mad cow disease. The huge majority
of cattle that reach our dinner tables are never tested for mad cow disease.
In Japan and in Ireland, every cow that is eaten gets tested and in Europe
over 30% are tested. In the US, even with 'expanded' testing, less than
1% of animals are tested. What's wrong with that picture?
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- Consumer groups have long criticized the USDA for looking
out for big cattle interests rather than looking out for the consumer.
Their obstinate refusal to test more cattle in the US for mad cow disease
is simply because the cattle industry has deemed it unnecessary. USDA scientists
argue that more testing is "unscientific, but Professor Stanley Prusiner,
who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for his discovery of prions, recently stated
that the level of testing for mad cow disease in the USA is grossly inadequate.
Should we believe a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or should we believe
a USDA spokesperson? And when Creekstone Farms in Arkansas decided to test
all the cattle in their plants for mad cow disease, the USDA stepped in
and, invoking an obscure 1913 law, prohibited the company from testing
their cattle!! It is this surreal situation that led to charges by consumers
that the USDA does not have the interests of American consumers in mind.
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- Prion diseases, whether in humans (CJD) in cows (BSE)
or in deer/elk (CWD) are 100% fatal. And prions are almost indestructible.
They contaminate surgical instruments, even ones that are sterilized. They
remain lethally infectious after two years in a pasture. Most viruses or
bacteria die within days. Not prions.
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- And new evidence shows that prions are passed via blood
transfusion. Both blood donors and acceptors have died in the UK and in
France. A looming question for the health authorities in the United States
is: how safe is the American blood supply?
-
- So what is the connection between the human prion disease
(CJD) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD)? Firstly, the astounding recent increase
in AD in the United States has not been sufficiently highlighted by the
media. In 1979, only 653 people died of AD. In 2002, that number had increased
to 50,000 deaths. A 9,000% increase in deaths for any disease in a mere
25 years should be cause for a national emergency. Instead, old people
now are almost expected to die of AD. This was not the case a few generations
ago. AD was a rare disease in the 1960s.
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- AD is quite difficult to diagnose. Mood swings, psychiatric
problems, sleep problems, eye problems, memory problems are all loosely
associated with dementia. Some of these AD symptoms overlap with CJD symptoms.
The main difference is that AD takes much longer to progress to death.
CJD is much more rapid. Typically, people die 3-18 months after CJD diagnosis.
The gold standard for diagnosing CJD is by autopsy and pathology studies
of the brain. Two shocking studies, one from Yale University and the second
from University of Pittsburgh really opened my eyes when I first saw them.
When researchers studied the brains of dead Alzheimer,s disease patients,
they found that between 5-13% had actually been wrongly diagnosed. These
people had really died of CJD. Now, what does this say regarding the supposed
rarity of CJD in the USA?
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- We are routinely told that CJD is so rare, only 1 in
a million people get it. But with 4-5 million Alzheimer's Disease patients
currently putting an enormous strain on the US healthcare system, if even
a small percentage of these people actually have CJD, not AD, then CJD
is much more common than we have been told. These figures imply thousands
of CJD cases in the US that are going undetected because of a lack of autopsies.
Recent reports indicate that most pathologists do not want to conduct autopsies
on CJD patients for fear of contaminating their facilities with the indestructible
prions. And to make matters even worse, CJD is not even a mandatory reportable
disease in about half the states in the USA. That means authorities have
no real idea of how many CJD cases actually exist.
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- Recently (October 2004), a suspected cluster of CJD was
spotted in Ulster County New York. Several months ago (March 2004), another
cluster of CJD was noticed in New Jersey. Clusters are worrying because
they may point to an infectious entity. In both New York and New Jersey
clusters, the health authorities assured the public that these were 'sporadic
CJD' and hence there was nothing to worry about. Sporadic CJD has no known
cause, the health authorities tell us. Both USDA and CDC tell us that
sporadic CJD arises randomly and has nothing to do with eating tainted
beef. According to health officials, only variant CJD or vCJD, is caused
by eating tainted beef. We are also told that there has never been a case
of human mad cow disease in the US.
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- But is that really true scientifically?
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- New research from Professor John Collinge in London suggests
that some cases of sporadic CJD may also be caused by BSE. This research
was conducted in transgenic mice with human prions, so critics have argued
maybe the same does not apply to humans. But, if Professor Collinge,s data
are indeed true, then it is much more likely that people in the US have
died of CJD from eating tainted beef (or venison). We will never know until
we (a) dramatically increase the number of autopsies of people dying from
'dementia', AD and CJD and (b) dramatically increase testing for mad cow
disease in the US.
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- If we look at the current low level of testing for mad
cow disease in the US and we combine it with the current epidemic of deer/elk
disease in this country and with the lack of autopsies to determine how
many people in the US are actually dying of CJD, we may be facing a grim
reality. When the Europeans, who have just gone through ten years of devastating
disease and have lost billions of dollars, look across at the United States,
they shake their heads in disbelief.
- Surely, we can learn from the mistakes made in Europe?
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- Brain Trust was published on October 19, 2004 and is
currently in bookstores nationwide.
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- For more information, click on: http://www.colmkelleher.com
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