- Sandra Blakeslee of the New York Times reported on Jan.
11 that the US Food and Drug Administration's supposed 1997 ban on feeding
rendered animal protein to cows and other ruminant animals is full of loopholes,
and moreover that the so-called ban is not being enforced among the thousands
of companies involved in the $3.2 billion dollar rendering industry and
the $20 billion dollar animal feed industry. As Blakeslee wrote: "Among
180 large companies that render cattle and another ruminant, sheep, nearly
a quarter were not properly labeling their products and did not have a
system to prevent commingling, the FDA said. And among 347 FDA-licensed
feed mills that handle ruminant materials--these tend to be large operators
that mix drugs into their products--20 percent were not using labels with
the required caution statement, and 25 percent did not have a system to
prevent commingling. Then there are some 6,000 to 8,000 feed mills so small
they do not require FDA licenses. They are nonetheless subject to the regulations,
and of 1,593 small feed producers that handle ruminant material and have
been inspected, 40 percent were not using approved labels and 25 percent
had no system in place to prevent commingling."
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- In other words millions of US cows, sheep, game farm
deer and elk, and pigs (pigs and cow's blood were inexplicably exempted
in the so-called FDA feed ban of 1997), not to mention household pets,
are still being fed billions of pounds of animal feed or pet food containing
meat and offal from ruminant animals--despite the obvious danger to human
and animal health and despite the fact that the FDA and the USDA for the
past three years have been reassuring the public that this was no longer
happening.
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- But the story gets scarier. In the Times on the front
page of the Sunday Jan. 14 edition, (tucked under a misleading headline
"Stringent Steps Taken by US on Cow Illness") Blakeslee drops
the bombshell. Not only has the US Mad Cow feed ban been a joke, but apparently
US feed companies, pet food companies, pharmaceutical firms, and nutritional
supplement manufacturers have been carrying on with business as usual by
importing large quantities of possibly contaminated bovine parts and rendered
animal protein--no doubt at bargain basement prices--in 1989 and 1997.
It appears that the same thing that has European consumers' blood boiling,
that their government and industry stupidly or greedily imported tons of
likely contaminated rendered animal protein from Britain since 1989 has
also been happening in the United States, and likely other nations as well.
After British authorities made it illegal to feed rendered animal protein
to ruminant animals in their own country, the UK feed industry simply sold
it overseas.
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- As Blakeslee states, quoting from export records, "British
export statistics show that 20 tons of 'meals of meat or offal' that were
'unfit for human consumption' and probably intended for animals were sent
to the United States in 1989. And 37 tons were exported to the US in 1997,
well after the government banned imports of such risky meat." Blakeslee
goes on to point out what BioDemocracy News and other critics of industrial
agriculture have been saying for years, that even if the US hadn't been
importing 57 thousand tons or more of suspect British offal in the 1990s,
there is mounting evidence that US rendered animal protein and bovine,
sheep, deer, and elk parts are themselves likely carriers of BSE and other
Mad Cow-like diseases. As Blakeslee relates, scientists have generally
agreed that BSE or BSE-like diseases "spontaneously" appear in
"one out of every million humans, cows, sheep and many other mammals.
"Since 36 million cattle are slaughtered annually in the United States,
about 36 cows spontaneously infected with mad cow disease could be entering
the nation's food chain each year." Thirty-six domestic US Mad Cows
a year being ground up and fed back to other animals may not sound that
alarming until you consider the fact that an average cow, pig, chicken,
game farm deer, elk, fish farm fish, or household cat and dog--because
of the commingling of many different animals' body parts at the rendering
plant and the feed mill--will be consuming the body parts of literally
thousands of different animals in their feed over their lifetime.
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- Mad Sheep, Deer, & Elk
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- And in fact the story gets worse. Scrapie or Mad Sheep
Disease has been endemic in US sheep herds since 1947, and the government
has done little or nothing to eradicate it. Significant numbers of scrapie-infected
sheep have undoubtedly been ground up every year and fed back to other
animals. In addition the US currently has a raging epidemic of Mad Deer
Disease and Mad Elk Disease (technically called Chronic Wasting Disease)
in parts of Colorado and Wyoming. There are already several documented
cases of young deer hunters in their 20s and 30s dying from CJD, the human
equivalent of Mad Cow. Mad Elk Disease has recently spread into Saskatchewan,
unnerving elk ranchers and the nutritional supplements industry, who sell
three billion dollars worth of supplements each year (mainly to Asia) made
from elk antlers. Consider the fact that at the height of the first Mad
Cow crisis in Britain 1-2% of all cows were being diagnosed with BSE, while
the Times reports that up to 18% of mule-tail deer in the Fort Collins
area of Colorado are now carriers of Chronic Wasting Disease. Hunters that
kill deer in Colorado are required to turn in the heads of these animals
so that they can be tested for CWD or Mad Deer Disease. Officials tell
hunters not to eat the meat of infected animals, (lab tests can take as
long as six weeks) but have stubbornly refused to ban hunting or eating
venison, despite calls from consumer groups such as the Center for Food
Safety and the Organic Consumers Association to do so. Meanwhile several
million people are eating venison and venison sausage every year in the
US, while several million more in the US and overseas are taking "glandular
supplements" or body-building hormones which contain concentrated
brain and pituitary material from US, British, and European cows. For the
full Jan. 14 Blakeslee article see <www.purefood.org/meat/madcowexplosive.cfm
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- Another FDA Ban?
-
- The FDA warned US drug companies, cosmetic companies,
and nutritional supplements firms Dec. 6 to stop using European bovine
parts in most of their products as of Jan. 1. It may already be too late.
As Blakeslee points out, even this ban--assuming it actually gets enforced--still
has loopholes. As she writes, nutritional supplements "must have labels
listing ingredients like bovine pituitaries and adrenals, but manufacturers
are not required to list the country of origin. Other beef byproducts that
are still allowed in the country include milk, blood, fat, gelatin, tallow,
bone mineral extracts, collagen, semen, amniotic fluid, serum albumin and
other parts of European cattle that are widely used in vaccines and medicines."
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- For more information on Mad Cow and Mad Cow-like diseases
see our website <www.organicconsumers.org as well as the following sites
<www.prwatch.org and <www.mad-cow.org
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- The best book on the threat of Mad Cow in the US is the
book by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton called Mad Cow USA: Could the
Nightmare Happen Here? You can order hardback copies of the book from the
Organic Consumers Association for only $10 (this includes shipping). Or
you can access the entire book for free on the internet by going to the
excellent website of the Center for Media and Democracy <www.prwatch.org
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- America and the world's 50-year experiment with chemical-intensive
industrial agriculture and genetic engineering may soon be moving into
its final, terminal stage. Mad Cow Disease and the growing global opposition
to factory farming and genetic engineering may turn out to the harbingers
of a new era of sustainable living and organic agriculture. One can only
hope that we make the necessary transition to organic farming and ban the
most dangerous practices of genetic engineering and industrial food production
before it is too late. In the meantime, stay tuned to BioDemocracy News
and the Organic Consumers Association website <www.organicconsumers.org
for the latest news and analysis.
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- By the way you can still get to the OCA website by going
to <www.purefood.org We're now using <www.organicconsumers.org as
our primary internet address simply because our adversaries have set up
a counterfeit internet site, filled with lies and industry propaganda,
at <www.purefoods.org Take a look at this site if you want to see what
we're up against. Keep in mind, however, that the "Bad Guys wouldn,t
be doing this except for the fact that we're winning the battle.
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- Organic Consumers Association - <http://www.purefood.org
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