The Great Mad Cow Coverup
The hot news has died. But Mad Cow Disease is still with
us. That lone cow in Washington State found in December to have
been infected with the dreaded disease appears to only be the tip of a massive iceberg that is slowly being exposed while
the national media runs in another direction.
It is my personal belief that a lot of innocent people
are dying right under our noses, from brain diseases that go under numerous names ranging from a variety of strains of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease (CJD) and Alzheimer's disease that are all forms of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease. The disease
also has been found in sheep, deer, elk, cats and even birds that feed on parts of other animals. They all appear caused by
the maverick protein, or prion that comes from eating the meat of infected animals.
Testimony by Dave Louthan, the slaughter house worker
who destroyed the Washington animal and sent parts of its
brain into a government laboratory for testing, says he believes there is a big cover-up by the American beef industry, that
controls the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Louthan says we were lied to about that particular cow, and about the USDA's
promise to do more testing of "downer" cattle.
Louthan said in a recent interview on Whitley Strieber's
Dreamland radio talk show that the sick cow was not a downer. It arrived at the slaughter house on a truck with other cows
that were so sick they could not stand, but this cow was standing and walking around. He said it appeared to be a healthy
cow except that it had difficulty walking.
Louthan said the USDA's order that all "downer" cows be
tested virtually assures cattlemen that no more cases of Mad Cow Disease will be found in the U.S., at least for a while. But he believes the disease is rampant and purposefully
being ignored because of the money that could be lost once the truth is known.
Louthan said the government's order for cow brains and
spines to be separated from the rest of the meat also is a myth. Once killed, cows are cut in two parts by large circular
saws that sever the animal right at the spine. Thus they produce two "halves" of beef. As the blade cuts through the spine,
it spreads blood and all of the spinal tissue, from where the deadly prions are thought to lurk, throughout the rest of the
meat.
He said that because of the way the animals are slaughtered
and cut into meat parts, he believes that there is no part of the cow that can be considered safe if they are in that
spine at the start of the processing.
For a long time now, scientists have separated the standard
"sporadic" form of CJD that infects humans with a "variant" form of CJD that identifies as BSE in cattle and a few people
believed to have been infected by eating prion infected beef. They have been assuring us that beef in the United States is safe because we have had no cases of variant
CJD in humans. We have sporadic CJD, however.
Hunters who eat deer and elk are starting to die of the
sporadic CJD. A few years ago I read about two meat cutters in Florida
who both died of sporadic CJD.
Now Italian researchers have found a strain of BSE that
mimics sporadic CJD. Not only this, but the researchers discovered that in addition to the holes the disease causes to develop
in the brain, two out of eight infected cows studied had an accumulation of amyloid plaque in their brains.
This is very significant. Amyloid plaques are round dark clumps of sticky
protein that occur in human Alzheimer patients.
The new form of BSE is so different the discoverers have
named it bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy, or BASE, for now. The strain is so similar to the sporadic CJD and
the human Alzheimer diseases that there is strong suspicion that a link exists.
Of course, science, by its very nature, takes a cautious
approach to all new discoveries. Years of more testing and study will be involved before anybody is going to say that infected
meat is the cause of these two terrible brain destroying diseases.
The two infected Italian cows were healthy at the time
they were slaughtered. One was 15 years old and the other was 11. The infected brain cells were discovered because Italy tests all cattle over 30 months old if slaughtered for
human food.
America
tests only the downer cows, and if Mr. Louthan is to be believed, we probably wont find another case of Mad Cow Disease in
American livestock for a long time. Mad Cows don't fall down, he says. They go crazy and stagger around. But they usually
stay on their feet.
What Louthan is telling us that the Beef Industry and
the USDA have issued orders to turn a blind eye to the problem. They refuse to look for Mad Cow Disease in America because they know they will find it.