By James Donahue
They call it Wasting Disease in the deer herds. They call it a "variant form" of Creutzfeldt-Jakob's Disease in humans. They can call it Scapies in sheep. And in cats it is Transmissible
Mink Encephalopathy. Don't be fooled.
These are clever ways of disguising a strange and deadly disease with the long name of bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow Disease. It is in the meat. It jumps species. It is a fatal brain disease. And it is everywhere.
Mad Cow Disease has shown up in cattle herds throughout Europe, across Asia and Japan. Since first appearing in cattle in the
United Kingdom about 10 years ago, it has literally encompassed the globe. In addition to sheep, cats, deer and elk, this
disease also began showing up in UK zoo animals, including birds.
There seems to have been a massive cover-up of the fact that the disease has been infecting animal
herds in the United States. I suspect the reason is simple. Nobody wants to let something like a deadly brain-eating disease
affect the god of big business which is MONEY. And believe me, both the beef industry and the hunting industry are big business
in the United States.
That our government is admitting that Chronic Wasting Disease has hit elk and deer herds in states
stretching from Pennsylvania west to Wyoming, and that hunters who have fed on deer and elk meat are starting to die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob's
Disease is significant.
Yet in almost every news report that we hear about Chronic Wasting Disease . . . from the attempted
destruction of 50,000 infected deer in Wisconsin to the "suspected" links between infected deer meat and the death of the
hunters . . . we are constantly assured that the beef industry in the United States is clean.
Do we dare trust these reports?
We hear about frequent recalls of meat and dairy products because of E.coli, listeria, salmonella
and other deadly bacterial infections. Why should we think that the maverick protein believed to cause Mad Cow Disease isn't
also in the meat? There is no way to test for it.
The only way of finding out if the patient has this appalling disease is wait until they die and
then look at the brain. If the brain tissue is full of holes and looks like a sponge . . . then the patient died of Mad Cow
Disease. Hence the name "spongiform encephalopathy."
The cause of this disease is believed to be a maverick protein called a prion that works somewhat
like a cancer cell. Once in the body, it causes normal adjoining proteins in the host to change their structure and imitate
the prion. Like cancer, this process eventually spreads through the brain.
The scary thing about the prion is that it is not a living thing. Thus it cannot be killed. It is
resistant to heat, ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation and common disinfectants. People infected by the prion cannot be
tested because it causes no detectable immune or inflammatory response and it has never been seen under a microscope. Thus
the body has no natural resistance to it.
It is believed that the disease may not attack the brain for years after the prion is ingested.
Even in livestock, the process can take from four to eight years. Beef cattle rarely live long enough to develop symptoms.
But animals living in the wild, that escape the hunter's bullet long enough, are developing the disease.
The theory is that Mad Cow Disease is caused by a form of cannibalism. The cattle have been fed
ground up animal parts. There is a link between Creutzfeldt-Jakob's Disease and a disease known as kuru, once found among
the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea. Research found that kuru occurred because of a weird death ritual. The people ate brain
tissue from deceased tribal members.
American cattle growers claim that livestock in the United States is never fed ground up animal
parts in feed lots. If this is true, why are the deer and elk having an epidemic of Chronic Wasting Disease, or an animal
form of Mad Cow Disease? It is my belief that these animals are getting into open feed lots and consuming the same prepared
feed given to cattle. Deer and elk are not carnivores and would not feed on the carcass of a dead animal.
If my theory is correct, then the beef cattle in the United States also are laced with bovine spongiform
encephalopathy. We don't know it because beef cows don't live long enough to develop symptoms. But the people who eat their
meat could be ingesting the deadly prion.
We will know for sure in a few years as the variant form of CJD begins to take its toll in the United
States, as it already is in England.
It is my contention that eating meat is comparable to playing Russian roulette. If you get infected
meat, you are doomed to suffer a loathsome death.
