Can Prions be Killed in an Autoclave
The U.S. cattle industry was under threat when the mad cow disease was first discovered in the state of Washington. But regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture assured that they’re doing every thing necessary to protecting from the ravages of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
These statements are unreliable since the efforts that are put in, to control the spread of these deadly disease are not encouraging. Generally the tainted meat that is for eating comes from large corporate farms having over 4000 animals. At these farms animals lack personal attention and care. They are treated as milk machines.
Generally, a cow needs 15 minutes to give all their milk. But in corporate farms, animals are hooked up to milking machines with timers on them for four minutes. If the cow under performs, it gets added to the list of animals headed for the slaughterhouse. The average life span of a corporate cow is 2 to 4 years. Cows don’t even reach their full growth until they’re 5 years old, when they hit their prime and give the most milk. The waste is simply unimaginable
Now, it takes about five to seven years for symptoms of BSE to appear in an infected cow. But most corporate dairy farms are sending their abused, used-up, broken-down cows off to the slaughterhouse at younger and younger ages — before they reach the key 5-year-old mark. No adequate amount of testing done to make the meat supply safe.
Experts confirmed that there have been cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human form of spongiform encephalopathy in the United States. But in practice, every year, 300 new cases of CJD are diagnosed in the U.S. It’s a diagnosis of elimination. After a person comes down with the symptoms, he or she is tested for a variety of neurological disorders. The only way to test for it is by removing brain tissue and examining it under a microscope after the patient has already died. Autopsies are never performed for two simple reasons: it’s expensive to do, and the fear of catching the disease from infected brain tissue.
In the slaughterhouse the brain and spinal cord of the Mabton cow were ripped out of the cow’s carcass by an inefficient machine that often doesn’t recover all the neurological tissue. The machine routinely leaves behind spinal cord tissue to be ground into hamburger, sausage and other products for human consumption.
Yet a man in Britain recently died from CJD that he contracted from a blood transfusion. The blood of infected cattle cannot be ruled out, hence, in muscle cuts like steaks and roasts. BSE is not a bacteria or virus; it’s a prion, a very simple, extremely durable protein that can’t be killed by freezing or extreme heat. So, cooking doesn’t solve the problem.
Before 1997, the USDA was put in charge of inspecting feed mills to make sure they comply with the ban on feed with infected cattle tissue, but its enforcement powers have been gutted by successive federal budget cuts and the enforcing agency went into the hands of the culprits. There are as many as a dozen feed mills here in Washington have been caught violating safety laws, but the USDA failed in controlling them.
The USDA says that, if downer cows are tested at the slaughterhouse, meat can be recalled. The Mabton cow’s carcass was processed for food, sent to distributors and grocery stores, and was almost certainly cooked and eaten before the results of its BSE tests were completed and announced to the public. How could the meat be recalled back after consumption? That’s how our mechanized, inhuman, non-regulated corporate food supplies system works.
Neither democrats nor Republicans seem to understand this basic concept, or even care about the problem. Both parties have supported bills in Congress that throw money into the pockets of corporate agribusiness at the expense of small family farms. The government encouraged this by offering more subsidies and there by gut the safety of the food supply and throws the small family farmers out of the business.
It’s time for a change — a big change. A ban on slaughtering downer cows is only a first step. We need to ban subsidies to corporate agribusiness. We need initiatives that support family farms, which provide debt relief to overtaxed small farmers. We need to extend the subsidies to the kind of “technology” that small farmers can’t afford but corporate farms use regularly to increase their output, like bovine growth hormone, cloning and genetically modified organisms. We need the kind of price supports that keep small farms in business, but don’t encourage large corporate farms to add more and more capacity out of greed and the need to please their shareholders.
Those changes won’t come soon, but they must come eventually. In the meantime, be careful what you eat. Eat local, eat organic, and buy from your neighborhood farmer’s market. It’s little expensive, but you get what you pay for, and you don’t want to be paying for BSE.