Mad Cow Disease

What is Mad Cow Disease?

America found its first case of mad cow disease on December 23, 2003. Since that time, a scare has broken out in society as well as in the meat industry. The demand for beef had decreased rapidly. Other countries throughout the world have stopped importing our beef and we have slaughtered at least 500 cattle. I'm going to look at whether or not this scare is really necessary.

Mad Cow disease is a disease that occurs in the brain and spinal cord of cattle. It is caused by a type of bad, odd protein that convinces the normal proteins of the brain and spine to change into a sponge-like mass.

Mad Cow disease is just a nickname for the disease. The nickname came about because the cattle don't act normally when they get this disease. The actual scientific name for it is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.

What's the big deal if this disease is just a cow thing?

The reason there is such hype about mad cow disease is because it is believed that people are able to contract a form of Mad Cow disease by eating the meat of infected animals. The human form of the disease is called CJD. The human form of the disease is just as severe as the cow form. There is no treatment or vaccine.

Mad cow disease is such a big deal because in the mid 80's, England, several people contracted CJD from cattle with mad cow disease. During that time in England, they killed five million cattle to try to stop the spread of the disease.

We don't want a situation like that to come to America.

How is Mad Cow disease spread?

Imagine this scene. You are a cattle farmer and you want to make the biggest amount of money the fastest possible way. Raising cattle free range can be quite costly because you have to own and manage the land. Feeding them on hay is also quite expensive because hay prices are quite high (due to less land for farming and the amount of work it takes to harvest it).

You take your cows to slaughter. The butcher carves off all of the meat that is needed for steaks and other things, and goes to throw the rest of the meat away. This extra meat consists of the brain, the intestines and the spinal cord of the cattle. It also contains the bones of the cattle.

There's the bright idea. Couldn't we do something with that extra stuff to make money. Someone several years ago came up with the bright idea of drying it out, grinding it up and feeding it to the other live animals for food. It doesn't cost nearly as much as having to buy all that expensive hay.

Thus was born the practice of feeding cattle to other cattle. This practice wasn't only done with cattle. Soon, cattle were eating sheep, pigs, horses and cattle. That's how mad cow disease started. Sheep have a form of the disease that was passed onto cattle when we started to feed animals to other animals. Those animals were ground up and feed to other animals, thus trending the downward spiral of sending mad cow disease on to other cattle. If you are feeding a bunch of cattle other infected cattle, that disease is going to spread real fast.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to spread mad cow disease merely by association. That is, just having infected cattle put with other cattle. The brain or spinal cord must be eaten.

The spread of Mad Cow disease shows only the feeding practices of the animals. The WHO suggested banning these feeding practices. The United States banned animal cannibalism to stop the spread of this disease. They didn't, however, ban feeding animals other animals. So a sheep could be fed an infected cow. That sheep could then be fed back to cattle infecting other cattle. This is how the disease could spread on. There are many people concerned about this.

There's one other thing to this. We allow downer cattle to be slaughtered. These are the cattle that are too sick to stand. They have to be hauled into the slaughterhouse to get killed because they can't walk. These cattle are allowed into the food chain with almost no problems. These are the cattle most likely to have the disease, and we aren't testing them for the disease.

How can humans get Mad Cow disease?

Basically by eating the brain of a cow (as some sick people do). It is also argued that you can get it by using cattle products that could contain part of a ground up brain (like the base of lipstick), but it is not likely.

The scary and not so scary facts

If you listen to the news, you can hear all kinds of scary facts about this mad cow scare like that the bad protein that causes all of this can't be killed with temperature and radiation (which is true) or that it takes 5 years to know if you have the disease. However, when you look at the actual facts of the disease, there's NOTHING to be scared of.

America tests their cattle for this disease. Though we don't do it as rigorously as other countries, we still do test them. This is the first case we have EVER run into that has been infected in America. That's not really enough to cause such an alarm.

The cow that was found was a dairy cow. That means quite a bit. First of all, dairy cows are most likely used for dog food when they go to slaughter. Because of the nature of their bodies, they aren't made to create beef. They're made to create milk. It takes up so much of their body energy and muscle that when they are killed, we can't eat steak from them. They just don't have it. That means that ALL steak is safe because this cow wasn't a beef cow.

The dairy products of this cow were safe (if you drank her milk) because it doesn't contain brain or spinal cord tissues.

The US has taken incredible precautions to keep mad cow disease from spreading. What they have done:

1.) Banned the import of meat and cattle from infected areas

2.) Banned the feeding of cattle to other cattle

3.)Testing animals for the BSE protein

4.) All downer cattle have been banned from the human meat market.

Mad cow disease will effect older animals (because the incubation period is so long). Most cattle in America are slaughtered at the age of 2. No case has ever been found in a cow that young.

Beef gets mixed with other beef and you're eating the beef of about 100 other cows when you eat a hamburger. That means the hamburger from this one cow is diluted so much it isn't even noticeable.

There have been only 139 cases world wide of CJD disease from Mad cows disease. That's .00000025% percent of the current population. There has only been 2 occurrences in the last three years.

The chances of getting infected if you eat infected beef are about the same chance that you'll win the Powerball lottery and get struck by lightning on the same day. The risk of contracting the disease from eating beef and beef products, even when infected cows are in the food supply, "is much less than one case per 10 billion servings."