Health Spectator

Recent press reports about the largest ground beef recall in the U.S.—the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. case, which involved the recall of 143 million pounds of beef—are apt to quote company president Steve Mendell as saying that “no illnesses have been reported” as a result of the incident. An AP report added that “Agriculture Department officials have insisted there is minimal risk.”

We have to say these things in the interest of fair reporting.

However, what the general public may miss (and which the AP reporter, Erica Werner, was smart enough to include) is that it typically takes ten years or so for a case of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) to manifest in humans. Mad cow disease is one of the primary concerns where downer cows are involved, since downer cows display the most common symptoms of advanced mad cow disease.

What may also not occur to the average reader is that cows don’t have to display any symptoms to transmit mad cow disease and other illnesses. More subtle still is the notion that the “no illnesses have been reported” defense is a likely indicator that no tests were performed before release of the beef in question to enable the speaker to say there is no risk of disease or illness from that manufactured beef. Why go with the rather lame “no illnesses have been reported” justification if you can state unequivocally that “blood and tissue samples collected from all processed cattle tested negative for prions, E. coli, etc., etc…”? You go with what you have.

In other words, it’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” so far as the industry is concerned.

The irony is that such testing probably isn’t even necessary if sensible precautions are taken in raising and slaughtering the cattle. As we’ve explained in an earlier piece, prions (the cause of BSE) in beef were never a problem until someone got the bright idea of feeding ground-up animal parts to cattle in order to fatten them faster. Cows, in case you hadn’t noticed, are natural vegetarians that feed on grass, given the opportunity. They don’t wander around hungering to munch on sheep and cow brains when left to their own devices. Even corn and soy do not comprise their natural diet.

So to keep BSE out of our cattle, and to avoid the resulting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) that forms in humans, we need to ensure that cattle are not fed animal parts, period. (CJD in humans can result from genetic mutations, but this form of the disease is rarer still.)

Does that seem like too much to ask? Is feeding livestock on their natural diet such a radical notion?

And by the way, feeding cattle on grass pretty much eliminates worries about E. coli infection in humans, as we pointed out in yet another previous post. Feeding grains to cattle makes the E. coli in their intestines acid-resistant so that it can pass through the human stomach unharmed, which is not normally the case. That is not to mention the fact that—as its name implies—E. coli is supposed to remain in the animal’s intestines, not end up smeared on beef. So, by raising the livestock properly and observing sensible slaughtering practices, we can eliminate the top two concerns among illnesses resulting from beef consumption, setting aside cancer.

But to get back to the original subject, both the industry and government agencies repeatedly resort to the “no illnesses reported” and the “minimal risk” assurances. Either one is a cop-out.

Do we think that ten years from now people will come down with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease because of the two downer cows shown in the Humane Society video? No, we don’t. We suspect that those cows were wretched victims of the shoddy milk industry practices that are providing American consumers with milk that is a shadowy imitation of real, healthy, raw milk.

What is as sad as the images of those two cows being prodded and tormented when they are too sick and weak to stand is the knowledge that our government is not doing enough to protect us from practices that increase corporate profitability at the expense of public health and create conditions that abuse cows to a degree that reduces them to that state.

Just as sad is the knowledge that we, as consumers, are viewed as little different from those cows by the industry that serves us our beef.