In article <bt059f$22pg$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, map@economicdemocracy.org
says...

"Oprah eventually won her lawsuit, but it cost her years of legal
battling and millions of dollars. In reality, the public lost, because
mainstream media stopped covering the issue of mad cow disease. As one
TV network producer told me at the time, his orders were to keep his
network from being sued the way Oprah had been."

"[due to loopholes in the 1997 "feed ban"] billions of pounds of
rendered fat, blood meal, meat and bone meal from pigs and poultry are
rendered and fed to cattle, and cattle are rendered and fed to other
food species, a perfect environment for spreading and amplifying mad
cow disease and even for creating new strains of the disease."

"in North America calves are literally weaned on milk formula
containing "raw spray dried cattle blood plasma," even though
scientists have known for many years that blood can transmit mad cow
type diseases. (This is why if you try to donate your blood to the Red
Cross, you will be rejected if you spent significant time in Britain
during the height of its mad cow epidemic..)"

"Why are United States slaughterhouse regulations so lax that a
visibly sick cow was sent into the human food chain weeks before tests
came back with the mad cow findings?"

===============FULL ARTICLE:

Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Begins

By John Stauber, AlterNet
December 30, 2003

When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our 1997 book, "Mad Cow USA: Could
the Nightmare Happen Here?", it received favorable reviews from some
interesting publications such as the Journal of the American Medical
Association, New Scientist, and Chemical & Engineering News. Yet
although the book was released just before the infamous Texas trial of
Oprah Winfrey and her guest Howard Lyman, for the alleged crime of
"food disparagement," the book was ignored by the mainstream media,
and even most left and alternative publications failed to review it.

Apparently many people who never read it at the time bought the
official government and industry spin that mad cow disease was just
some hysterical European food scare, not a deadly human and animal
disease that could emerge in America. In March, 1996, when the British
government reversed itself after ten years of denial and announced
that young people were dying from the fatal dementia called variant
CJD --mad cow disease in humans --the United States media dutifully
echoed reassurances from government and livestock industry officials
that all necessary precautions had been take long ago to guard against
the disease.

Those who did read "Mad Cow USA" when it was published in November,
1997, however, realized that the United States assurances of safety
were based on public relations and public deception, not science or
adequate regulatory safeguards. We revealed that the United States
Department of Agriculture knew more than a decade ago that to prevent
mad cow disease in America would require a strict ban on "animal
cannibalism," the feeding of rendered slaughterhouse waste from cattle
to cattle as protein and fat supplements, but refused to support the
ban because it would cost the meat industry money.

It was the livestock feed industry that led the effort in the early
1990s to lobby into law the Texas food disparagement act, and when an
uppity Oprah hosted an April 1996, program featuring rancher-turned
vegan activist Howard Lyman, she and her guest became the first people
sued for the crime of sullying the good name of beef. Oprah eventually
won her lawsuit, but it cost her years of legal battling and millions
of dollars. In reality, the public lost, because mainstream media
stopped covering the issue of mad cow disease. As one TV network
producer told me at the time, his orders were to keep his network from
being sued the way Oprah had been.

In the six years since the publication of "Mad Cow USA," Sheldon
Rampton and I have spoken out in media interviews, at conferences of
United States families who had lost relatives to CJD, and we saw our
book published in both South Korea and Japan. Our activism won us some
interesting enemies, such as Richard Berman, a Republican lobbyist who
runs an industry-funded front group that calls itself The Center for
Consumer Freedom. Berman is a darling of the tobacco, booze, biotech
and food industries, and with their funding he issued an online report
depicting us as the ring leaders of a dangerous conspiracy of
vegetarian food terrorists out to destroy the United States food
system. Last week alone he issued two national news releases
attempting to smear us.

Of course, he had an easier time attacking us before the emergence of
mad cow disease in America. I was saddened but not surprised when mad
cow disease was finally discovered in the United States. When the
first North American cow with the disease was found last May in
Canada, I told interviewers that if the disease was in Canada, it
would also be found in the United States and Mexico, since all three
NAFTA nations are one big free trade zone and all three countries feed
their cattle slaughterhouse waste in the form of blood, fat and
rendered meat and bone meal. In fact, in North America calves are
literally weaned on milk formula containing "raw spray dried cattle
blood plasma," even though scientists have known for many years that
blood can transmit mad cow type diseases.

(This is why if you try to donate your blood to the Red Cross, you
will be rejected if you spent significant time in Britain during the
height of its mad cow epidemic. Britain is afraid that humans with mad
cow disease may have contaminated the British blood supply, and they
do not use its own blood plasma since as yet no test can adequately
screen blood for mad cow disease.)

The United States has spent millions of dollars on PR convincing
Americans that mad cow could never happen here, and now the USDA is
engaged in a crisis management plan that has federal and state
officials, livestock industry flacks, scientists and other trusted
experts assuring the public that this is no big deal. Their litany of
falsehoods include statements that a "firewall" feed ban has been in
place in the United States since 1997, that muscle meat is not
infective, that no slaughterhouse waste is fed to cows, that the
United States tests adequate numbers of cattle for mad cow disease,
that quarantines and meat recalls are just an added measure of safety,
that the risks of this mysterious killer are miniscule, that no one in
the United States has ever died of any such disease, and on and on.

The latest spin is to blame the United States mad cow crisis on
Canada. On Saturday, December 27, with no conclusive proof whatsoever,
the United States Department of Agriculture announced that the mad cow
in Washington state had actually entered the United States years ago

>from Canada. This set off an understandable howl from the Canadian

government, and by Sunday the United States was forced to back off
somewhat, but clearly the PR ploy is to get Americans thinking that
this is Canada's problem, not ours.

Even if Canada does turn out to be the source of America's first case
of mad cow disease, numerous questions remain: How many other infected
cows have crossed our porous borders and been processed into human and
animal food? Why are United States slaughterhouse regulations so lax
that a visibly sick cow was sent into the human food chain weeks
before tests came back with the mad cow findings? Where did the
infected byproduct feed that this animal ate come from, and how many
thousands of other animals have eaten similar feed?

Since the announcement of United States mad cow disease our phones
have rung off the hook with interview requests. The New York Times
noted that "The 1997 book 'Mad Cow USA', by Sheldon Rampton and John
C. Stauber, made the case that the disease could enter the United
States from Europe in contaminated feed." Articles in the New York
Times also cited other warnings from Consumer Union's Michael Hansen,
and Dr. Stanley Prusiner, the Nobel Prize-winning researcher who this
week called the current United States practice of weaning calves on
cattle blood protein "stupid." All of this would be very vindicating,
except for one problem: the millions of dollars that the government
and industry are spending on PR to pull the wool over the public's
eyes might just succeed in forestalling the necessary steps that now,
at this late date, must still be taken to adequately deal with this
crisis.

The good news is that those steps are rather simple and
understandable. We should ship Ann Veneman and her smartest advisors
to Britain where they can copy the successful feed and testing
regulations that have solved the mad cow problem in Europe. Veneman
and her advisors should institute a complete and total ban on feeding
any slaughterhouse waste to livestock. You may think this is already
the case because that's what industry and government said they did
back in the summer of 1997. But beside the cattle blood being legally
fed back to cattle, billions of pounds of rendered fat, blood meal,
meat and bone meal from pigs and poultry are rendered and fed to
cattle, and cattle are rendered and fed to other food species, a
perfect environment for spreading and amplifying mad cow disease and
even for creating new strains of the disease.

The feed rules that the United States must adopt can be summarized
this way: you might not be a vegetarian, but the animals you eat must
be. The United States must also institute an immediate testing regime
that will test millions of cattle, not the 20,000 tested out of 35
million slaughtered in the past year in the United States. Japan now
tests all cattle before consumption, and disease experts like Dr.
Prusiner recommend this goal for the United States. And of course, no
sick "downer" cows, barely able to move, should be fed to any humans.
These are the type of animals most likely to be infected with mad cow
and other ailments -- although mad cows can also seem completely
healthy at the time of slaughter, which is why testing all animals
must be the goal.

Ann Veneman and the Bush administration, unfortunately, currently have
no plans to do the right thing. The United States meat industry still
believes that the millions of dollars in campaign contributions doled
out over the years will continue to forestall the necessary
regulations, and that soothing PR assurances will convince the
consuming public that this is just some vegetarian fear-mongering
conspiracy concocted by the media to sell organic food. Will the
American public buy this bull? It has in the past. Much depends on
journalists and what they are willing to swallow. It looks to me as if
papers such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are finally
putting some good investigative reporting teams onto this issue, and
that may undercut and expose PR ruses such as the "blame Canada
campaign."

What I can predict is that the international boycott of United States
beef, rendered byproducts, animals and animal products will continue,
and this will apply a major economic hurt to meat producers big and
small across the country. Will their anger turn against the National
Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Animal Feed Industry Association and
other lobbies that have prevented the United States from doing the
right thing in the past? Or will this become some sort of
nationalistic food culture issue, with confused consumers and family
farmers blaming everyone but the real culprits in industry and
government?

We must continue to advocate for the United States to do the right
thing: Follow the lead of the European Union nations, ban all "animal
cannibalism," and test more or all animals. In the meantime, if you
want safe American beef, search out products that are certified
organic and guaranteed not to be fed slaughterhouse waste such as calf
formula made from cattle blood. An excellent source of information on
the web is the site of the Organic Consumers Association.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/

Our book, "Mad Cow USA," is temporarily unavailable until a paperback
copy is released later in 2004. However, you can get the book in its
entirety for free through the website of our Center for Media &
Democracy. Simply go to www.prwatch.org and click on the cover of "Mad
Cow USA." You'll be taken to www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf where you
can download for free the entire book--and read the warnings that
went unheeded then, and are still being ignored by government
regulators and industry.

[http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17466]

* * *

PROTECT YOUR HEALTH AND THE HEALTH OF YOUR FAMILY:

MORE INFO, UPDATED CONSTANTLY, IS AT:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm

ALSO WWW.VEGANMD.ORG AND CLICK ON "TALKS" TO LISTEN TO PHYSICIAN
MICHAEL GREGER WHO HAS SPOKEN OUT ABOUT THIS SINCE THE EARLY 1990S

* * *

Sign the petition at:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm
***********************

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