UDDER DENIAL or WHY MAD COW DISEASE MAY BE IN YOUR FRIDGE

Mad-Cow has to be the most intriguing fatal disease on the planet. Imagine the scenario you're walking along eating this hamburger, not knowing that as you munch, alien invaders are climbing out of the meat, through your tongue, bouncing like happy, yellow pac-men toward your brain which THEY will eat the way you're inhaling that burger. You don't know you're infected so you get married and have a child---who, you guessed it, is born with the Satan bug pre-loaded, already munching away at his brain.

The truth about Mad Cow is so horrific nothing is taught about it in med schools. Until a year ago, most scientists knew Jack in the Box about it---(malady originally found in cannibals but mysteriously, at times seemingly spontaneously in non-cannibals)--which was probably for the best. If doctors had known any more, med students would have realized they had no more than five or ten years to live, quit school and spent their last years surfing Tahiti.

A lot of people would have you believe only Mad-Cow and Englishmen go out in the Noon day sun. Hooey. Mad-cow has been killing American sheep since the early 70's, U.S. cows since the mid-80's, and U.S. citizens for the last decade.

The reason it hasn't been made public is that the people who had the facts chose to misinterpret them. They are in udder denial. Scientists have know the truth about Mad-Cow for ll years, since l985 when Britain's #1 researcher, a microbiologist, discovered and announced them. It took him a decade to publish his Feb, l995 book which claimed a hundred plus humans dead of Mad-Cow might imply the British beef supply was infected.

(Two prestigious medical journals trashed the book in scathing reviews the same week as a Rock group named "Mad-Cow Disease" made its London debut to rave reviews. Go figure.

Summer '95, the Canadian Red Cross had a blood recall when they discovered two infected Canadians had donated blood but the press only wanted to talk about a sick bull whose owner refused to destroy him. The November '95 issue of the

British Medical Journal suggested the possibility that maybe people got Mad Cow from eating beef. Three million Brits immediately quit eating beef.

Mad-Cow hit our shore in two blows --the first January 12th, l996, when John Darnton wrote a long article on balmy bovines for the New York Times, the second March 20th, l996, when the British government finally admitted to the world that the obscure, brain-disintegrating cow malady called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Latin for sponge brains) was the same disease found in a lot of dead sheep, in the brains of several hundred dead Brits and the same disease that turned cannibals' minds to mush back in New Guinea in the 1940's.

White man wasn't supposed to get the cannibal bug. Papuans deserved things like that. These dumb-nuts ate their deceased family members' brains as a social ritual, hoping to keep their relatives thoughts 'alive' and know the future.

Once a Papuan was infected, any children born, automatically had the infection incubating inside them and the whole family died dingy. It was a weird sickness which deserved the most obscure name possible and "Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease" did the job.

CJD was a 'prion' disease, so called after the minuscule protein particle that seemed to cause it, not a bacteria, not a microbe, but a virus, a sub-microscopic speck that had no DNA or genetic structure, A Flying Dutchman of a protein particle like an unpiloted plane, just a few simple atoms of death strung on an amino ribbon floating single-mindedly through a mammalian body until it found the area where it loves to root, the brain. There, the prion embeds itself, bonding with a single healthy protein molecule and like a cult leader, instructing him to mutate into a twisted prion like itself. Then, the newly converted devotee molecule does the same thing, converting another normal cell, setting off a chain reaction-series of imploding, self-destructing cells, leaving large, ventilated, vacant spaces. The cult is as lethal as it is patient not caring if it burns down the church as it quite happily decays into the ground, hungrily waiting a few centuries for another victim.

Though science would have us believe CJD can be sporadic, or appear out of nowhere, CJD enters us only when another person's flesh is eaten. White men didn't eat their brothers, so there was no thought in early researchers, Cruetzfeldt-Jacob, that bwana could get this bizarre mush brain syndrome. But as a wise man once said, science never advances so fast as when it is dead wrong.

If there are coherent universes contained inside coherent universes, microcosms above and below, why can't germs have feelings and aspirations? As germs go, this one was a bug with imagination. It wasn't interested in crawling on the savannah of Papua, in some blade of grass, It wanted 'the big time,' so it waited until a chipmunk ate the grass, the aborigine ate the chipmunk then the germ tap-danced up the poor man's brain stem to the man's brain, eating holes in this gray matter until the cerebrum resembled a big, gray sponge and the host became spastic, mindless and started laughing, as mindless people everywhere do, only this fellow would laugh himself to death and then, as if to 'get' the joke, his children ate his brain.

At first, the disease seemed kind of fun. Imagine Cruetzfeldt and Jacob coming upon this native, laughing himself to death with kuru, (the Papuan name for it) then embarking for Europe, with the laughing man's pickled brain in a jar. Seeing no germs in any lens of the period, they threw this spongy cauliflower into their little British garden. A trillion prions abated into the ground, waiting for some low-grazing animal to come munching toward them, and along came the family pet, Wooly the Ram. Bingo! It's Mega-death starring The Cannibal Bug opening at the Palladium.

That might well have been the scenario for, after New Guinea, the disease's next official appearance involved a big, geographic leap. In the 70's, it appeared in the sheep herds of Britain. British sheepherders, with Celtic poesy, called the penchant "scrapie" after the sick sheep's habit of rubbing up against things.

As breeders traded sheep like baseball cards, scrapie moved to sheep herds in America which in 1970 had an epizootic amount of laughy, rubbing sheep. For a while farmers wondered if their teen-aged kids had dosed herds with some of those new-fangled, hippie drugs. Rams and ewes who had never met a cannibal started exhibiting an odd, itch to scrape their heads and hides against fences, even if the fences were barbed wire. No one suspected that scrapie was just that old Papuan wolf hiding in sheep's clothing. It was beyond imagination that a cannibal infection on one, isolated continent could leap to food chain-animals on another continent, unless the unseen six fingered hand of some alien gray Dr. Pasteur was at work. Maybe all those cattle mutilations in the South West were really UFO research, designed to vacate this fine planet of bothersome earthlings, fitting it for new, silvery skinned tenants.

Or were cattle mutilations the work of "local talent" who didn't want to alarm farmers with requests for cow labia? In l970, the U.S Dept of Agriculture and National Institute of Health were on some kind of secret detail. They collected thousands of scrapie-infected sheep, examined them, isolating the animals in pens, in up-state New York, but then, according to Howard Lyman of the U.S. Humane Society, (an ex cattle rancher who was privy to all this), the NIH (i.e. Washington) sold the sick animals to farmers across the USA.

When these sheep later died, unsuspecting farmers sold their corpses to the rendering industry to make cattle feed, in order to GET l00$ rather than SPEND 500$ for an autopsy. Unwittingly, the U.S. Government had sent a gaggle of happy little Papuan prions off to have their way with a lot of unsuspecting American cows.

In the USA there is an enormous industry of turning cow corpses into Soylent Green to fatten livestock, called 'feeder cattle,' meaning cattle raised to be eaten by cattle. This practice is so solidly entrenched in the USA that you can actually trade commodity futures on 'feeder animals.'

Back in the 70's the delegated feeders were sheep who'd died of scrapie.This was simply American frugality to use up all those imported, sick sheep. Grinding up dead animals worked well for American ranchers; cows buffed up into Schwarzeneggers so Brits began doing it to their dead sheep and in the 70's, Brits were losing a lot of sheep to scrapie. Why not cut losses with cash for corpses? Trusting beef-farmers bought hi-protein certain-death feed for their cows for the next 18 years. Because the UK had an enormous percentage of sheep to cows, every cow got a daily, heaping serving of kibbled sheep. And poor, trusting Brits ate a lot of the infected sheep too, as in Britain, mutton is consumed.

For the first time since Papua, humans got prions in their brains. How not to? Farmers and butchers couldn't see that a sheep was ill. At slaughter time, the dementia hadn't yet manifested. Even if it had, in l974, the top UK microbiologist/researcher, Dr. Richard Lacey and his U.S. counterpart, Dr. Stanley Prusiner had only just set up their electron microscopes to study prion diseases. In those days researchers thought prion diseases were only genetic.

The fact that they were infectious first, later becoming genetic was beyond imagination. So get the picture 26 years ago, microbiologists in two countries could see the bug, farmers, veterinarians and butchers couldn't. There were no antibody markers visible at any time during incubation so sick ewes freely gave their illness to their baby lambs who carried the bug straight to human tables. In Britain, mutton may have infected Brits. We say 'may' as there is a theory that CJD does not come to humans through sheep, but rather, after another step up the food chain, through sheep-kibble to cows, then through beef steak into human mouths. The logic of science is hazy to the point of denial here as there were human dementia deaths in the 70's but they were ascribed to Alzheimer's, the disease that was giving doctors deep-pockets, so prions, sheep and sloppy doctors were all off the hook.

But all that was soon to change. In l985, British farmers noticed that an illness suspiciously like scrapie turned up in a cow. Patient Zero was a Holstein dairy cow who started kicking like a chorus girl, developed an extreme case of the jitters then fell over dead. Her brain was examined posthumously, its Swiss cheese appearance noted and the disease given the name "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" or BSE, a whole letter away in the dictionary from Cruetzfeldt and a dictionary away from 'Scrapie.'

In a cow, the bug caused more than just an itch to scrape. BSE was a true "Dementia" disease, like Alzheimer's is for humans, i.e. memory loss, motor function changes, loss of large movements like walking ability. Eyesight is lost, the ability to make fine movements with the hands, loss of spacial arrangements like parking a car. A lot of that is not crucial to a cow, but it was hard for the farmer to milk Bessie when she was splayed on the ground shaking, screaming and dancing around like James Brown. A cow is a lot more valuable than a sheep. Beef-farmers demanded answers. At first, nobody connected spastic cows with the scrapie sheep of the 70's and certainly not with New Guinea cannibals of the 40's but in l986, a professor of Microbiology at Leeds University, consultant to the W.H.O., Dr. Richard Lacey, announced that scrapie, BSE and CJD were the same thing, that beef disease was in the meat supply, could kill humans and that a wave of deaths would soon hit Britain.

Lacey was called 'an airy-fairy, politically suspect vegan,' and accused of trying to dismantle the 6 billion dollar a year British beef industry. His funding was pulled. Like a Cassandra, he stuck to his guns, warning there was going to be a fatal outbreak, saying that people should stop eating beef and that newspapers should start warning people of the possibility of human infection. Lacey felt that 100,000 people were already infected. His prophecies made Beef-eaters and especially beef-farmers edgy and got him fired but his words weren't ignored. The government created an Official Advisory Council, (leaving the nation's only expert, Lacey, off the board) which told farmers not to worry, that while feeding powdered sheep corpses to live cows probably wasn't a good idea (even if the idea had been given to them by American ranchers, who practiced 'the grisly, fleshly humus pile' method for buffing up beef to the tune of huge profits,) Brit farmers could do as they wanted. That was l986. And the band played on.

In late l987, 700 BSE-infected cows were reported in Britain. By Summer 1988, the number had climbed to 7,000. Out of one side of their mouth, the experts said they were stumped. Out of the other side of their face they created a l988 law making the use of sheep and bovine offal illegal. Europe, Asia and America heard about the law, realized the livestock they'd been importing was infected and en masse boycotted British sheep and beef, causing millions of pounds sterling profits to vaporize.

The sacrificial lamb-ban was a case of too little too late. British livestock with tourist cards were grazing in every country of the world, and had entered the breeding stock with a baa, moo and a Mona Lisa smile. The entire world had been eating imported British beef and lamb chops well since the ground floor of the disease in the 70's so laughing Papuan prions were pac-manning up brainstems from Budapest to Bora Bora.

The world ban on beef, the Prophet of Leeds, and the '88 law against grinding up sheep did not stop the progression of BSE in England. Cows kept dying. Brits waited for the next hoof to fall and fall it did. The number of infected dead cows soared from 1989's mere 7000 to 36,000 in 1992. In eleven years,160,000 British cows had gone four hoofs to the sky and there still wasn't an official murmur about human contagion---aside from Crazy Lacey whom no one took seriously,--- not a mention of the possibility of the disease munching its way another insidious step up the food chain but the 90's, the human form of the disease, CJD, began to show its sub-atomic teeth.

In 1993, WHO figures indicated a total of 250 suspected, 117 proven CJD deaths with the average age of the victims being 27 years (descending from the former CJD average of 63 years). But the bell didn't stop tolling 56 Brits died of CJD in l994, followed by 42 cases in l995. March 20th, l996, Agriculture Minister Dorrell announced to the world that British scientists "suspected a link" between BSE and it's human equivalent, CJD. A link between spongy brains in British cows and the even spongier brains in British politicians was finally officially on the record. Dorrell's admission caused a furor which put photos of stumbling, cross-eyed, drooling cows on TV's across the planet and made England's Wimpys and McDonalds burger shops stop serving beef and begin marketing a soy patty, (which they did for all of three days until they had some European beef flown in and started resupplying the real thing.) Vegans picketed the MacMeister and got their asses sued --- the world's first case of 'McLibel.' English schools immediately stopped serving beef in cafeterias. All this ruckus shot American beef, grain, soy and especially corn prices sky high in slavering anticipation of the US cornering the feed market as it became necessary to fatten the planet's cows on something other than their dead brothers. Staunchly, Prime Minister Major and the German and Italian politicians ate veal chops for lunch in Turin as they haggled over the ban, taking us back to an earlier Brit minister who'd force-fed his gagging 4-year old daughter a burger in front of the press corps. The Royal Family stodgily continued to serve beef at Buckingham Castle, recalling how, during WWII, they patriotically stayed in London dodging bombs alongside commoners but the bravura was really profiteering, pro-beef drama to keep the British beef industry alive and shouldn't make us forget the important question---why hadn't the 7 year ban on British Lethal sheep powder stopped the progress of the disease in Britain? THIRTEEN REASONS WHY IT DIDN'T & MAD COW IS IN YOUR FRIDGE TODAY

1.) MAD COW, SCRAPIE and CJD are mutations of a cannibal disease. A mammal gets it by eating the infected flesh of another mammal, although corneal transplants and pituitary injections also carry it.

2.) US/Brit Sheep were infected simultaneously back in the 70s. In both countries, sheep's dead bodies were turned into protein powder and fed to cows. Britain banned 'death kibble' in '88. It's still 100% legal in USA.

3.) MAD COW causes NO ANTIBODY RESPONSE. When infection enters any body, human or animal, the victim's immune system shows no sign of fighting the infection as it does with bacteria, germs and viruses which means the mammal's immune system can neither detect nor fight it nor can scientists use the antibody-search method to see if someone is sick, as we do with AIDS.

4.) CJD disease takes 10-50 years to eat away the human brain. In COWS, death strikes as early as one year after exposure, as late as 8.

5. ) Mad-cow causes a genetic mutation which is transmissible so if you have it and are starting a family all your children will have it. Sheep and cows pass it to offspring, too and chickens to their eggs. If it weren't transmissable, why for decades had the FDA has demanded that all donors to the blood supply answer the question 'has anyone in your family died of Cruetzfeldt-Jacob?' The disease is l00% inherited and one drop of blood of a descendant of a CJD victims can infect all your descendents down through time.

6.) No scientist can tell if a cow or human is in an incubating phase. Except for brain biopsies, there are no tests, no genetic markers. Prions are not reliably found in urine. You can see prions in brain tissue but you canno open the skull of a live mammal to scoop them out. If a cow whose milk you are drinking has it, her calf, sent to be a veal chop last Winter, had it when you ate him. An older cow may fall over dead with it, but meanwhile her sick, offspring are long gone to human tables. The long incubation period means the farmer can't see that the animal is ill. The USDA studies the brain of 100 cows per hundred thousand --- a snippet of a sample indeed.

7.) Mad-Cow is killing faster and faster. It was once thought humans could incubate the disease for up to five decades without going into the final, dementia stage but lately Brit teens have been dying of it so it appears Mad-Cow prions evolve the way everything else does. The mutation is toward legs.

8.) The only way for a farmer to find the disease in his herd is via a 500$ autopsy. Farmers prefer selling the corpse to a rendering factory for $l00 profit, a practice still legal in the America at this time of writing.

9.) Mad Cow prions can't be killed the way we fought the plague or fight cholera epidemics, or Ebola, by burning bodies. It is passed on via 'prions',proteins that degrade at 800 fahrenheit, way above the temperature that would reduce them to ash. What is more, burning is a bad idea, as prion molecules go up in the smoke, airborne and fall back on the land. As they were never alive, they do not die. These zombie molecules just wait for the next set of munching teeth. As Britain is considering burning 5 million cows soon, loosing the prions like some ghostly stampede in the sky, the air and water there may soon be contaminated. Cancel your Summer trip. The place will soon be a giant science experiment.

10.) Though Mad-Cow attacks brains, it's thought to be in every part of the cow, his flesh, blood, urine. The contamination cannot be removed by cooking or powdering him. A British Vegan woman caught it simply by dusting her roses with blood meal.

11.) USA has had thousands of 'downer' cows (dying mysteriously) since l981. Dr.Richard Marsh, a virologist on the Veterinary staff at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, stated that he had seen 100 cases of BSE in America, between 1981 and 1989. If the bug entered US beef 15 years ago and has been multiplying ever since, a million cows could be infected.

12.) MAD-COW mortality figures hide behind the skirts of Alzheimer's. Some U.S. doctors know the truth yet haven't blown whistles. Pittsburgh Veterans hospital autopsied 53 sequential Alzheimer's victims. Sampling 1 showed 5.5% had died of Mad-Cow, sampling #2 that 6.3 Percent died of Mad-Cow. Alzheimer's death tolls are doubling and tripling, not characteristic of a genetic disease ergo the shadowy presence of another PROBABLE CAUSE.

13.) No lab in USA will do a Mad-cow autopsy as the prion cannot be burned out, sterilized afterwards so on all our death certificates, officially, we're going to die of you guessed it, ALZHEIMER's and the cows? They're downers. That's all. Since beef and sheep farmers have been sending 'downer' livestock to rendering factories to be made into 'protein powder' for livestock for the last 26 years, Mad Cow prions could be in every ounce of meat, milk, pork, chicken, egg, cheese, or butter you have eaten since l970 and in every bite you eat today and in gelatin caps, animal glandular supplements and in the glue on the postage stamp you will use to mail a xerox of this article to your Aunt Edna. Forget Ebola which kills you so fast you can't move ten feet and give it to anyone else and which you can blow out like a birthday candle with a good bonfire. Mad Cow is the most prevalent, virulent disease to hit this planet since the plague. Conceivably it could represent the end of all human life here, vacating the orb for a new, Vegetarian Adam and Eve to bring forth a new, meat-free race, or for Pleidean squatters to turn into Acapulco. It is certain that we will see many more cases associated with CJD than we have ever seen with AIDS as Mad Cow infection has been found all over Europe. Figures for sick cows to l995.

BRITAIN 157,394

Switz 205

Ireland 120

Portugal 30

France 16

Germany 4

Italy 2

Canada 1

Denmark 1

There are no official figures given for the US. That someone wants to hide the problem, let a tidal wave of CJD deaths be ascribed to Alzheimer's to bolster a troubled economy at the expense of its people might be inferred from U.S. official silence. A few days after the Brit admission, the USDA issued statements that American beef was clean. "The US did not use sheep for bypass protein cattle feed." This is an outright lie. In the USA, thousands of downer sheep have been used to feed cows and of late, America has an enormous amount of 'downer' cows to feed them, too. From the Pittsburgh sampling we realize that there are hundreds if not thousands of CJD deaths in America but they are passed off as Alzheimer's. BSE is entrenched in American beef regardless of what the US Government wants you to believe, and boy, there seems to be an effort to control what you believe. Ted Koppel interviewed Dr. Richard Marsh on Nightline two weeks ago. It went like this.

Koppel But we (USA) don't feed sheep brains to cows, do we?"

Marsh blinked. "I don't know where your information comes from, but we do." He was instantly cut off by a commercial and did not reappear that night. (Capitol Cities which owns ABC was founded by William Casey of the CIA. It is as close to being an official mouthpiece of the oligarchy as exists. Oh hey, get real. Why do you think Kissinger is their favorite 'witness.' He's practically the ABC poster boy. The truth is, Virologist Vet Marsh knows of what he speaks. All those BSE cow bodies he saw in Wisconsin 1981-1989 had been fed dead sheep yet the cows' became 'feeder cattle' and went to feed thousands of other cows who have bred thousands of animals. Papuan prions have been spread to herds from Maine to Hawaii. Knowing the genetic mode of transmission of the disease is to all offspring, it is reasonable to suspect that there is sponge brain infection slowly crawling up the brain stem of every cow in America as well as all the humans who have eaten them as well as all the offspring of both species. And to pigs, chickens who were also fattened with the deadly Soylent Green. As a poultry farmer told a prion researcher, "rendering salesmen brought us bags of this powder saying it was wonderful stuff and had ever so many uses we could use it for fertilizer or to feed our chickens." As so many CJD deaths are masked as Alzheimer and private labs won't let CJD tissue in the door to be examined, it is certain the American public will not be informed of the disease that is in our food, our kitchens and our bodies. We are scheduled to be 'downers' and Ted Koppel doesn't want us to know it.

-- ... (...@aol.com), December 25, 2000

Answers

It's TEOTWAWKI!!!!!

We are doomed!!! The end of mankind is neigh, head for the hills!!!

It's Farnhands Freehold!!!

Even vegetarians are not immune, they like that organically grown food, grown with natural fertilizers like cow dung.

That's why there is such an increase of E-coli in fruit and veggies, they are grown that way.

Give me good old tried and true sterilized compost any day. There was after all a reason we developed safe fertilizers in the first place. Just like preservatives in food, people used to die from botchalism, especially from tomato products, before we came up with safe ways to preserve foods in cans and jars.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), December 25, 2000.

You don't even have to wait 10 years, your brain is already gone.

-- (u@mad.maniac), December 25, 2000.

cheese, eggs, and postage stamps too?!

shit this is depressing

-- cin (cin@cin.cin), December 25, 2000.