Mad Cow Exposes Cattle Industry

By DAVID BERNT

The Dec. 23 revelation that mad cow disease had been found in an animal in Washington state that had been slaughtered for meat has further exposed the dangerous conditions that exist in the beef industry.

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow, is a degenerative brain disease that affects cattle; similar diseases affect other ruminants, such as sheep and deer (pigs too have been found to be susceptible to the disease in the laboratory).

Cattle can contract BSE when they eat the tissue of other infected animals. And humans can contract a related condition, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, by eating meat from infected cattle. The disease progressively eats away at the brain, causing dementia, loss of motor functions, and eventually death. Mad cow is just the latest disease to show up in cattle as a result of factory farming. The cattle and meatpacking industries have been consolidated to the point where today four firms control 82 percent of beef packing. Whereas 30 years ago, there were 795 beef plants in the United States, today 18 giant plants dominate 80 percent of the market.

Since the Second World War, the industry has cut costs by switching to feed lots instead of allowing cattle to graze on the open range. At least three quarters of the cattle in this country now spend a major portion of their lives in feed lots, where they are fed grain and other substances (such as soybeans, tapioca, sugar beets, and growth-promoting hormones) designed to fatten them up and bring them to slaughter more quickly.

Non-food products are sometimes added to cattle feed—especially when grain prices rise. This may include paper, cement, and chicken manure and feathers. Surplus industrial products like citrus wastes in Florida, apple pulp in California, and cottonseed hulls in Texas are also added to the feed.

Factory farm cattle have also been fed the waste from the killing room floors, which often includes blood, tissue, brains, marrow, and other unsaleable part of animals.The feeding of animal remnants to cattle has been identified as the cause of mad cow disease for over a decade.

The banning of remnant feed and proper testing could eliminate the risk of both cattle and human infection. But the USDA and FDA have listened to the concerns of the cattle industry that testing and proper feeding would cost the industry too much. They have decided to put the profits of the industry ahead of the safety of working people.

In 1997, when the mad cow scare in Britain was at its height, the FDA announced regulations that they claimed would protect U.S. beef from mad cow. The new rules required that all animal feeds containing remnants from cows, sheep, and other ruminants be labeled as not appropriate for cattle.

But they continued to permit feeding those parts to pigs and non-mammals such as chickens. There is a danger that the remains of these animals, in turn, could find their way back into cattle feed—and thus infect people through the meat.

In addition, cow blood, which scientists say is capable of transmitting mad cow, continued to be fed to dairy cattle. Even with all of the loopholes, the FDA only got a 70 percent compliance rate from the very weak regulations, according to Sheldon Rampton, author of “Mad Cow USA.”

In response to the latest mad cow scare, on Dec. 30, the USDA announced that it would work to exclude certain high-risk meat parts from the food supply for people. Unfortunately, it said nothing about banning those potentially risky tissues from the feed for pigs and poultry.

Last year, about 20,000 of the 37 million cattle slaughtered for meat in this country were tested for BSE. This is projected to rise this year to 40,000 cattle tested under new, “more stringent” guidelines. In contrast, the European Union, with a similar sized cattle herd to that of the United States, tests almost a million cattle every month‚ while Japan tests every single cow.

The European Commission, in a July 2000 report, highlighted problems of testing in the United States by pointing out that “young age at slaughter makes it unlikely that fully developed clinical cases [of BSE] would occur (and could be detected).” The majority of U.S. cattle are slaughtered before they even reach age two.

In addition, current tests in use in the United States can take over a week to obtain results—which means that by the time an infected animal is discovered its meat might already have been consumed. There are more rapid tests on the market, and ones that can detect the disease even in very young animals with no symptoms, but the government, taking its lead from the cattlemen’s lobby, has resisted making use of them because of alleged costs.

The Washington state cow found to have mad cow disease is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. And mad cow itself is just one of many diseases caused by factory farming. E coli, caused by the residue of fecies in meat, has also sickened and killed consumers—some 20,000 a year, leading to about 500 deaths. Another 2 million get salmonella, resulting in about 2000 deaths.

The crowded conditions of factory farms put animals under great stress, and make them highly prone to infectious diseases. To fight these diseases—which can spread rapidly among their highly stressed animals—the cattle corporations dose them with antibiotics.

About a third of antibiotics manufactured in this country is used in animal feed. When people eat the meat of cattle raised on the factory farms, they also ingest microbes that have become resistant to antibiotics—creating great risks for fighting human diseases.

The actions of the cattle industry is just one symptom of an irrational social system that puts the needs of an elite few above those of the mass of humanity. The system that uses 50,000 carcinogens in its products every day, creates global warming that threatens the very future of the planet, pollutes the air and water, and feeds us tainted food is one that must be replaced.

Only by replacing capitalism with a system that serves the needs of all can we ensure not only safe and healthy food but a sustainable future for the entire planet.