Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Nothing to See Here

In the ‘90s, the UK suffered 140 deaths from Mad Cow Disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, BSE) possibly made worse by their taste for kidney pie. I worried that a single case of BSE in the US could collapse our beef market and then on December 23, 2003, it happened. A downer, Holstein cow pinged positive for the BSE prion in Washington state. The four-year-old cow was a Canadian import, so authorities believed she had been infected as a calf and brought the disease with her when she crossed the border. Dang imported beef. Knowing that cattle fed rendered animal byproducts had a higher incidence of BSE the USDA immediately blocked such feeds, prohibited the human consumption of downer cows and neural tissues, and began an extensive identification and testing of cattle at slaughter. In June of 2005, BSE popped up in a native Texas cow, an Alabama cow in March of 2006, and then again in a California cow in 2012. Because BSE is related to the prion diseases of Chronic Wasting Disease in deer and elk, and scrapie in sheep it likely will always be part of the American landscape.

Humans ingesting BSE prion contaminated foods can develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (vCJD). It is fatal. The pathogenic prion protein induces a fatal folding of cellular proteins in the brain. There is no treatment so avoiding prion infected tissues is our best preventative. The USDA deserves accolades in how they handled BSE, and this is timely because a new source of CJD has been discovered.

After experiencing 28 cases of fatal CJD in France between 1992 and 2019, 26 cases of this prion disease spiked overnight. Unlike typical CJD which can take a year to kill you, this new strain kills in days. This is Mad Cow Disease on steroids. As researchers were publishing their data in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research, 50 additional cases of CJD struck France. Interestingly, all 76 victims had recently received their second stroke poke, and this brings me to my point.

The USDA masterfully controlled BSE as they were motivated to protect public health using truth and science. Those fellas retired. Rather than serving a regulatory function, today’s FDA, CDC, NIH, and their French counterparts, run interference for the industries they are tasked to oversee. Every stroke poke injury is dismissed with the blanket statement “there is nothing to see here.” Had these fools been handling the US BSE outbreak in 2003, today we would have mad cows running through fences everywhere.