Delta9

Passing on what news I hear/read..
The new HT has a big writeup about mad cow loose in America. As of now they no longer recommend bonemeal. As it's made from cows found dead from who knows what it WILL spread the disease. Apparently it's airborne, in the dust....
Just imagine your brain getting holes in it from trying to catch a buzz...
Don't mean to quit smokin..just stay healthy out there...??
One more reason to use chems...
D9

lilbuddie

Man what a bummer
Sounds like there were a couple of good articles in that issue.

Anyone have any news links on the situation?

LB

Delta9

If you're interested I can post it. It's pretty scary, I'm gonna start looking for home butchered organic meat.
D9

lilbuddie

Sure why not I'd like to see what it says

LB

Delta9

This is the entire article as it appeared in HIGH TIMES, #299 July 2000, minus some sidebars. Copied without permission...Ha!

MAD COWS AND ENGLISHMEN by Gabe Kirchheimer
Mad Cow disease has turned Britain on its head. Even as the number of infected cattle in the United Kingdom has been reduced 176,000 cases have been confirmed, 3.7 million cows have been destroyed. the likelihood of wide-spread human infection has increased.
The disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, literally destroys the brain, filling its tissue with spongy holes. The growing number of British victims of new variant, young people in their prime who contracted the brain sickness from tainted meat, is a grim precursor to an uncertain future. Consumption of British beef has plummeted; financial losses have been catastrophic. An exhaustive report prepared by the official UK BSE Inquiry, tracing the history of the continuing epidemic and the negligence of the authorities, is expected to be released this summer.
Mad Cows have now been found in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Denmark and Canada. The US Department of Agriculture maintains that no Mad Cows exist here, and has tested nearly 10,000 bovine brains in the last decade of 1.25 billion cattle raised in that period and found not a single case of Mad Cow disease. It is primarily this data upon which the agency bases their denials.
The stakes are extremely high. One infected animal, whose remains are "rendered, powdered and mixed into feed, can infect thousands of other animals, and the thousands of people who eat them. Leading food-safety advocates question the agency's small test sample, methodology and motives. They point out that USDA scientists are not likely to find the British variant of Madcow because, in fact, US cattle are likely infected with an entirely different strain or strains of BSE. Similar transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), or 'prion diseases," such as scrapie and chronic wasting disease (CWD), have been found in populations of American sheep, goats, deer, elk, mink, and squirrels. The deadly infection is acquired through contaminated feed and maternal transmission, and probably from contaminated areas and through close proximity of animals to one another.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human TSE, is still considered so rare the medical literature states only one in a million cases of 'classic' CJEJ occurs in humans that few doctors and neurologists even recognize the symptoms, which are frequently misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's disease. CJD robs victims of lucidity, control and life over a period ranging from six months to three years from the onset of symptoms, which can take from 10 to 40 years to manifest. Like all TSEs, CJD is 100 fatal. There is no treatment or cure. As no blood test forth living is available, CJD has been definitively diagnosed only through brain biopsy. The US Centers for Disease Control has repeatedly refused to mandate CJD unlike HIV and many other diseases- as reportable. With stories of CJD cases increasing, support groups have sprung up around the country and on the Web to demand action. The US Department of Agriculture sees no reason to advise the public at this time that eating US beef or pork constitutes a significant risk of infection with CJD, acquired from animals with TSEs. Neither does the USDA warn against other risks such as blood meal or horticultural bone meal, which can be easily inhaled or enter the body through the eyes, a direct route to the brain. Nor has the FDA communicated that numerous drugs and dietary supplements containing bovine ingredients, perhaps even gelatin capsules themselves, and cosmetics which include collagen and tallow are at uncertain risk of carrying the infectious agent a nearly indestructible mutant protein known as a prion which apparently causes CJD and other TSEs.
Neither have US doctors, surgeons and dentists been notified that surgical instruments are at highest risk of transmitting the infection, as standard autoclave sterilization does not neutralize infectious prions. Blood, blood products, bovine extracts and transplant organs are not screened for CJD in the US, although around the world infected organ recipients, who developed symptoms sometimes decades after treatment, have been traced to infected donors. Lack of government action is based on the assumption or deception that the United States is completely free of Mad Cow disease, other domesticated animals are equally unaffected, and that only the very rare "classic" strain of CJD, which primarily affects the elderly, and not British nvCJD or another strain, exists here. In actuality, a careful reading of the evidence indicates Mad Cows -as well as Mad sheep, deer and elk roam the land, and the incidence of human guilt is exponentially higher than the Centers for Disease Control has made clear. Several key studies show it is likely that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are dying right now of undiagnosed or misdiagnosed CJD.
In the wake of many CJD-contaminated blood recalls, on April 17 the US Food and Drug Administration and American Red Cross quietly instituted a "precautionary" ban on blood donations from individuals who have spent a total of six months or more in Britain between Jan. 1, 1980, and Dec. 31, 1998, although this is expected to reduce the shortage-plagued US blood supply by 2.2%,. (A similar Canadian ban is pending.) Disingenuous doublespeak on the Red Cross donor Q&A is not reassuring:
Q. Why are these people deferred from donating now, if they weren't in the past? A. deferral criteria do not apply to donors until the criteria is implemented A Red Cross press release statement that "There is no evidence that nvCJD is transmissible through blood or other means" is simply not supported by current research. "Top regulatory agencies in two nations don't make a decision of this magnitude on the basis of the meager information that has been publicly is closed," says Dr. Tom Pringle., a molecular biologist and the energetic administrator of the encyclopedic Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page
(www.mad-cow.org), a project of the Sperling Biomedical Foundation. Pringle believes that such steps are "too little, too late. With this many millions of Americans and Canadians exposed and possibly incubating disease for fifteen years already, it is only a matter of time before nvCJD manifests itself in North America in a person who has already given blood. And a lot of people there for under six months will continue to donate." Considering that the British Mad Cow crisis destroyed the UK beef market, precipitated a worldwide ban on British imports, exposed an official cover-up, and continues to induce severe public anxiety (even suicide among the "worried well"], many critics doubt the US government is offering complete and accurate information concerning grave problems affecting the large and powerful domestic meat, rendering, bone, gelatin, blood and medical industries. However, if one puts together all the pieces of the puzzle, gaping regulatory loopholes and evidence of widespread infection become apparent. In truth, America has probably been harboring many TSEs for decades. CJD's tremendous scientific complexity, long incubation period and symptomatic similarity to Alzheimer's has likely veiled the leading edge of a deadly epidemic in the United States. Mad Cow disease first gained the world's attention in March 1996, when officials of the World Health Organization and British authorities were forced to admit that 10 deaths from CJD were directly related to eating tainted beef. After widespread infection of British cattle was revealed, millions of cows were burned in high-security incinerators and the residue treated as biohazard waste. To date, 69 people in Britain have been diagnosed with nvCJD, although the total number of cases will certainly run higher. How much higher is now a matter of debate. Dr. Richard Lacey, a leading microbiologist whose early warnings were

reg

lilbuddie

I always hate reading stuff like this!! it makes me not to want to venture out of the house Good stuff to know and be aware of though!

Thx
LB

it seems last issue of HT is much better than this one!

Joker1.5

If the bone meal is baked at a high temp it's OK to use it. You have to check labels and product warnings. The FDA has been aware of the issue and has issued no warnings that I am aware of.

HydroGrower

The FDA has posted no warnings to pot growers not to use bone meal in their crops?? Well.. uh... go figure

HG