| Winter
2004• Volume XIII, Number 1
The Mad Cow Threat: Is Beef Safe?
By Neal D. Barnard, M.D., president of PCRM
 Americans
have looked at beef skeptically since the emergence of mad cow disease
in the United States in December. Agriculture authorities scrambled
to find where the slaughtered cow’s remains had ended up,
and they killed other potentially affected cows. But the question
lingered: “Is beef safe?”
The answer is clearly no. Mad cow disease is transmitted by prions,
abnormal proteins that are immune to solvents and even to intense
heat and flame. The disease can be transmitted from infected sheep,
and, in fact, U.S. sheep have carried spongiform encephalopathies
since 1947. A similar disease also turned up on mink farms, where
farmers had used rendered cattle remains as feed.
In 1997, the U.S. Department of Agriculture banned the feeding
of ruminant animal (cow, sheep, and goat) remains to other ruminants.
But it allows livestock operations to fill their troughs with other
rendered animal remains and even chicken manure left over from huge
chicken operations.
| The real reason meat is not safe
relates to the illnesses that seem to have slipped out of the
public's spongiform memory. |
About 300 cases of the human form of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jacob
disease (CJD), are reported every year. Health authorities have
their fingers crossed, hoping that all are simply the “sporadic”
variety that is unrelated to meat-eating. But no one knows for sure—there
is no mandatory reporting of CJD.
But the real reason meat is not safe relates to the illnesses that
seem to have slipped out of the public’s spongiform memory.Before
mad cow emerged, beef was occasionally tainted with deadly E.
coli O157:H7. And before E. coli, salmonella was routinely
found, and still is. And before that, scientists learned that frequent
meat-eaters have approximately a three-fold increase in colon cancer
risk. And new evidence links animal fat to breast cancer. Decades
of evidence have linked animal protein to osteoporosis and kidney
damage, and, of course, there is good, old-fashioned fat and cholesterol.
A switch to chicken or to fish does not change any of this. Fish,
in particular, are loaded with mercury, pesticides, and organichlorine
contamination as a matter of routine. Fish and chicken contain significant
amounts of cholesterol and, while fat content varies from one species
to another, all poultry and fish products contain saturated fat—the
kind that promotes heart problems.
Happily, food distributors are rushing to your defense with veggie
burgers, veggie bacon and sausage, faux chicken and faux fish, and
just about everything else. As you wheel your grocery cart around
the produce shelves, you can take heart in the fact that no scientist
ever discovered a “mad carrot.”
Neal D. Barnard, M.D.
president of PCRM
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