MAD COW DISEASE IS OUT THERE!    STAY INFORMED!

( Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy - BSE )

CJD (Mad Cow Disease) Symptoms

• The initial stage of the disease can be subtle with ambiguous symptoms of insomnia, depression, confusion, personality and behavioral changes, strange physical sensations, and problems with memory, coordination and sight. As the disease advances, the patient experiences a rapidly, progressive dementia and in most cases, involuntary and irregular jerking movements known as myoclonus. Problems with language, sight, muscular weakness, and coordination worsen. The patient may appear startled and become rigid. In the final stage of the disease, the patient loses all mental and physical functions. The patient may lapse into a coma and usually dies from an infection like pneumonia precipitated by the bedridden, unconscious state. The cerebrospinal fluid most often appears normal, except for an occasional elevation in the protein content.

CJD (Mad Cow Disease) Locations In The U.S.

• In the case of a 32-year-old foot surgeon from Brooklyn, N.Y., Dr. Stacey Crair, she suddenly started toppling over.

• Nearby on Long Island, a water safety engineer named Mike Nofi remembers that his 30-year-old wife, Wendy, suddenly started feeling like "she was on a boat."

• In 1979, Doi had conducted a study for USDA of 106 pigs with a mysterious disorder at a packing plant in upstate New York. The pigs showed symptoms that were strikingly similar to the characteristics of scrapie or transmissible mink encephalopathy:

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Wednesday, 15 November, 2000, 22:39 GMT

CJD risk 'higher than thought' The incubation period of vCJD is unknown

The long-term risk of developing vCJD may be higher than thought, according to research among a Papua New Guinea tribe.

It has been a widely accepted theory that only a few people with a particular genetic makeup will be susceptible to the infectious agent, or prion, which is believed to be the cause of the illness.

And, indeed, it has been shown that all 88 victims of vCJD in the UK shared certain characteristics which could conceivably have placed them at a higher risk of developing the human form of mad cow disease.

Some experts have even taken the view that those without this genetic makeup might be immune to vCJD.

However, research into a closely related disease, presented at last week's Millennium Festival of Medicine, and reported in New Scientist magazine, suggests that this protection may be illusory.

Scientists travelled to Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific where a form of human CJD has killed more than 2,500 members of the Fore tribe in the past century.

The reason behind the swift spread of the disease was the custom of eating the brains of dead relatives as a sign of respect.

When this practice was banned more than four decades ago, the number of deaths from the variant, called Kuru, fell away.

Long incubation period

But more recently, there has been a rise in the number of elderly Kuru victims.

Interestingly, tests on 11 victims revealed they all had the genetic makeup thought to offer protection against CJD infection or development.

This suggests that those with the "protective" genes may still get ill - although not as quickly as those with the susceptible makeup. The delay in the onset of symptoms could be as much as 30.

This would mean that new cases of vCJD in the UK might crop up well into the second half of this century.

Professor Peter Smith, who chairs the UK Government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, said: "It doesn't rule out the possibility that the incubation period is longer in people of that genotype."

The unknown incubation period of any possible vCJD infection is the main reason why scientists are unable to place a reliable figure on how many people are likely to fall ill with the disease.

Any number from 150 to 100,000 people in the UK might fall ill and die, according to some estimates.

If the suggestion of the Papua New Guinea researchers is correct, the number of likely victims will increase.

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By GEOFF GIBBS The Guardian November 14, 2000

Lion in British zoo had form of 'mad cow disease'

LONDON - A lion at a zoo in the west of England was suffering from the feline version of "mad cow disease" when it was put down earlier this year.

Staff at Newquay Zoo in Cornwall disclosed Tuesday how Major, a 12-year-old male, was put to sleep in August after failing to recover from injuries sustained in a fight with another lion several years ago.

But results of a postmortem showed the animal was suffering from feline spongiform encephalopathy (FSE), the cat equivalent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the formal name for mad cow disease.

Officials at the British Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food in London were informed of the case after samples from the animal's brain were sent for laboratory tests.

But a ministry spokeswoman said the case was not felt to be a concern. "These animals don't go into the food chain," she said. "You are more at risk of getting mauled by a lion in a safari park than you are getting BSE from one."

The zoo's managing director, Mike Thomas, said staff had had no idea that the animal had the disease. "It was a very surprising piece of news for us," he said. "I would expect it would have had to come from Major eating part of a whole carcass, as it is the brain and spinal chord which carry the disease."

Although cases of FSE in big cats in Britain are not unprecedented, Major is only the third lion confirmed to have had the disease.

Official figures show a wide variety of exotic species have succumbed to mad cow disease-type illnesses since the first recorded death of a zoo animal from such a disease in June 1986. Most of the deaths have occurred among the species, with tigers, ocelot, puma and cheetah all falling victim. Isolated cases have also been reported among ruminants.

Major arrived at Newquay after fights with an older dominant male at Longleat Safari Park, south of Bristol in the west of England. When conventional treatment failed to work, zoo staff called in a local faith healer to try to cure the spinal problems Major had been left with as a result of the fighting. But the lion's health continued to go downhill, and in August he was put to sleep.

Keith Harris, head warden at Longleat Safari Park, which boasts 25 lions, said the park had not had any problems with FSE.

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Nov 27 2000 3:04PM

Mad Cow Confidence Crisis Spreads in Europe

BERLIN (Reuters) - European governments struggled to contain the political fallout from a widening mad cow disease scare on Monday as German consumers became the latest to lose their appetite for beef amid health fears.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder rejected charges his government had mishandled the situation, after the discovery of the first German cattle infected with mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) plunged the country into the center of Europe's mad cow health scare on Friday.

"I think we have shown that we are capable of acting swiftly and precisely," he told reporters before a regular leadership meeting of his ruling Social Democrats in Berlin.

Germany and Spain have been the latest to find cases of BSE, which has been linked to the human form of the fatal, incurable and brain-wasting new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) that has killed more than 80 Britons.

European Health Commissioner David Byrne said in Berlin that Germany -- instrumental in establishing the 1996 European Union ban on British beef -- had been complacent in thinking itseelf free of the disease.

"I don't believe the German government acted consciously irresponsibly," he said. "They believed they were BSE-free and adopted a particular approach which was not cooperative with EU efforts to introduce legislation to protect consumers.

No EU state could guarantee its beef was free of mad cow disease Byrne said later in response to reports that Ireland planned to market its beef as BSE-free.

EU farm ministers were set to hold a special meeting next Monday in Brussels to discuss the disease, French sources said.

FORCED TO DELAY BAN

In a desperate effort to win back consumer confidence in domestic beef, Germany tried to impose an immediate blanket ban on meat- and bone-meal in animal feed.

But the planned ban was delayed until Saturday at the earliest because the government said the original emergency plan was not legally viable.

Rumors of a ban boosted prices of alternative ingredients, such as soy and grapeseed, in commodities markets as traders speculated that the rest of the EU could follow Germany's lead.

However, EU Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler said the EU must tread carefully, as a blanket ban could prove expensive.

"We estimate the cost of destroying these meals in the EU at three billion euros ($2.53 billion), which would correspond, in addition, to a loss of 1.5 billion euros per year for producers," Fischler was quoted as saying by French daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Other European countries voted with their stomachs. Poland's farm ministry confirmed that it was banning imports of beef from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain to protect the country against mad cow disease.

Britain's food safety watchdog wanted assurances from France that beef exports did not pose a threat to public health.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said it would visit France on Wednesday before making a number of recommendations to the British government, including whether or not it should apply a partial or total ban on French beef.

Italy's health minister Umberto Veronesi said that from the beginning of next year, any cow heading to Italian slaughter houses will have to be tested for BSE.

He said Italy was also making plans to trace meat from birth to butcher, allowing consumers to know how the animal had been fed, where it had lived and when it had been slaughtered.

SHOCKED CONSUMERS

Germany has long said mad cow disease was not a threat, citing a superior feedstuff standard.

That assertion was blown apart last Friday by the discovery of a BSE-infected cow born in 1996 in the northern region of Schleswig-Holstein. A second cow exported from the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt to Portugal has also tested positive.

German consumers, long told that BSE was essentially a problem for less fastidious countries, were shocked by the news that German cows too had the disease.

"I'm definitely giving up beef," said pensioner Kurt Hermann, pointing to the chicken he had just bought in response to the health scare.

"We only have BSE here because Germans eat so much meat. Back in the old days, we only ate meat on Sundays," the retired construction foreman said.

Post-office worker Andreas Eggers, 34, said as he wolfed down pork-based bratwurst: "I'm certainly going to stop eating beef -- at least until all cattle have been tested for BSE."

One Berlin butcher said beef sales in his shop had fallen by about a third since news that two German cattle had died of BSE.

British scientists said on Monday they believed the disease had spread in Europe years ago and government blindness at the time may mean radical measures were now needed to fight the brain-wasting disease.

They said Europe should learn from Britain's experience in combating BSE and should not repeat the mistakes politicians made during earlier campaigns to reassure the public.

BSE first hit the headlines in Britain in 1986. The crisis reached fever pitch a decade later after scientists said they believed there was a link between mad cow disease and its human equivalent, which causes dementia, blindness, paralysis and eventually death.

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Nov 28 2000 12:34PM

EU to Rule Wednesday on French Mad Cow Measures

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission said its scientists would rule on Wednesday on whether national bans on French beef and meat-based animal feed, imposed amid the widening mad cow crisis, were justified.

The panel of scientists was meeting on Tuesday and the commission said it would gather again on Wednesday.

"The Scientific Steering Committee will only finalize its opinion on BSE-related issues tomorrow morning," the Commission said in a statement on Tuesday evening. "There will be no further news tonight."

After a sharp rise in the number of cases in France of the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the French government stepped in to quell consumer panic, banning T-bone steaks and meat-based animal feed.

Many of France's EU partners went further. Spain, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands were among those to impose national curbs on imports of French cattle and beef.

EU farm ministers agreed last week that all national action in the crisis had to be judged by EU scientists, and dropped if found to be unjustified.

Commission spokeswoman Beate Gminder earlier warned that such opinions were rarely clear-cut.

Asked if the Commission would propose an EU-wide ban on meat-based feed for all animals, Gminder said: "it depends on the view of the scientists and on the conclusions the Commission draws from this opinion."

The panel also looked at steps taken by France, including its blanket ban on the meat-based feed which is suspected of spreading BSE through the national cattle herd.

COMMISSION TO DEBATE BSE ON WEDNESDAY

The EU executive meets for its weekly session on Wednesday, and may take extra steps to reassure consumers across Europe who are shunning beef and sending prices plunging.

The EU's food safety and agriculture Commissioners David Byrne and Franz Fischler may hold a joint a press conference after the meeting, EU officials said.

Any proposals from the EU executive will go to an emergency farm ministers meeting on Monday, called in part to stop the crisis spilling over into the summit of EU leaders scheduled a few days later in Nice, France.

The scare has widened almost daily.

Last week Germany and Spain found BSE in their own cattle herds for the first time. The discovery hit Germany particularly hard, sending beef sales plummeting, just as in France.

A hotline set up by the German government for worried consumers crashed on Tuesday after being inundated with calls.

Germany has joined calls for a total ban on meat-based feed, forming a powerful alliance with France and Britain.

However, not all EU countries support such a move.

Austrian Farm Minister Wilhelm Molterer said that extending the existing ban from cattle and sheep to pigs and poultry would lead to much higher imports of protein-rich soybeans from the United States, raising the issue of genetically modified crops.

"I can't just replace one emotional debate with another," Molterer told state radio.

And Fischler, the architect of the export ban on British beef that was removed last year, has warned that a ban on meat-based feed would cost billions of euros.

More than 80 people have died in Britain from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD), the human form of BSE. There have already been two deaths in France, with more predicted.

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Nov 30 2000 4:08PM

German Scientists Test Soil for Possible BSE Link

BERLIN (Reuters) - Scientists took soil samples on Thursday from the farm hit by Germany's first case of mad cow disease to try to discover whether cattle can contract the brain-wasting disorder from grazing in fields.

The tests came after Environment Minister Juergen Trittin warned this week that the agents causing bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in dung might survive and multiply in the ground.

Separately, Germany's lower house of parliament voted in favor of legislation to ban the use of meat-based feeds for livestock, blamed for spreading the disease.

The measure should also clear the upper house of parliament on Friday and take effect on Saturday, making it the fastest act of legislation in Germany in over a quarter of a century.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder met regional leaders on Thursday evening to discuss who would pay the 350 million marks ($155 million) cost of destroying stocks of animal-based feeds.

Sigmar Gabriel, premier of the state of Lower Saxony, said he was confident the regional states would not be called on to foot the entire bill.

"I believe the federal government will pay its share of these costs," Gabriel told reporters before the meeting.

The European Commission on Wednesday urged a ban throughout the European Union on such feed and proposed other tough measures to rebuild public confidence in beef.

GERMAN CONSUMERS FEARFUL

German consumers have been unsettled by fears that eating beef could lead to an outbreak of the fatal human equivalent of BSE, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which has killed over 80 people in Britain and two in France.

Seeking to allay those fears, Health Minister Andrea Fischer said her ministry would issue a compulsory order next week for BSE tests on all slaughtered cattle over 30 months old -- the age when tests for the slow-incubating disease become reliable.

"Otherwise meat from these animals cannot go on sale," Fischer said in a statement, also calling for tests on younger cattle.

Scientists from the Agriculture Ministry in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein took their soil samples from a field at the farm of Peter Lorenzen where the first German case of mad cow disease was discovered on Friday last week.

The rest of Lorenzen's herd of 169 cattle was slaughtered and, of 32 BSE tests undertaken so far, all have turned out negative, sources in the state government said. Results of the remaining tests of brain tissue were due on Friday.

The soil samples were taken to try to establish whether prions -- the proteins which cause BSE -- in an infected cow's excrement can survive in the ground and later transmit the disease to another animal.

The link has not been proven, however, and no method for analyzing the samples has yet been set.

Environment Minister Trittin, a leader of the Greens party, issued his warning on the possible ground survival of prions earlier this week, citing an official study which said prions might find their way into the ground via dung containing bonemeal from infected cattle.

SCRAPIE AGENT SURVIVES IN FIELDS

The study, published last February, said the agent causing scrapie, a sheep disease believed to have been the original source of BSE, could survive in the ground for up to three years.

Trittin said any fields where cattle had been diagnosed with BSE should be quarantined for three years -- a demand which one leading scientist said was overdone.

"Of course there is a certain risk. But to panic and say we want to quarantine our fields would be going too far," Hans-Wilhelm Doerr, head of Germany's association for fighting viral illnesses, told North German Radio.

Doerr said experience in other countries hit by BSE had shown that the best approach was to slaughter herds affected by the disease.

The federal Agriculture Ministry also said it would rent the fields in Lorenzen's farm, near the northern town of Flensburg, to conduct its own research on the possible grazing link to BSE.

"This is all new to me," a bemused Lorenzen said as his farm was besieged by camera teams and photographers. "I don't know whether this can prove anything."

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http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AnSci/BSE/

BSE -- Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy

("Mad Cow Disease")

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is a fatal brain disease of cattle. The disease is believed to be caused by a "self-replicating" protein (a prion) rather than a bacterium or virus. Meat and milk have not been shown to carry the infective agent and measures have been taken to exclude those parts shown to carry the infective agent (primarily brain and nervous tissue) from the food supply.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is a related prion diseases in humans. Almost all cases of CJD are spontaneous, inherited or iatrogenic. A small number of variant CJD cases have been linked to BSE exposure. Stanley B. Prusiner, University of California was recently awarded A Nobel Prize for his work on prions.

BSE, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) of cattle, was first observed in Great Britain in April, 1985, and was specifically diagnosed in 1986. By June, 1990, there were some 14,000 confirmed cases out of an estimated population of 10 million cattle in Great Britain. Since 1986, more than 173,000 cases of BSE in cattle have been identified in Britain. The epidemic peaked in 1992-93 at almost 1,000 cases per week. Control measures have reduced incidence and currently, less than 100 cases are being reported per week.

No cases of BSE have been found in the United States

The disease has been reported in domestic cattle in Ireland (337 cases), France (51), Portugal (195), Switzerland (283), and in cattle exported from England to Oman (2), the Falkland Islands (1), Germany (6), Denmark (1), Canada (1), and Italy (2). These numbers probably under estimate incidence since more than 2000 cases would be expected in the EU (outside of the United Kingdom) based on transmission epidemiology and exports of greater than 70,000 metric tons of British meat & bone meal and 30 to 60,000 cattle between 1985 and 1990. (Nature 1996 382:4)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has banned importation of live cattle or meat products from BSE-infected countries since 1989 and is conducting surveillance for BSE to ensure that it does not become established in the United States. FDA has also been put in place a ruminant to ruminant feed ban similar to that in Great Britain as an additional safeguard (Code of Federal Regulations).

If you would like to contact the authors of this document, please e-mail, write or phone:

•Susan Brewer

University of Illinois

Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition.

Phone 217-244-2867

•Jan Novakofski

University of Illinois

Department of Animal Sciences.

Phone 217-333-6181

•Richard Wallace

University of Illinois

College of Veterinary Medicine

Phone 217-333-2907

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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http://www.mad-cow.org -- Last Updated: 30 Nov 00

The Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page

... GENERAL NEWS.....

Feb 12..Oprah, Lyman vindicated

Nov 30..Euro CJD News

Nov 30..Mood swings

Nov 27..First nvCJD case in Germany?

Nov 25..Azores, Germany admit BSE

Nov 23..Will Canada, US be next?

Nov 21..Epidemic revised upward

Nov 16..Europe faces mad cows

Nov 14..France faces mad cows

Nov 16..Frankenstein foods

Nov 07..Cannabalism on chopping block

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The Associated Press

Europeans look for solutions to mad cow outbreak

SEDGEFIELD, England (November 30, 2000 6:26 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - French President Jacques Chirac and BBritish Prime Minister Tony Blair met Thursday to discuss the mad cow crisis sweeping Europe and agreed it's critical to heed new measures to curb further outbreaks.

The two met over a roast lamb dinner at a pub in Sedgefield, Blair's constituency in northeast England, their agenda dominated by mad cow and an upcoming European Union summit in Nice, France. Earlier Thursday, Chirac met with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern in Dublin.

A special European Union committee of veterinary scientists on Thursday backed proposals for further EU-wide testing of all cattle over 30 months of age for mad cow disease. On Monday, EU agriculture ministers will discuss a proposal for a six-month, EU-wide ban on animal products in fodder for cattle, pigs and poultry.

Chirac, aware beef would not be on the menu Thursday, was at his most diplomatic, saying: "I never said that I would not eat English beef."

Blair informed him he could look forward to some "very good" English lamb.

In Nice, Britain is expected to drop several powers of veto to facilitate the EU's move toward more practical majority voting. But Blair told Chirac Thursday that there were certain "red lines" that Britain would not cross - such as dropping veto powers on any llegislation involving tax, social security and border controls.

Chirac also said France had similar reservations about French services and culture, which it would seek to maintain control over.

Also dining Thursday night were British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and his French counterpart Hubert Vedrine.

As the party arrived for dinner, they were jeered by about 40 protesters calling for a ban of French beef imports due to concerns over mad cow disease, in retaliation for similar French action at the height of Britain's mad cow crisis in the 1990s. One protester threw an egg, narrowly missing the contingent.

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Dec 4 2000 11:32AM

Europe Urged to Stop Factory Farming to End Mad Cow

LONDON (Reuters) - UK scientists urged Europe on Monday to help farmers move away from intensive agriculture, saying the end of factory farming was the only way to kill off mad cow disease. The scientists, who advised and criticized the UK government at the height of Britain's mad cow crisis, told EU farm ministers that tests for bovine spongiform encephalopathy were not sensitive enough to guarantee BSE-free beef.

"Action needs to be taken now to initiate plans for the genuine long-term eradication of BSE," the three scientists said in a letter to European Union food safety Commissioner David Byrne.

"We would urge that the EU should both promote, and provide substantial funding for an expansion of extensive and organic systems of beef production...and a scaling down of industrially farmed beef throughout Europe."

EU farm ministers were meeting in Brussels to decide how to curb the spread of the brain-wasting disease, considering a ban on all meat-based livestock feed and measures to keep older cattle out of the food chain unless tested for BSE.

But Iain McGill, who worked for the Agriculture Ministry at the height of Britain's crisis, Stephen Dealler, who has worked on BSE since 1988, and Adrian Holmes, a lobbyist on the matter, warned the EU that a wide cattle cull and increased testing may not halt the disease's spread.

"The current tests for BSE would not appear to be sufficiently sensitive to guarantee that beef is BSE-free," they said, adding that false negative results could allow high-risk cattle tissues back into the food chain.

"Regarding the culling of cattle it must be worth flagging up the enormous problems with the disposal of cattle carcasses in the UK."

They said a widespread cattle cull could also expose people to BSE from the carcasses -- whether eaten or not -- through environmental contamination.

"There is currently no safe and satisfactory route for disposal of carcasses which is also logistically feasible on such a large scale," they said.

Europe should also adopt France's ban on the tissues most susceptible to the disease, including the ileum and thymus.

Moreover, Europe should fund research for a cure to BSE and its human equivalent, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

But to end the spread and kill off the disease, Europe has to start farming in a different way, they said.

"The German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is calling for the end of factory farming," they said.

"The UK BSE inquiry also came to the conclusion that BSE was a product of intensive agriculture -- a 'recipe for disaster'."