Creutzfeldt-Jakob (Madcow) Disease Strikes Again in The U.S.

[Nbadan]

Tests show two women died of brain-wasting disease
By CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Associated Press writer


BOISE, Idaho -- Preliminary tests on the remains of two Idaho women show they died of the brain-wasting illness Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but additional tests are needed to determine whether it was the naturally occurring form or the variant related to mad cow disease.

Idaho Department of Health and Welfare officials announced the findings Wednesday after notifying the families of the women, one of whom was in her 60s and lived in Twin Falls County and the other who was previously identified by her family as 53-year-old Kathy Isenberg of St. Maries. Because of privacy restrictions, state health officials do not release names of individuals suspected of dying from the disease, which can only be conclusively diagnosed post-mortem.

The results bring to three the number of confirmed deaths this year in Idaho due to diseases related to "prions," or malformed proteins. Earlier this year, tests by the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western University in Ohio determined that another Twin Falls County woman had died from a prion-related disease believed to be Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Additional tests are under way at the lab to determine what form of CJD was responsible in the three confirmed cases.

"Generally, 85 percent of the tests come back as the sporadic, or naturally occurring form, 14 percent come back as the familial form that is passed down through generations and less than 1 percent come back as the variant form," said Tom Shanahan, spokesman for the Idaho agency. "There's never been a variant case acquired in the United States."

Casper Star Tribune (http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2005/10/01/news/regional/9c121aece6ea98198725708a007f8e6c.txt)

The problems in Idaho may be worse than the article portrays...

(Dateline 10/2/05)
Officials investigate sixth possible case of CJD
Elmore County man receiving treatment
By Sandy Miller
Times-News writer


TWIN FALLS -- Idaho health officials are investigating a sixth possible case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, this time a man in Elmore County, according to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.

The man is over the age of 60 and is currently being treated for the neurological disease. He is the sixth person to be diagnosed with CJD since January in southern Idaho.

Magic Valley (http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2005/08/18/news_topstory/news_topstory.1.txt)

Hummm, whether this turns out to be the naturally-occurring or nasty-mutating variant form of CJ, maybe its time to eat more chicken and farm-raised beef.

[boutons]

And dubya's industry-friendly, politicized FDA fails again to protect the American people from industry.

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October 4, 2005

U.S. Offers New Animal Feed Rules, but Critics Assail Them
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

The Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules today to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, but the rules were considerably less strict than those proposed last year but never adopted, and critics promptly denounced them as inadequate.

The F.D.A. proposed banning from animal feed the brains and spinal cords of cows more than 30 months old. It also proposed banning the same parts of any animal not passed by inspectors as suitable for human food, any tallow that contained more than 0.15 percent protein and any meat contained in brain or spinal column that was separated from carcasses by machine.

The new proposal would still allow animals to be fed material that some scientists consider potentially infectious, including the brains and spinal cords of young animals; the eyes, tonsils, intestines and nerves of old animals; chicken food and chicken dung swept up from the floors of poultry farms; scrapings from restaurant plates; and calf milk made from cow blood and fat.

"The F.D.A. and the meat industry is totally committed to continuing the practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste to cows," said John Stauber, the author of Mad Cow, U.S.A., who has repeatedly called for a ban on feeding all animal protein to livestock. Meat processors like Cargill and Tyson Foods, he argued, also own rendering plants, want to keep exporting cheap protein or feeding it to their own animals and have lobbied hard to keep the right to do so.

Michael K. Hansen, an expert on prion diseases at the Consumers Union, called the proposed regulations "completely inadequate," noting that Britain "took many halfway steps in their efforts to eliminate mad cow disease and failed to stop it." Only when it stopped feeding mammals to food animals did they cut the cases down to less than 10 a year, he said.

Dr. Stephen F. Sundlof, the F.D.A.'s director of veterinary medicine, who announced the proposed rule changes today, said they would remove 90 percent of the potential infectivity from animal food.

Since June 2004, he noted, the United States Department of Agriculture tested 484,000 cattle for the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and only one animal born in the United States had tested positive.

"This reduces a very, very low risk to even lower," he said.

His agency, he said, also considered the cost to the cattle and rendering industry.

Getting rid of just brains and spines from older cattle, he said, would create only 64 million pounds of waste that would have to be burned or buried at a cost of about $14 million.

Getting rid of the vertebrae, spines, nerves, eyes, intestines and other potentially infectious parts of all cattle including the meat attached to nerves attach would create more than two billion pounds of waste, which he said would be an environmental problem and a big expense for the industry, which he did not estimate.

In 1997, the F.D.A. banned feeding ruminants like cattle and sheep to other cattle and sheep, with a few exceptions like calf "milk replacement" made from cow blood.

But it is widely acknowledged that the ban is imperfect: Some farmers, deliberately or accidentally, give cows ruminant feed. Also, chickens can legally be fed cow protein and cows can then be fed spilled poultry litter; rendering plants and trucks contain ruminant and nonruminant feed, which can mix.

In early 2004, the F.D.A. proposed banning letting cows eat poultry litter and plate waste, but the rules were never adopted.

The rules proposed today, Dr. Sundlof said, will not be adopted until sometime next year, after a period of comment ends in mid-December.