Mad Cow Doctor

[Guest guest]

Last Wed night, I had the extreme pleasure of attending a lecture by

Michael Greger, M.D. Dr Greger is an expert on Mad Cow Disease, and

is touring around the country to talk about what is being done, and

more importantly, what is not being done about this disease.

 

I learned a lot of disturbing information. I will attempt to

highlight just a few of the facts, without making this into a book

lol.

 

Ever notice that MCD has the same initials as McDonalds lol?

 

The first, and by far most important fact is that MCD is not a

bacterium, and it's not a virus. It's a prion, which, if I

understand correctly, is sort of a protein. It is very hard to kill.

It has survived through things that nothing else would survive

through. Things like bleach, alcohol, heat (Dr Greger said it was

heated to temps that would melt iron and it lived thru it), boiling

water, etc.

Because if this- there is no cure, and no way to sterilize against

it. Doctors in England are starting to use disposable instruments on

spinal and brain operations, because if the instruments are used on

someone with MCD, you can't sterilize the instruments to use on

another patient.

 

Not that much is known about MCD. A threshold limit (how much MCD

one can be in contact with without catching it), and an incubation

time (how long you have MCD before symptoms show) are not known.

It seems that MCD is mostly contained in the brain and spine, and

those are the riskiest areas to come into contact with. A meat eater

is at a much much greater risk eating these parts of an animal.

 

MCD can (and most likely is) easily spread from animal to animal by

feeding rendered beef to them. For those that aren't already aware-

when the cows are dissected at the slaughterhouse, all the parts

that are left... all the bones, waste, blood, remains, and basically

the stuff they would have to throw away... are sort of boiled down

into a fluid. This fluid is high in protein, and is sold as animal

food to farmers. The farmers feed it to their animals, turning

normally herbivore animals into carnivores and cannibals. This also

spreads MCD from cow to cow, from cows to chickens, etc. This fluid

is also used in bone meal planting mix, putting Veggies at risk if

they don't properly wash their food.

The practice of feeding rendered cow protein from untested cows to

other animals was compared to the spread of aids thru unsafe sex.

 

MCD is not new, and some theorize it has been around for 40 years.

 

MCD symptoms resemble Alzheimer's disease. There are theories that

as many as 13% of the people that died from Alzheimer's disease in

the last 40 years may have actually died from MCD.

 

The USDA and our Government has done little about this. Other

countries test many times more cows than we do. Dr Greger said that

France has was less cows than the USA does, yet it seems like they

test more cows in a month than the US has ever. It appears very much

like everyone is ignoring the problem here and hoping it just goes

away.

 

There was so much more, but this is getting too long already. Dr.

Greger ended his speech with a response from one of the two Dr's

that received the Nobel for discovering prions. When asked if he was

worried that MCD was going to be the new plague of this century, he

responded, " I think that's what we're all worried about. "

 

" And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and

executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side

of the executioners. " --Howard Zinn

Tek