Udder Denial

Even organic beef may not protect you from the human form of mad cow disease.

It's called vCJD (variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease) and it has to be the most intriguing fatal disease on the planet.

Imagine the scenario: you're walking along eating a hamburger, not knowing that as you munch, unkillable alien invaders are climbing out of the meat, bouncing like happy, yellow pac-men toward your brain, which they will then eat in the same way you're inhaling that burger. You don't know you're infected so you get married and have a child, who, you guessed it, is born with the bug already munching away at his brain.

This new form of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease is the human variant of mad cow disease. It can infect us through the consumption of products from animals that have been fed the ground up carcasses of other animals a common practice in this country and the US. The agent causing vCJD is a prion, a minuscule protein particle that is not a bacteria, not a microbe, but a unique virus: a sub-microscopic speck that has no deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), no ribonucleic acid (RNA) and no genetic structure.

Atoms of Death

A prion consists of a few simple atoms of death strung on an amino ribbon floating single-mindedly through a mammalian body until it finds the area where it loves to root your brain. There, the prion embeds itself, bonding with a single healthy protein molecule, instructing it to mutate into a twisted prion like itself. Then, the newly-converted molecule does the same thing, converting another normal cell, setting off a chain reaction of imploding, self-destructing cells. This leaves large, ventilated, vacant spaces in your brain. Death is inevitable and horrifying.

The truth about human mad cow disease is so horrific, nothing is taught about it in medical schools. A 16 volume report written by the UK's Lord Phillips into the whole mad cow tragedy has recently been published. Lord Phillips is the judge overseeing proceedings of the mad cow disease inquiry for the UK government. This devastatingly unnatural disease has cut British dairy herds from 63,000 to 33,400 in 10 years and has killed at least 80 people under 55 years of age. The lethal disease has flourished in Britain's culture of government fear and secrecy and the food and farming industries' greed and contempt for quality.

Questionable Organic Beef

Health-conscious individuals may boast that their beef was raised organically, fed only grain and grass but the problem in logic is that this is a genetically transmissible disease. The unorganic cow passes the bacterium to her milk-lapping calf, who is already infected when he is sold to the organic farmer. The cow gave the seeds of mad cow to her baby calf both through the cagey prion taking over her DNA and also through her udder. The calf's subsequent organic diet does not stop the slowly eroding "sponge brain" from invading this happy, health-food-chewing heifer.

These prions can enter a chicken's egg if the hen was fed Canadian "bypass feed." And they can enter your child's body when she eats any kind of meat or even drinks a glass of milk. Dishware in a kitchen that frequently prepares meat can be so infected with prions that if it were a laboratory, government regulations would demand it be burned to the ground.

But surely, the cooking of meat or milk kills the prion, right? The trouble is, a prion is not really alive to begin with. And the pasteurizing of milk, at 69°C (156°F), makes the prion think it's a sunny day. Cooking meat at 100°C (212°F) makes it think it's in a pleasant sauna. Frying in the 160°C (320°F) range might make it blink. But you can only reduce the prion to total ash at 340°C (800°F). This temperature immobilizes it and takes away its ability to reproduce. There is no solvent known to immobilize the mad cow spore. If you ask a doctor to do an autopsy of a patient who died of vCJD, she refuses, knowing that if she exposes her lab to this disease, the lab would be closed down by government officials.

Richard DeAndrea, MD, is the nutrition educator for the Training and Research Foundation of South Central Los Angeles. He feels that if you think you've been exposed, enzyme therapy might work because proteins can be dissolved by enzymes which are found in raw foods. But top US microbiologist Dr Stanley Prusiner has written that this protein molecule laughed off all the enzymes he tried on it.

So avoiding meat seems inevitable. Choose vegetarian proteins like grains and legumes. These proteins don't tax the immune system as much as "foreign flesh." Immune systems love a whole, live, raw food diet so eat raw, dark green salads with nuts, sprouts and seeds. Do as much cleansing as possible through colonics. Take periodic raw juice fasts.

Besides a vegan diet of vegetables grown on organic soil, take "good fat" supplements like flax seed oil, evening primrose and the oils found in nuts and seeds. Drink almond milk and brown rice milk. Use a non-genetically modified fermented soy like miso, tofu or tempeh. Discover the pleasure of tahini. Take multi-vitamin and mineral supplements. Blue green algae, spirulina and chlorella are complete foods with B₁₂ (animal-source B₁₂ is dangerous now). Get rid of all other eco-hazards that stress the immune system fluoride toothpaste and fluoridated water, for example. Go natural.

There is one other thing. You could lobby for a ban on all feeding of animals to other animals. Because the only safe beef is the one we have with Ottawa.

British Scientists Fear Mad Cow Disease Epidemic

The death of a 74-year-old has British government specialists reassessing the possible size of the human mad cow epidemic.

Just when the British public had hoped the label of "mad cow country" had finally gone away, fear has sprung up after the death of a 74 year-old diagnosed with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of mad cow disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.

This latest victim was a full 20 years older than the previous oldest victim and the death has wide-reaching implications. Until now, most of the known 85 victims of the disease were under the age of 30. Scientists had earlier assumed that the majority of the elderly were not at risk of developing vCJD.

Adding to the fear and confusion is the fact that the length of the vCJD incubation period is not known. The optimistic outlook is an incubation period of only eight years, which would mean the worst of the epidemic would be over within the next two years. If the incubation period is 20 or 30 years however, then the worst is still to come.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy was first discovered as a new cattle disease in 1986 and a ban on high-risk beef waste parts being used for human consumption was introduced in 1989. The recent BSE inquiry, chaired by Britain's Lord Phillips, found that the public had been prematurely reassured about food safety measures.

Source: The Medical Post, Nov 14, 2000

For more information on a vegan diet, read The Raw Gourmet by Nomi Shannon. Available at your health food store or through alive books (800-661-0303).