CountryByNet.com Forums :: BSE & Milk Replacer?

Hi Ron,

I'm not a physician or anything, but my understanding is that we don't know what the exact cause of BSE is. I realize that's probably not the most heartening news you've heard, but it's not necessarily as bad as it sounds.

The scientists believe that the likely cause is infectious forms of a type of protein called prions. The way I read the reports prions are normally found in animals but the abnormal prions seem to be folded over. In cattle with BSE, these abnormal prions initially occur in the small intestines and tonsils, and are found in central nervous tissues, such as the brain and spinal cord. As the disease progresses, it's also found in the ganglia, eyes, lymphoid tissue and bone marrow. To safeguard against the spread of the BSE agent to humans, these tissues are prohibited from entering the human food supply.

To back track just a little, sheep have been suffering for years from scrapies, which is a type of TSE (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy). Ungulates like deer and elk have their own form of TSE called Chronic Wasting Disease. Oddly enough, Ron, mink and cats (yeah... cats) also suffer from TSE. And this has been going on for a long time. People have documented all the behaviour associated with TSE's in animals for well over a century. And of course there are several types of TSE for us humans. Classical Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Kuru (which was identified in cannibalistic tribes in, I think, New Guinna), and variant CJD (vCJD) which was identified, I believe, in 1996 and is the one associated with BSE.

Despite the way you've seen CowboyDoc and I going at it hammer and tongs, we agree on a lot of things. Both our countries have excellent programs to: a. prevent BSE from entering foodstuffs for human consumption and b. eventually eliminate BSE from our cow herds. No matter how much it hurts, the fact that we're identifying these cases before the animals are entering the food chain indicates that things are working. Can we be doing better on both sides of the border? I think we can. More testing would go a long way to allying the consumer's fears about what they're eating. I'd point out too, that Doc and I are on the same page about feeding. Neither of us feeds anything but forage and grain. I won't speak for Doc, but I don't believe we should be feeding animal proteins to any animal that's going to make it's way into the human food chain. With the exception of hogs (and they'll eat darn near anything) these animals are not carnivores. And it isn't that pigs are so much carnivores as well... pigs. They're more omnivores than anything else.

So, why aren't we testing more? Why are we still feeding animal proteins? Doc summed it up best on the other thread. Greed and profit. The consumers don't want to pay any more for their food than they have to. The packers and retailers want their profit and the producer has to find a more efficient way to bring the animal to market. Farmers have never been price setters; farmers are price takers. It's perverse in a way. When we have a good crop year for, say, barley, there's a glut of it on the market and the price goes down. We're actually punished for being successsful. Anyway, one of the most effiecient ways to bring animals to market faster is to feed them a higher protein diet. And often animal byproduct protein is a cheap way to supplement forage and grain rations. (That's kind of the simple version... there are a lot of other issues that don't really matter here.) So basically that's why animal proteins are showing up in feed for poultry and pigs. Producers can get animals to market faster by feeding animal proteins and hopefully get an edge on their margin.

In the end, consumers are going to have to decide just how much their food is really worth to them. If they're happy with the product they're getting from big factory farms, that's the way it's going to be. If they want the product that comes from the ever shrinking numbers of smaller producers like Doc and me, they're going to have to pay the money we need to make a living and support our families.

But I'm sorry. I got way off topic there, Ron. So, while we don't know exactly what causes BSE, we do know how it progresses in an infected animal and current thinking is that until it actually begins to present itself, it doesn't pose a threat to people who eat the bovine's muscle tissue. The best scientific evidence at this time indicates that bovines under the age of 30 months do not pose a risk. There has been a reported case of an animal younger than that testing positive in Japan, but they don't test the way we do in the US and Canada. In Japan they test once using basically the same test we use as our initial test. If it comes back positive, they say it's a definite positive and that's that. End of story. This test has consistently proved to give a lot of false positives. When we get an initial positive test, we retest with a higher standard to either confirm or negate the indications of the first test. I'm only mentioning this in case anyone is confused about how an animal under 30 months of age tested positive over there. It happens. The positive test was not confirmed with a higher standard of testing.

I brought blood into this, Ron, because it occurred to me that most dairy calves are taken off their dams and put on milk replacer. Statistically, BSE has been more common in dairy animals and herds than in beef animals. I was wondering if mammalian blood and blood products, which until just about a year ago were legally allowed in feed for ruminants as a protein source, might be a significant method of transmission. Hence the higher number of BSE cases in dairy cattle. (?) The USDA states "Recent scientific evidence suggests that blood can carry some infectivity for BSE." I'll be honest, I'm still trying to determine exactly what they mean by that. But it steers me away from believing that meat from a BSE positive animal is safe for human consumption.

While I believe blood and blood products are now illegal in milk replacer in both our countries, I see that Merrick's Inc. out of Wisconson, http://www.merricks.com/centurion.html still lists porcine plasma as an ingredient in their Centurion Milk Replacer. I'm assuming that this is an oversight and that they just haven't updated their website since the ruling banning blood and blood products came into effect.

Let me preface what I'm about to say by restating my position that I think the border should stay closed. I am convinced, Ron, that the FDA, USDA, and Canadian Food Inspection Agency recognize that we are operating in an area of uncertainty. I think both our countries are using good science and are approaching the issue of food safety with a great deal of caution. While I believe mistakes are being made and more could be done to mitigate the risk of BSE, I ate store bought beef for supper tonight. It might not have been the quality of beef I'm used to, but I honestly think it's safe and a study by the Harvard Risk Management Assessment people does as well.

I'm sorry I couldn't answer the hard questions about the science, Ron, but I'd eat your hypothetical 24 month old calf. The current science supports my decision. We all know that everything in life carries a certain amount risk. Some people go out of their way to court it. Some drive fast, some people go bungee jumping, some people smoke cigarettes, some even take drugs. I'm a little too old to go looking for trouble anymore, but I'm with Al_Wa, "if it's 1 1/2 inches thick and well marbled and cooked rare I'll eat it and don't give a rat's if it's from Idaho or Alberta."

Dave

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