The Government will likely deem it too expensive for the meat industries and the country’s meat export revenues to institute a comprehensive program that would provide total protection (53). The next most important step would be to break the cycle that allows any rendered animals to end up as feed for animals eaten by humans, not just a ban on feeding ruminants back to ruminants. And to find an effective means of enforcing the ban. A soybean meal could be substituted for the meat and bone meal. Ideally, the ban should be comprehensive to prohibit feeding of rendered animals to any other animal. A method of disinfecting contaminated rendering plants is necessary to protect pets and other animals not consumed by humans, if rendering for their food continues. There are also many byproducts from rendering that could be made from infected animals that could still carry the prion, such as the gelatin around your vitamin capsules and sugar whitened by cow bones. It is still unknown what prions could do if present in products made from animal hides, say if they came in contact with broken skin. The current rendering practice has been shown to be risky (53). The extent of that risk is yet to be determined.

And what about grills used to grill those beefsteaks? They could be contaminated by a BSE cow and spread the prion to grilled chicken or to the grilled vegetables the vegetarian has carefully ordered to avoid animal products, since the prion would not be killed by the heat. Hopefully, a rapid, inexpensive diagnostic test can be developed soon to identify contaminated animals while they are still alive and before they are sent to slaughter. Neurologist, Neil Cashman, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, has identified an antibody specific to a portion of the rogue prions (42). Researchers hope this can lead to development of a vaccine or therapy to prime the immune system to destroy the misfolded clumps of prions and a diagnostic test for living animals.

So, would eating meat containing the prion be a problem?

Some researchers hold that damaged prions and manganese are the cause of the disease but have rejected the idea of transmission through consumption of contaminated food. Others attribute the TSEs to something emitted or depleted during the process of the formation of rogue prions, but whatever that is, it is transmissible. However, the consensus from the bulk of research conducted on the disease is that BSE can be spread from contaminated animals to many other species of animals, including humans, and the means of transmission is food. Whatever is creating the rogue prions or the disease, it appears to be passed on in an active state to the next recipient in the food chain. Brain and nerve tissue have been identified as the most contagious part of an infected animal, and cheaper forms of meat are considered more dangerous (53). However, the body is laced with nerves and blood, and this includes muscle meat, and pretty much the whole cow.

There are still many questions to be answered. But if you wish to play it safe and reduce your risk of future exposure to possibly ‘contaminated’ material, you could choose to eat organic meat or become a vegetarian, although even vegetarians would have a hard time avoiding all contact with prion-containing products (53). But until more is known about the disease and the extent to which an infectious agent may already be widespread in our food stock, it’s a matter of how much risk you want to take for yourself and your pets while you wait for the results.

In any case, now that you know what goes into many of the commercial cat foods (as meat byproducts), you may want to consider at least giving your cat a healthier diet with food that does not include the ingredients mentioned at the beginning of this article. You may also want to reconsider eating beef or pork, based on the research results implicating that these animals do harbor TSEs and also knowing what they have been fed on, whether this meat is contagious with the spongiform disease or not. You may also wish to reconsider chicken because of its diet of potentially contaminated feedstock, and its ability to pass on the disease. Research is needed to determine if poultry are silent carriers of the disease themselves. And you should be sure to take plenty of anti-oxidants (e.g., Vitamin C, Vitamin E) yourself, which will help inactivate hazardous free radicals.

“If an evil force could devise an agent capable of damaging the human race, he would make it indestructible, distribute it as widely as possible in animal feed so that it would pass to man, and program it to cause disease slowly so that everyone would have been exposed to it before there was any awareness of its presence,” British microbiologist, Richard Lacey (61).

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