Claims by the beef industry that only the cattle brains, nerve tissue, and spinal cord are infected and can cause disease are totally misleading. Published scientific studies have shown that the prion can also be present in many other tissues, including muscle (i.e., steak) (53) and blood (12), bone, eyes, tonsils, lymph, intestines, spleen, liver, and other organs, glands, and other tissues (13, 14). Organ transplants, surgical equipment, pharmaceuticals made from animal products, garden fertilizers, cosmetics, human growth hormone, and baby food can also carry the prions (53). The infectious agent for the sheep TSE (scrapie) can be found throughout the body of an infected sheep. It has been suggested that the brain, spinal cord, spleen, thymus, tonsils, and intestines of the cattle were chosen by both the British and U.S. Governments for their initial feed ban possibly because these parts had the least commercial value (62, 68).
Two broadcasts of the TV program, Dateline, in 1996 and 1997, covered BSE (47). They pointed out that while cows are supposedly not allowed to directly eat cow parts since a 1997 FDA voluntary ruling, cows and calves may still be fed bovine blood products. (26) This is a dangerous exception, because scientists have conclusively proved that blood and blood products can carry the disease-producing prion (53). The Red Cross will not accept blood from donors who have lived in Britain for three months or Europe for six months dating from 1980. Dateline’s commentator, Stone Phillips, stated point-blank that the American Red Cross had secretly sequestered 2 million units of various blood products, because of uncertain provenance with regard to donors and CJD (47).
Although there is a case description in the New England Journal of Medicine (1992) in which colostrum from a Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseased woman was found to be infectious to mice, cow's milk is considered "safe" by the World Health Organization. (30) Teamsters for dairy workers petitioned the U.S. Secretaries of Agriculture and Health & Human Services to immediately ban the distribution of milk associated with the BSE outbreak in the Pacific Northwest. (33) In Great Britain, the distribution of milk from any cows linked to the outbreak was banned. In 1993, the British medical journal, Lancet, reported the death of a 61-year-old dairy farmer from CJD (53). His herd of BSE-infected cattle had been destroyed in 1989, and he had been drinking milk from the herd for at least seven years. Four months later, another dairy farmer died, aged 65.
However, it’s not only the beef products that can be contaminated, but also the equipment used to process an infected cow. When other cows and other animals are then run through the machinery, their products will also become contaminated by picking up nerve debris and prions left behind by the infected cow. Many different types of animals pass through the same equipment. If one is infected with a TSE, the machines become infected. In 1990, Dr. Linda Detwiler, a USDA official, reported that U.S. sheep scrapie had been spread into cattle in Government tests. For decades scrapie-infected sheep have passed through U.S. rendering plants. (50) In 1990, the USDA produced a report titled, "BSE Rendering Research Priorities," which warned that rendering plants themselves may be contaminated with TSE disease agents: "If scrapie or BSE-infected animals are rendered, it may become necessary to disinfect the rendering facilities. Unfortunately, both the resistance of spongiform encephalopathy agents to many disinfectants and the need to avoid corrosive chemicals in rendering plants create major limitations on the choice of technology available." (53) Referring to the first acknowledged case of BSE in America in Washington state, Michael Hansen, of Consumers Union, the watchdog group in Yonkers, N.Y said, "All those rendering plants the infected cow material passed through will be contaminated.” Therefore, it was not just meat and various products from this cow, but also from other cattle and other animals that were processed after them in three different plants, and which will probably not be traced or recalled. (3) Also worth noting is that, depending on the equipment used, water may be drained from the rendering tanks to go to the water treatment facility (carrying prions with it). (53)
