Why Alderspring Cows Aren’t Mad

I mean as in Mad Cow Disease. Not anger. We don’t see anger much in Alderspring beeves except like this spring when E69 rolled Ethan across the field when he tried to put an ID tag on her newborn baby. It surprised him a little because she was ancient in terms of cows. She is around 17 years old, not terribly uncommon on our ranch, but very uncommon in “modern” agriculture. Average age for a beef cow in the US is around 5 years old. But that is another story entirely…

Mad Cow Disease, aka Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has symptoms akin to the formation of Swiss cheese-like holes in brain tissue of the affected cow. This is always fatal, and manifests in cow locomotion and behavior in often “mad” appearing ways. There have been 4 positively identified BSE cases in the US in the past 12 years.

The foundation of BSE is a misfolded, nonliving protein called a prion. Once this normal protein is misfolded, it induces other normally folded proteins to replicate like it. Eventually the exponential population of misfolded proteins cause damage to the organs in which they reside, commonly throughout the nervous system of affected mammals. Read more about it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

It turns out that the human variant disease, Cruezfeldt-Jacob Syndrome (vBSE) is thought to be positively linked to ingestion of BSE carrying tissues. In other words, if you eat Mad Cow, you become Mad Human. Four known people in the US have perished from the disease in recent years. All were thought to have ingested BSE affected tissues outside of the US. Indeed, there may be more folks who have died from it—lack of autopsy reports on most “natural” deaths in the US leaves the possibility wide open.

As it does with cows.

What this means is that there is much more BSE out there than we can possibly know about. Cow brains are never routinely cut open in packing plants to potentially identify the prevalence of BSE. When a blood test came available, USDA banned its use to a Kansas producer in 2004, probably due to the possibility that the test results would end up discrediting the USDA’s position on how to manage against BSE, and the potentially disastrous effects on the US cattle industry if the “mad” truth came out.

Why do cows get it?

Cows get it the same way humans do. All known cases were due to ingestion of BSE affected tissues. Wait a second, you say. Cows eat cows?
Indeed they do, in our wonderful modern agricultural model (why in tarnation would you want to feed cows grass anyway?). Before 1997, feed mills throughout the US were grinding up cows into what they called bone meal and blood meal and feeding them back as protein sources to millions of dairy and beef cattle in the US.

But in 1997, the USDA put a feed ban on use of ruminant tissues in ruminant feed, so the problem was to go away. The problem today is that feed mills still make both types of feed. Ground up cows go to other animals and ground up other animals are still fed to cows. It turns out that prions are very difficult to clean off of equipment.

Let’s call that almost impossible. And only 1 prion is needed to start the terrifying process all over again in another cow…or human. Good thriller material. I hope you’re reading this, James Patterson or Dean Koontz.

A little story about this: I was in the Midwest several years ago at a feed mill I used to frequent in the off grazing season while working for some farmers there, and while unloading a grain truck, fell in to conversation with one of the owners. I knew they served many large hog operations and mega-dairies in the surrounding area.

Me: “So, what do you use for a protein source besides the soybean meal that you create here in your commercial hog ration?”

Owner: “Ground-up dairy cows.”

Me: “So…then…what to you use for your dairy cow ration?”

Owner: “Ground-up hogs.” He smiled at what seemed like the elegant simplicity of it all.

Note that this is post 1997, and two things come to mind. First, if there were prions in the dairy cows that they ground, they are on the feed mill equipment (remember: it takes 1 prion). Second, many researchers believe that BSE, vBSE, scrapie (sheep BSE), chronic wasting disease (elk and deer BSE) and other prion diseases are basically the same protein folding problem carried across species lines.

If that is true, the hog and dairy concept above is a perfect transmission pathway for BSE.

Take home lesson.

So what do you do?

It is all about source and process verification of your beef. It really is pretty simple. If animals are fed only grass like they have been since they showed up on this planet, they cannot get BSE. There is no pathway for them to pick up those prions.

And if they are prion free, so are you, the beefeater.

Conventional beef, on the other hand, can and often is fed anything, and those prions are out there. Let’s hope a Dean Koontz writes about it before the media ever does.