DEADLY BIRD FLU PANDEMIC: "INEVITABLE"

The avian flu galloping across Asia poses "the most serious pandemic threat since 1968," Keiji Fukuda said Monday at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases. A pandemic caused by a flu strain that is new, deadly to humans and highly contagious "is inevitable," he said. I'm just sayin'.

USDA PROMISE: 200,000 COWS TESTED THIS YEAR

I didn't blog any of the stories last week saying the USDA supposedly was going to increase Mad Cow testing, because I wanted to wait and hear the USDA commit to it publicly and explicitly. Well, now it's official - I guess... listen to how it's made public: "U.S. animal health inspectors will test between 200,000 and 260,000 cattle for mad cow disease this year, up from 20,000 last year, a legislative aide told Reuters on Monday. Yes, that's right - it's not an announcement from the front office, but "a legislative aide, who was briefed by U.S. Agriculture Department officials." Well, who was this aide? "The aide, who wished not to be identified, said the one-year testing program would allow inspectors to be 99 percent confident that if there was one case of mad cow disease among 10 million cattle, it could be identified." WTF? Wished not to be identified? See, this is what worried me about this so-called promise. Who's going to stand behind it? We don't even have a damn spokesman's name yet! Something tells me they're not going to actually test 200,000 cattle this year, but I'm putting that as a headline to remind us that that's the claim.

PM UPDATE: The USDA now has a release up about this, and it supplies enough context to show that already the con is on. The statement above from Reuters that "U.S. animal health inspectors will test between 200,000 and 260,000 cattle for mad cow disease this year" is incorrect, since this plan doesn't go into effect until June: "USDA will begin immediately to prepare for the increased testing, with the anticipation that the program will be ready to be fully implemented June 1, 2004. In the meantime, BSE testing will continue at the current rate." PLUS: They're already backing off the concept that they "will test" 200,000 to 280,000 - note that every mention of that is couched as a conditional - "if we test this many, we can be this certain." In the transcript of the USDA press briefing, Bill Thomson of Oster Dow Jones brings this up - "you're not giving us an estimate on how many animals you will test. Is there a possibility that you'll test less than 201,000 animals?" and DeHaven comes out and says: "You guys are doing your best to get me to identify a number, and I'll emphasize again that the goal of this is to test as many of that target population as we can." Then: "It's possible that we would collect somewhere less than 200,000." So this blog entry hasn't even been up all day, and already, the "promise" that's been reported as fact in all major newspapers is revealed to be non-binding. It's the difference between saying "I'm going to do such-and-such" and "I'll do my best!"

AND: More evidence this is a smokescreen for business as usual: Scott Kilman of the WSJ asks, "Under the old program employees of meat packing companies or meat plants often picked that animal. Will that now be the job of a federal employee?" and DeHaven hedges, basically saying that since they're doing the best they can, it doesn't matter who picks the cows to test. He says the answer will be in "the plan on our website," but, lo and behold, it ain't. The plan spells out who physically collects the samples, but not who picks. But come on, folks, give 'im a break - he's doing the best he can!

UPDATE 3/16: No matter how much DeHaven and Veneman tap-dance about this, "we're doing our best" isn't good enough for Japan - which is, of course, the bottom line.

AND: It's apparently also not good enough for US meatpackers.

A SORRY 'SPORT'

An op-ed in The Frontiersman points out that "the race is so grueling that, on average, 54 percent of the dogs who start the race do not make it to the finish line." I didn't know that and can't vouch for its accuracy, but I haven't seen anyone challenge it. What they did challenge, apparently, was a Frontiersman reporter's heckling at the race itself. "At this year's Iditarod Musher's Banquet, a Frontiersman reporter, who was not on official assignment, booed one of the mushers and was involved in a confrontation with several people." The Frontiersman goes on to say "we apologize to the Swingleys, Dick Mackey, the Iditarod Trail Committee, the mushers and anyone who was offended by the conduct of our reporter." That conduct sounds unprofessional for a journalist - but the conduct of the lead "musher" is, of course, above reproach: "Norwegian musher Kjetil Backen kept the slimmest of leads yesterday in the 32nd annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, arriving a minute ahead of Mitch Seavey after stopping outside the Unalakleet checkpoint because one of his dogs collapsed and died." Awww, poor guy. What an inconvenience! And get this - "Backen asked for help from a reporter and photographer who were on a snowmobile outside the checkpoint. Backen said his dog had died and to go get race marshal Mark Nordman because the musher didn't want to carry the dead dog in his sled bag into the checkpoint." Gee, hope that wasn't the same reporter. Is carrying dead dogs around professional conduct? I have a feeling there's an apology due somewhere there.

COST-BENEFIT FOLLIES

Another state has the Bird Flu: "More than 300,000 chickens on Maryland's Eastern Shore were destroyed yesterday to stem a fresh outbreak of avian influenza. The flu has infected birds in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in recent weeks and is threatening the heart of the tri-state Delmarva economy." Just wondering - is it wise to have an economy so tied to animals that a flu can torpedo several industries at once? And - forgetting for the moment the egregious ethics of killing 300,000 "food animals" without even turning them into food - is there in fact another industry that routinely has to destroy and discard such a large amount of its core product because of problems generated by the product itself?

MEAT IS MEAT, AFTER ALL

Those not repulsed by consuming dead flesh in a variety of tasty products may think twice if that flesh is human. Such is the case in British Columbia, where "health officials issued an alert urging anyone who may have meat from Robert Pickton's farm near Vancouver to contact police. Mr Pickton, 54, has been charged with 15 murders of women, most of whom were linked to Vancouver's sex trade." But don't worry - "The risk to human health for those who consumed the products is extremely remote, based on the fact most pork products are typically well-cooked, which is known to effectively destroy most infectious agents," local health authorities said in a statement. Well, then. All along the trouble with cannibalism was that we weren't cooking our fellow humans enough.

_________*NEW FEATURE: MONTHLY VEGAN*_________

In an effort to focus on the positive as well as the negative here at Meat Facts, I'm starting a new feature of including one story a month of the human-interest vegan. This is a story about some local person and/or family going vegan and how it's improved their life to one degree or another, and recipes for people to try in case they're so moved. This is not to diss the story genre, because each of these deserves to be heard, it's just that usually I haven't included them because there's no news hook, nothing that will be truly new or noteworthy to Meat Facts readers, since each of these is practically another introduction to the concept of veganism. But now I'm ignoring that concern, and I'll spotlight one a month. Here's March's Monthly Vegan.

"We did it for health reasons, and this was well before mad cow disease was in the news a lot," said Roger Browne, an engineer who had a health screening before beginning the vegan diet. He's since lost 35 pounds, feels great and plans a follow-up physical exam to compare the results of the diet. "We decided to avoid animal products, including dairy, which seems to be a source of allergies for a lot of people," he said. "I have a lot more energy since changing my diet and don't get as 'loggy' late in the day. At each meal, I eat until I'm full and my snack is often a handful of mixed nuts -- usually a no-no for other people."

EAT ANIMALS, GET SICK, GET FAT, GOT THAT?

"Americans are eating more fat and cholesterol as 'low-carb' diets grow in popularity, but people do not seem to be losing weight and they are putting their health at risk, U.S. researchers said" in a Reuters story from the weekend.

After a probing analysis of food consumption and health-risk data comes the meat of it, if you will, in another study:

"[Low-carb diets] may not help people lose weight, suggested a study by Linda van Horn of Northwestern University in Chicago and colleagues. The study assessed more than 4,000 people in the United States, Britain, Japan and China, asking them to write down everything they had eaten over two 24-hour periods. 'Lo and behold, what we did find is that without exception, a high complex-carbohydrate, high-fiber, high vegetable-protein diet was associated with low body-mass index (the standard measure of healthy weight),' Van Horn said.

The more animal protein a person ate, the higher his or her weight, she said.

Huh. What was that again? "The more animal protein a person ate, the higher his or her weight." Huh. Can ya beat that.

UPDATE 3/10: Another sun-rises-in-the-east discovery, via Vegan Porn: "Consuming foods high in animal protein, saturated fat, eggs and dairy" raises your risk of developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), a cancer that attacks the immune system, say Yale researchers in the American Journal of Epidemiology. "The study also showed that diets high in dietary fiber -- tomatoes, broccoli, mixed lettuce salad with vegetables, cauliflower, etc.-- were associated with a reduced risk of NHL."

CDC AND NJ INVESTIGATING CJD CLUSTER

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services are now officially examining the apparent cluster of CJD cases centered around the former Garden State Race Track in Cherry Hill. Janet Skarbek now has a list of at least eight and possibly 13 deaths from CJD in people known to have frequented the track. Steve Mitchell mentions the recent scientific discovery of a new form of CJD that mimics the sporadic form, and notes this interesting factoid: "One racetrack employee, Carrie Mahan, 29, died from a mysterious condition in 2000 that initially appeared to be vCJD. Subsequent tests, however, ruled out both vCJD and sporadic CJD, and it remains unclear exactly what killed Mahan. But at least one expert, Dr. Omar Bagasra, a biologist at Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., suspected it could be a new strain of CJD related to mad cow-infected meat." Well, with one area developing at least twice the number of cases that could be explained by chance, it's gotta be something. Here's hoping these two agencies honestly work out the answer and provide it to us.

SPREADING IT TOO THICK

Here's a little human-interest story that fell through the cracks when the Mad Cow criminal probe was announced: An entire Green Bay-area family was forced out of their home by polluted water due to manure runoff from a nearby factory farm.

Scott Treml, his wife, Judy, and their three daughters, ages 8, 6 and 6 months, were looking for a place to stay early Tuesday evening after presenting the Kewaunee County Land & Water Conservation Committee with a sample of water Tuesday morning taken from a kitchen tap Monday that looked more like ditch water than drinking water. "If my kids drank that they'd be in the hospital in 48 hours," Judy Treml said. "It's very scary living with that."

The Tremls said manure spread on Stahl Farm fields starting on Thursday and ending on Saturday began showing up in their water over the weekend, and tests of their well water over the last two years have turned up evidence of fecal bacteria in water that appeared clean. David Bougie, an agricultural wastewater specialist for the state Department of Natural Resources, said Stahl Farms is the target of an ongoing investigation. "This facility has had a history of issues," Bougie said. Stahl Farms' owner, Glen J. Stahl, was cited and fined twice by the state for water pollution in the 1990s, according to computerized Circuit Court records.

Treml said he has called Wallander and Bougie at least two dozen times to complain about manure handling at Stahl Farms over the past two years. Wallander said his hands are tied by regulations that limit the county's ability to regulate big farms.

Huh. Funny you should mention that, because on the same day, an editorial in a different Green Bay-area paper railed against exactly this level of heinous abuse of the system that animal exploiters enjoy. As Wisconsin considers a bill like those in other states to override counties' (and municipalities') concerns about huge factory farms moving in, the Green Bay News-Chronicle points out that "Development of CAFOs will be contrary to the interests of the real estate and tourism industries as well. Who would willingly patronize a restaurant downwind of a factory farm? How many folks would build a house in an area of strong stench? This bill should not attempt to force all counties to come under this proposal. There is no advantage for FAMILY farmers in this bill, so support by family farmers is inexplicable." Well, actually there is one possible explication for that, but it's not a charitable one, so we'll skip past it.

The article continues: "Concentrating one species in a small area is highly artificial, and invites disease outbreaks and defies good sense because of the concentration of manure. Reasonable people would not invest money in such enterprises." Exactly. And yet every single person who pays for a burger or a pound of USDA beef is doing precisely that.

IT'S IN THE CARDS

Here's an interesting wrinkle in the Mad Cow lawsuit - the family is arguing that the store should have alerted them based on their purchase going through a "loyalty card." "QFC, through that card, has a databank which gives the addresses and phone numbers of all of their Advantage Saver customers and all they had to do is make one phone call and tell these people they had meat that might kill them," said Nick Steyant-Browne, the attorney for family. Sure, it sounds simple now, but would you want to make that call?

The funny part, though, is the comments of some of the loyalty-card customers on the prospect of using the card records for emergency contacts: "I think they should make their best attempt to post it conspicuously, but I don't really want them knowing what I bought," said David Chatt, an Advantage Card holder. And: "I just don't believe in giving the personal information out, that's all," said Lamar Beaber, another Advantage Card holder. Isn't this exactly the attitude of the meat-eating consumer? "As long as I don't quite understand what's going on in the back room there, it must be fine." Better than that, it's Grade-A!

YOU TALKIN' TO ME, PUNK?

Not sure how scientifically sourced this is, but Britain's Channel Five apparently will air findings that the infamous gladiators of old were vegans, so rough & tough they fought not in sandals, but barefoot! "Anthropological autopsies ... indicate a vegetarian diet of beans and barley which produced a thick layer of fat. 'They got enough of this food every day to make them very fat and strong,' said Karl Grossschmidt, a forensic anthropologist at Vienna University. Grossschmidt said the diet likely provided protection from slashing wounds and damage to nerves and blood vessels, with the layer of fat augmenting their scant armor." Well, OK. If you say so. All I can say is, if they were eating vegan and getting that fat, they must've had a hell of a lot of barley.

NEW: TOFU SANDWICHES (!) AT MCDONALDS

Well, OK, it's McDonald's Japan. But as I've pointed out before, what happens at the biggest non-US franchise of McDonald's Corp. is sometimes a harbinger of trends for the company at large. I mentioned the Japan unit's recent tailspin and how it was a bad sign, and Businessweek seems to concur: "Given that the Japan operation generates nearly $2.7 billion in sales... the troubles there made the folks back at headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., a bit edgy." So... tofu sandwiches! Let's get 'em over here!

SOME BILLS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

A showdown in the Republican-controlled Washington state legislature led to the scuttling of several bills in the queue - including two bills related to the discovery of mad cow disease. Well, whaddaya know! "One would have outlined penalties for selling downer cows," reports the Tri-City Herald. "The other would have authorized the state Department of Agriculture to adopt rules to support industry efforts to comply with federal requirements for country of origin labeling and livestock identification. 'It's all dead,' said Sen. Jim Honeyford, R-Sunnyside." But wait! You know there's gotta be a silver lining... and there is: "One exception might be a bill to offer a tax break to meat packers."

STARTING TO TIE IT ALL TOGETHER

Even in painstakingly even-handed editorials, in determinedly calm, unexcited tones, some outlets like The Boston Globe are starting to connect the dots for the public about the stakes here and the USDA'S so-called credibility:

The USDA defends its concentration on downers [i.e. the small number of tests] by saying that the infected Holstein fit that category. But the owner of the slaughterhouse and the worker who killed the animal say that it was not a downer cow. US officials are now investigating to see if a crime was committed in the false listing of the cow as a downer.

A further argument for wider testing has come from Europe, which uses more sensitive tests than the United States and requires them on all cattle 30 months or older. Italian researchers recently detected a new form of mad cow in two cows that had appeared to be healthy.

The discovery is especially disconcerting because tissue samples from these cows resembled samples from human victims of a related spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The 300 or so cases of this disease each year in the United States had been assumed to be spontaneous aberrations, but scientists now wonder if they might have been caused by eating infected meat, like the human form of mad cow disease.

Wonder if there will be an in-depth Sunday story on this somewhere...

USDA VET BRIBED TO SHUT UP?

Although I sympathize completely with what he's up against, I worry about Dave Louthan, how his story gets bigger and, well, wilder as time goes on. But there's nothing I wouldn't put past the folks at the USDA given their previous history. So I gotta pay attention when Louthan says that Rodney Thompson, the press-sequestered USDA vet who supposedly marked the cow a downer,"was given a promotion and bumped up three pay grades in an effort to keep him silent," and attributes the info to a named source, meat inspector Donald West. Either Louthan's starting to go off the deep end, or the USDA is in some serious, serious trouble. It's one or the other.

Steve Mitchell says, "UPI has been unable to verify any of Louthan's allegations, in part because the USDA has refused to give out any information on Thompson. In fact, agency officials will not even verify if Thompson is still a USDA employee, saying they cannot comment on an ongoing investigation. Asked about the promotion and pay-raise allegations, USDA spokeswoman Alisa Harrison said, 'I haven't heard of that at all ...I'm sure that's part of what the (Inspector General) is taking a look at.'" Hmmm. Isn't that what they call a non-denial denial?

Meanwhile, the first lawsuit - a class-action lawsuit - has been filed in King County, WA over the mad cow meat that got to consumers' plates in the wake of the yank-now-confess-later recall. This is started by one family, but who knows how many other families ate some of that 19 tons of potentially deadly meat?

MEANWHILE, IN CANADA ...

Is it just me, or has the situation up there gotten even more crazy than the cows? Is this what we've got to look forward to in six months?

SURPRISE! WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING!

Here's a surprise: The USDA did a second surprise inspection at the National Zoo, and found defective bars on indoor enclosures in the Elephant House and "excessive amounts of peeling paint on the walls." The surprise is not that there'd be anything wrong with the one place the inspectors visited (this was a "focused" inspection), nor even that the USDA is seemingly doing its job of regulating the animal industry - no, the surprise is that there was already a first surprise inspection, back before Lucy Spelman resigned. Somehow I missed it - did you?

Well, it was a doozy: They found that a majority of the small primates were not being given their physical exams, "in part because the veterinarians have been preoccupied with treating older, sick animals." Again, folks, if you don't have the expertise/manpower to deal with 'em, stop dragging wild animals into situations like these. But more amazingly, a large number of active cases of irritable bowel disease in the apes, giving the animals recurrent cramps and diarrhea, were tied to the fact that the apes were being fed fish and beef when they normally eat a vegetarian diet. "Zoo spokeswoman Peper Long said that the apes have been eating fish and beef in an 'enrichment program' outside their normal diet" - OK, one more time, if you don't understand animal nutrition, don't make animals dependent on you for food, OK? Feeding vegetarian animals BEEF is not "enriching," but rather, as is obvious from the disease, "impoverishing." Enriching - who's anthropomorphizing now?

***CRIMINAL PROBE IN MAD COW CASE***

Well, this is pretty big, even if it doesn't make the front pages: "The government has begun a criminal investigation into whether records may have been falsified in the nation's first and only case of mad cow disease, the Agriculture Department's inspector general said Wednesday. AND: "In a separate investigation, the General Accounting Office is checking the feed industry's compliance with a Food and Drug Administration's rule aimed at keeping the infectious protein blamed for the disease out of cattle feed." (Guess I wasn't the only one who wanted to see the paperwork.) PLUS: "The criminal investigation is moving alongside a non-criminal review of the Agriculture Department's response to the mad cow case, the department's inspector general, Phyllis Fong, told a House subcommittee." And in case there's any doubt what the focus is of the criminal investigation, "Fong said it focuses on whether the infected Holstein cow truly was a 'downer' animal unable to stand or walk when it was slaughtered Dec. 9 in Moses Lake, Wash."

Dave Louthan is the guy that has been saying otherwise, and he hasn't shut up about it. Here's some of his latest prognostication: "I told everybody the meat people only had until calving season to get this fixed. That time is now upon us. All that inventory they have been holding back to keep the prices up must move now to make room for all the new feeders popping out now, today... There will be a huge surplus of fat cattle waiting to be slaughtered. Prices will continue to plummet. All the smaller feedlots will go under right away. They will demand subsidies. The American taxpayer, you, will pick that up. The Gov't is already broke. George W. spent all the money beating up Saddam. Higher taxes will be necessary." Dunno if all that's accurate, but it makes as much sense as anything the government's saying. And this part sounds familiar to readers of Meat Facts: "You're not going to get sick for a while, so unlike lysteria, E- coli, and salmonella, they can simply push it under the rug in the name of Profit. If this was a disease you got today and died from tomorrow, it would be a whole different ball game. As long as Joe Average is getting his bills paid on time and watching the evening news, which is completely devoid of any Mad Cow reports, he'll be content to sit there munching on contaminated beef and pretending that BSE is something that happens somewhere else. Besides, it's perfectly safe and risk free - the Gov't said so. Time after time." Lessee if people still credulously believe the USDA officials when they're speaking from jail.

UPDATE 3/4: While Dave Louthan proffers ever more dangerous accusations - e.g. three federal investigators pressured him to sign a written document "to change my story" (and this may be true, but Louthan better be ready to back it up), the USDA is putting the finishing touches on its "Schrodinger's Cow" defense. This is a cow that can be both a downer and not a downer, depending on whether it's being observed at any given moment. USDA's DeHaven: "there is nothing saying that an animal that is down cannot get up. So in fact both accounts could potentially be true." USDA's Julie Quick: "Clinically, a downer animal can get up and walk for brief periods of time." See? It was all just a matter of semantics. Go back to sleep.

REMEMBER THAT "LAUGHABLE" FAST-FOOD LAWSUIT?

Just a coincidence, of course, that Mickey D's has finally stopped "Super-Sizing." (Actually, it's probably also quite related to this.)

MAD COW MEAT: 4 TIMES AS MUCH AS USDA SAID

Gosh, this is disturbing - or would be, to anyone who could sincerely be surprised that the USDA lies to the American public: "When the USDA launched the recall of affected meat Dec. 23, officials put the total at 10,400 pounds, or 5.2 tons, a figure they repeated for nearly two months. But the actual amount was 38,000 pounds, or 19 tons, the agency now acknowledges."