Focus 580; What Should Consumers Know about Mad Cow Disease

This morning in this part of focus 580 we're trying to get a better understanding of what this is what it is we're doing to try to make certain that we don't have an outbreak of BSE in the United States and whether indeed those measures are enough whether they go far enough. And I guest of the program is Sheldon Rampton. He is an investigative journalist. He is editor of a publication a quarterly publication called PR watch which is put out by an organization called the Center for Media and Democracy. He is also the co-author along with John Stauber who also works there Center for Media and Democracy of several books including one that was published in 1907 titled Mad Cow USA could the nightmare happen here. Published by common courage press. There are other books include toxic sludge is good for you. Lies damn lies in the public relations industry and the most recent which has just come out. Is trust us we're experts how industry manipulate science and gambles with your future. That just came out in January of this year. As we talk with Sheldon Rampton a

question certainly are welcome the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. Again all we ask of anyone is welcome call we ask callers as people just try to be brief so we can keep things moving along and accommodate as many. Different people as possible. Mr. Hempton Hello. Hi there. Thanks for talking with us today. Thank you. We appreciate it. It is as I read it is thought that BSE in cows is something that a small number of couse simply are going to get but that this this outbreak that we saw in Britain was not so much a matter of spontaneous development of BSE and in individual animals. It had to do with a practice that I think probably a lot of people were really not aware of and that is that it had been the practice for for parts of some animals to be ground up and and processed and

made into food and fed feed for other animals and fed to other animals and it seems to be the case what people seem to think is that. There a particular one of these kinds of spongiform encephalopathy is one that affects sheep were in the sheep the sheep were put into the feed they were fed to the cows and that's how this happened then any accelerated when parts of cows were fed to other cows. Is that what we think about how this started. Well I've been listening to you describe this and yet most people make a lot of mistakes on that kind of justice class diseases because it's pretty complicated but you've got a pretty good job except for one detail. OK. Which is that it's true that a number of scientists think that that this disease started in seeds and then moved into cows. But that's not at all the consensus or even the majority opinion. And one alternative theory is is is that the disease the Christiaan tenuously in cows and themselves at

an at a low level that was previously not detected because it is so rare and that and that that natural disease in cows that amplified in England as a result of the practice of feeding rendered cows back to cows. So there's a debate over whether it started from C or whether it actually started from Cowan themselves. Which given that some of the peculiarities of this particular class of diseases is perfectly possible. Well that well let me ask one further question and that is that that again based on what I read there is this suspicion that what we have identified apparently is some of these transmissible spongiform encephalopathy these these TSC in different kinds of animals. Right. And in sheep in cows in human beings and also in some other things. Elk deer mink cats but I gather that some some scientists seem to think that it may be that all mammals

that they occur in all mammals particular ones for particular mammals but that it is something that is rare enough so that it's difficult to see and so for that reason we might have missed it but there may be a lot of these seas out there that we just don't know about. Right. In fact a couple of studies have been done of Alzheimer's patients. These are small studies but. And you should try to generalize from them but when they've looked at people who have died of Alzheimer's in the United States in something somewhere between 1 percent and 14 percent of the cases they looked at actually turned out to have a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. So there might might be considerably larger incidence of this disease in humans than than we are generally led to believe. It's it's what the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy are is a class of diseases which. You

create a dimension similar to Alzheimer's which is ultimately fatal. And it does that by sort of filling the brain up with these microscopic sponge like holes that can be detected upon autopsy with a microscope. But because the disease resembles all timer it's possible that all timers masking that the true incidence of the disease and the number of people with with with this disease being missed diagnosis of Alzheimer's patients. There is a ATF see that affects humans and that is the crates filled Yakob disease so named for a couple of German scientists who identified it in the 20s. Right. And it like the others again. You know what I read just like the others that it's something that we don't really quite understand but we think perhaps it occurs spontaneously in a small number of people like one in a million and that it

primarily is a disease that we see in older individuals. But we have since we've now seen this out this concern about BSE. We have seen a variant of this disease which operates differently which seems to be cropping up in younger people producing against the same sorts of symptoms. And the question is Is this something these people got is this in fact BSE manifesting in a human being and something that these people came into contact with because of something some some a food item that they consumed. Right. And the general consensus among scientists to study these diseases is that the young people you're talking about did get the disease from from mad cow from BSE or mad cow disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy. It's the the the the reason that that this is something of a dilemma for scientists to study is is that this is a very

bizarre class of diseases. When you talk about it occurring spontaneously For example I can imagine if there are doctors listening. That some of them if they're not some already familiar with the unique characteristics of this disease would think that's nonsense. Diseases don't appear spontaneously miscible ones are said to be a virus here and if it is a virus then it's being passed from you know from one person to person it wouldn't be occurring spontaneously. The thing that's unique about this disease is that the disease agent is not the conventional bacteria or a virus. It's the best available theory on it is that the disease is caused by something called a prion which is an infectious protein. It's basically a protein that is produced normally by the body that become. It changes its shape and be and in a process of changing its shape acquires the ability to transmit the disease

to others. And one of the theories is that this. This misformed prion protein occurs spontaneously sometimes through sporadic mutation in every species that has the pre-op protein and it turns out that every mammalian species they have looked at has the pre-op protein. What that means is that this is a disease that you would expect to occur spontaneously in every every million species whether it be cows or she or pigs or humans. And that's what makes this a very difficult disease to control and study because with most diseases you can say OK we can quarantine infected animals. AND AND AND AND AND OR and AND Just make sure they don't pass the disease on to others but with this one even if you do a quarantine you always have the risk that it's going to pop up in occasional rare individuals who have never been exposed to

the disease. I have a couple calls here and I'm I want to make sure those people know that neck and make them wait forever but maybe let me ask one further question we can try to get into the details further and that is where how it is that an individual would come into contact with BSE. It's again my understanding that you you apparently find these things the things that cause the disease in some parts of the animal but not all parts that for example milk and meat from animals known to be infected were given in the laboratory to rats and they didn't get BSE. And so the thinking is that in fact. It has something to do with how the animals are are processed what happens to various parts and then for that reason For example we would say well if you know maybe you shouldn't you might want to worry if you ate a hot dog.

But if you ate a steak probably you would be OK. How do how do we should be able think about this. This big issue of meat products and and what sort of risk they may be running by eating well they're higher risk and lower risk parts of the animal. This is if the bovine spongiform encephalopathy or the tenseness Wilson's farm and siphon off general argosies that affect the brain and and nervous system so the brains and nerves the parts of the of the body that are most likely to have high concentrations of these proteins and to be capable of transmitting the disease. If you ingest them so eating brains is not a very good idea. But the entire body of course your muscles throughout your body need a nerve supply in order to function well and for that matter they have found detectable levels. The prion protein

in in in the blood. So there is no part of the animal that is you that you can say is 100 percent certain to be free of the disease. What you can say though is that there are certain parts that are more likely to be risky and from a practical standpoint it's much less risky to consume just the meat of the animal than it is to consume something like the brain of the Terry gland. And as for milk I say that I don't see anyone from the scientific community expecting a lot of concern about milk. We Let me introduce Again our guest and we have some callers I want to bring into the conversation we're talking this morning with Sheldon Rampton He's an investigative journalist. He works with the Center for Media and Democracy that puts out a quarterly newsletter called PR watch. In addition to that he is the

co-author of several books the center has published including one dealing with the subject of mad cow disease titled Mad Cow USA could the nightmare happen here published in 1907. In addition he has written articles for publication including Harper's the nation in these times and has been interviewed or quoted in some of the major broadcast and print media in this country he's talking with us by telephone. Questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. That's for champagne Urbana folks we do also have though a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. First caller is locally it's line number one. Hello. Hi I was wondering if you could tell me if it is you know much about fact or if it is exposure and also if you could comment more and dairy products and how do you know I know you have a relatively low but compared to a state with debut last Ariston est or just compared to the right of the rest.

OK the first question was well I didn't hear all of that fellas. Is it a matter of being infected one. Or is it a key that effects of the more. Oh OK do you happen to ingest. And I like well when they've done experiments on animals it's basically the more you are exposed to the greater your chances of getting the disease and the more you are exposed to the system. If you expose not only to a lot of that of course still come down with a disease somewhat somewhat faster than they would otherwise but there is a cumulative issue of you know the I mean nice time you know if you consume something that's infected with this you're rolling the dice. But in terms of the relative risk of it. I don't think anyone has a real good way of quantifying the amount of risk but I would say that there's an order of magnitude difference between between something like a

brain and something like me and then I'd say there's probably another order of magnitude difference between me and something like milk so the milk would be considered relatively safe but I should also add that that the risk to people in this country from. From mad cow disease at this point is probably not a huge concern as as journalists writing about mad cow disease so far has not been that we think people need to change their diets in the United States because of this disease Our concern is that we feel that the government regulatory agencies and the beef industry are not doing enough to protect the public against the potential emergence of this disease in the United States. The other thing I would say too is that if you're trying to protect yourself from this class of diseases I don't think. Looking for specific products to avoid is even a very effective strategy for example in England at least one of the people who have died from exposure to Mad Cow Disease was a lifelong

vegetarian and no one knows how she got it. But but one of the one of the things that happens with with the animals we kill for food is that we also process their bodies through rendering into a variety of products that most of us don't think of as meat such as cosmetics or vaccines or even things like industrial lubricants. And so there are so there are a variety of pathways through which you could be potentially exposed to this disease agent that don't even have evolved from something with a food that you would consume. And for that reason we think that the attention really ought to be not on what products you avoid or what products you use. The rather on making sure that the government agencies and the food and and the the people who produce our food are doing what they should to keep

this disease from from spreading here. Thank you. Is it all such that regular sterilization would not meet the price. Right this is easy is extremely resistant to sterilization procedures that would kill any known living organism and that's again because this is not a living organism this is a prion protein it's not a virus or bacteria. So what is conventional disinfectants will not affect it. They have they've done experiments involving in involving not just disinfectant but heat treatment where they heated up infected tissue to put it to such a level that it reduced it all to just fine ash and the infectious agent survived without really being affected. So one of the problems for this is that in England they've had to cancel a number of Ponce electively. And the reason

is that the instruments they used to perform the tonsillectomies they're worried will come into into contact if they do one conflict about someone who's infected. Then there are surgical instruments will become infected and then when they perform this tonsilectomy on someone. Someone else says there's no good way to disinfect our instruments. The next they emit they risk transmitting transmitting the disease on to their next patient. So in England right now they are working out a way to come up with. Basically they're trying to manufacture new disposable surgical tools so that they don't have to have sway about transmitting the disease to surgery. Thank you very much. All right I think you know let's go to. Well we have another caller I guess that person and changed their mind. Other people certainly are welcome if you want to give us a call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5.

Let's talk some more about what happens what is happening here in the United States. In as part of the effort to monitor watch for BSE and make certain that it doesn't take hold here we have done a number of things we have said we're not going to import live ruminants like cows from places where we know there is BSE and other products that are made out of them. We've said we can't you can't import them except under special permit for scientific research. And we have people around the country that are that are watching for the disease. Is is that though your feeling that. This doesn't go far enough. Yet in a number of respects to begin with. Although they did stop importing British cattle for a period there were imports of British meat and bone meal meal and that of course is rendered material that spread the disease. In

England they are made they do also have a surveillance program last year. For example they looked at some twenty three hundred cattle brains to see if those cattle were infected and they didn't find it. The reason that not an adequate test is that this is a disease which. First of all you may not find when you just do an autopsy. When you do it. Before the disease reaches the stage at which you find these microscopic spongiform hole in the brain the animal may may be infected at a subclinical level. Secondly the surveillance is not adequate because just looking at 23:00 brains is not enough to rule out the possibility that you may have the disease occurring at a low rate of incidents such as one in a thousand or one in 10000. And as we mentioned earlier this is a disease that is thought by some scientists just to Christianne

tenuously in all animals at a rate of about one in a million or so. So the surveillance alone is not enough to protect against a disease that sort of like by the time you did detect the disease through surveillance its going to be too late. And and in fact I was talking to a British scientist a few years ago back when the United States was doing nothing but surveillance and he said this is just crazy that this waiting waiting to find out the U.S. left the barn door open and and unfortunately the other practices that need to be done. Are they have taken some steps to their credit. They've they announced three years ago by the time our book came out that they were imposing a ban on the feeding of mammalian proteins to cows and other ruminant animals. Unfortunately the regulation they announced had some very serious clearing loopholes and also unfortunately we did. We found

out in the last year it's been reported in The New York Times and elsewhere that the regulations they put out in 1997 are not being monitored or or observed in many cases. So there are quite a few loopholes right now in the existing procedures that should be in place to protect the public. We have other callers here and we will go next to a caller in Winnebago. Number four. Hello good morning. Yes I have a question that relates directly to the last explanation. When I was a boy the University of Illinois I was very explicit never fed tankage or bone meal our meal to ruminants. So when did it become permissible to start doing that. Musta been after I got out of school. What's the history on it you know.

It was it actually has a pretty interesting history. There's the part that gets rendered is right rendering plants are places where they take all the parts of the animals that can't be. It turned into some other usable products such as. I mean you can take the skin of the cow and use it for leather or you can you know process the meat out of it but then you have all these other leftover parts that don't have any commercial value and and you also have some of some other things like restaurant waste and dead animals and things like that. And so to dispose of all of that that put them in these big rendering plants and basically grind it all up and cook it down and produce various products from it including what they call rendered meat and bone meal. And one of the reasons that this came into use as something that was being fed to the livestock is that they used to take a lot of the stuff

and process it into salt. But then the advent of of synthetic soaps derived from petroleum kind of wiped out that market for the renderers So they started looking for other uses for this material and came up with the idea that it could be because there are a lot of protein and fats in the product. Say in this rendered material that that this could be something they could mark it as a seed supplement to chickens and cows and pigs and so forth. And so they started doing that. Quite a bit really I think beginning in the 1970s and into the 80s. And it's something that I really took off at that time. They didn't come across any kind of problem with it of course until the outbreak of mad cow disease in England in the 1900s. Thank you. Once again we shoot ourselves in the foot

with science. Yes. Well that's sort of what's going on. I mean when you look at this it's not a big high tech change that anyone has made is just the take it took this stuff that the people thought would be safe to feed the animals and they didn't anticipate that this bizarre type of diseases the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy is might be lurking in the background waiting to merge if they did that. I prefer. The caller's question let's go to somebody else here this is champagne County. That's why I won. You know I had a couple of points but on the last point it seems like it came up at the same time that the overfishing of the Peruvian anchovy the fish meal supplement was widely used after World War Two but it was over fished so quickly it actually changed the whole ecology of off the coast of South America. But and they needed some protein source. Then after that was was used up. But what I want to ask you about was a couple of things and I often hang up and listen. Who are those scientists that are studying

like the idea of alternate vectors for this right now as far as we know people pry on. Actually just goes by people eating consuming beef for our meat. But I gather there there is a rather scary maybe it's a marginal possibility that there could be another way that it would might spread I don't know attached to a virus or something that's kind of scary. But the other point was just since you're with PR watch I would like to for you to put the context of how you think the meat industry is responding this I think and the government too for that matter that it's more of a responding to it as a public relations problem of getting people not to worry about eating beef. Oprah sued but. With the FDA as decimated as it has been for for for decades. Several I guess since Reagan so mind started before that I don't know. And this whole idea that government can't do anything that public

health is sort of pretty much abandoned in this country. How can we have any assurance that anybody is monitoring with any any kind of effectiveness of the you know assume the social democracies in Europe are more intrusive and consequently might and might might be looking a little harder or something I don't know if you can deal with that broad of a scope and the whole thing up and see. All right thanks for the go OK well that I don't mind thing about for the Antilles. But on the question of what spending is this to see if there is still some scientific debate about the prion theory some scientists think that there is some kind of a virus involved. The problem is they've never been able to identify such a virus that is present. I mean for example it produces no anti-body response. And. But this is it. One of the

things to always bear in mind when you're talking about this class of diseases is that it's a very difficult disease to study it's it's very dimly understood even by the best scientists. And so anything that anyone including me tells you about it you should take with a grain of salt. And that's one of the reasons it's hard also to deal with from the point of view of public health because it's very hard for scientists to know what the talking about when they try and set policies in terms of what's safe enough and what's going to fight all the channels through it's just disease might come at you. So for example the American Red Cross a little while ago. Issued a policy basically saying that they were not going to accept blood donations from people who'd lived in England during the period that this epidemic has emerged in cattle because some of those people would be donating blood who presumably had the British be.

Some people criticize the Red Cross and said that you know the likelihood of it being transmitted through blood is pretty low. And that's that's being ridiculously over protective. I think it's actually a reasonable thing for the Red Cross to do because because of the many uncertainties that surround this disease. Now as to the other question with regard to how this is being managed PR campaign I think the lawsuit that the National Cattlemen's Beef Association bought against Oprah Winfrey is a good example of the PR campaign that that's been waged against the public discussion of this disease. If you look at the. The writings of the industry as consultants they are scared to death that the public will talk about this they're afraid everyone's going to start boycotting the and no one will eat hamburgers anymore and that will be a disaster so one of the things that they did they did a few years ago was they joined forces

with some other people in the food and meat industries and they got laws put on the books in 13 states called agricultural product disparagement laws which are what. And that's the law that Oprah Winfrey was sued under in Texas say the laws basically say that if you say something that is construed as disparaging about an agricultural product such as a such as DC then you can be sued and convicted unless you can prove that what you said is. Scientifically sound whatever that means. The problem of course is it talking about this disease is it's impossible to prove that anything you say about it is scientifically sound because it's such a complicated disease. In the case of The Oprah Winfrey child she won the trial but she had to spend millions of dollars and a lot of her time in defending herself. Most people who are interested in writing about the disease most journalists don't have the kind of money that Oprah Winfrey has. And after her first lawsuit.

Began with a real chilling effect in the way journalists talked about this disease. We had quite a few reporters say to us that they were interested in the story they read our book they wanted to do something about it but they were afraid that if they did they would be sued. So that's one aspect of the public relations campaign that is an ongoing effort to sort of chill speech and also to tell journalists that it is irresponsible scaremongering just to talk about this subject. The other aspect of it is is that the industry groups in collaboration actually with the with the U.S. Department of Agriculture has set up a sort of crisis response teams consisting of scientists and others who are who are ready on a moment's notice to be mobilized to tell the public about how stringent all the regulations are and how they've never detected a case in the United States. And there's no real problem here. They also have contingency plans in the event that a case is

detected in the United States where they will say at that point well if it's only one case and we have very stringent regulations in place to keep it from spreading further and so forth and every time you see this issue start to pop up in the in the news these government scientists and industry scientists also start to mobilize and to put. And to put their word out there very organized but doing that. We just have about 15 minutes left and we have some other callers and I want to try and give them a chance and again I guess I should introduce our guest. We're talking with Sheldon Rampton. He is editor of PR watch a quarterly newsletter published by the Center for Media and Democracy. He's also written articles for other publications including Harper's and the nation and in these times he is the co-author along with John Stauber who also works at a center in fact he was the founder of the Center for Media and Democracy. He's the co-author of several books including one that deals with this topic it was published first in 1907. The title of Mad Cow USA it's

published by common courage press and questions are welcome three three three. W. Weil toll free 800 1:58 WLM. The next person up here in line is someone locally here linked to below one. I was wondering if you knew anything about the what I've read that in the early 80s CJD was spread among humans who were taking human growth hormone. And then a similar thing has happened with with the new variant CJD in that. Cow. Were you to put two extracts from their patooties pituitary gland which is what the transmitting agent and they were trying to come up with the super cow. Well I don't know I think a lot about. Terry plants super cows.

But you're correct that in one way this disease has been transmitted to people is through the use of human growth hormone as a treatment for people who suffered from horses you know people who body didn't naturally produce enough human growth hormone were given human who were given treatments and the way they would derive the human growth hormone was from was by extracting it from the Terry glands of cadavers. This practice by the way is no longer occurring a few years ago. They came up with a way of making synthetic human growth hormone. But what happened when is that. In order to produce enough human growth hormone to treat people they would actually go around and pay for a funeral home a certain Seefried pituitary gland that they that they extracted from the people they were they were burying and

and it wasn't much money but. But they would get thousands of these pituitary gland that way and then they would pull them off together and in a single baths in order to produce these this this human growth hormone extract in the process of pulling it though they also amplified the risk of of transmitting the disease. Because if if you take I mean if you if you if you were to take the pituitary gland from one cadaver the likelihood of that one person having having quite swelled occupancies is pretty small but when you take thousands of them and pull them all together in a batch you're you're you're you're contaminating that whole batch with the infectious agents don't take very much of the infectious agent to transmit the right it takes very little and so in the process they basically there's a large class of. People in England then the United States and other parts of the world who are treated when they were children for

you know problems with their growth using this thing and some of them are still waiting to stay to find out whether they're going to get the disease what they did with it. I think I think the odds of getting the disease are something like 1 in 100 among the people who were treated with human growth hormone during that period. Well I did you did read that there was a similar thing going on with with workouts but I got two more questions and we're trying to squeeze in one is that the understand the Ministry of Agriculture which are fisheries and food called Map in England in England banned everything except animal blood gelatin and have been and in particular Jell-O is problematic because they're not to you I mean they have very little basis for not banning gelatin and understand it. To get into everything from cosmetics to candies and

cookies and things like that I was wondering if you knew anything about what happened. What if if if our regulatory agencies have been particularly cautious about what's involved what's what's in our imports from Britain in terms of health and tallow for example. Well you know that's a really good question and you know in the Delphin those end up in everything and that ends up for example in gel caps in the medicines you take. The regulatory agencies back in around 1995 sent out some letters to drug companies and they said don't use this stuff from from England because it could be contaminated with mad cow disease. They're very emphatic about it. And unfortunately we we just had reported last week in The New York Times that five of the major drug companies ignored that advice. And the New York Times is a big piece about

this. What turns out it's not they not only did they ignore the advice but that the Food Drug Administration didn't even find out about it until last year. And the New York Times found out about it this year saw a year after the FDA knew that these drug companies were not complying with the advice that they had sent out. The public finds out about it. What that tells you is that is that the FDA is doing more to protect the reputation of these drug companies that aren't following its advice than it is to protect the public. And even now out of all of the drug companies that do this have been identified in that report the FDA says it can't they can't release the information about which products are affected because because of trademark and copyright patent information about how these products are made and it would violate the patent rights of these companies to disclose which products have been made using materials from British cattle.

I hope that the COA will forgive me you know he said. He had another question but we're getting to the point where I only have about maybe six or seven minutes left in the lines are full and one trying to give some other folks a chance. We'll go next to southern Illinois. It's line number three. Hello how are you doing. I'm raisin. My first cow and I know it were supposedly in low risk but I've heard conflicting things about well what happens to the calories that they get angry and upset and they're very violent and I've heard another person or know things say that they just lay around they don't do nothing can you tell me what the early possible effects are and and what the also the end results are I mean as far as behavior and also what it looks like or appears to do to humans and I'll hang up and listen thank you. Well that's actually kind of a complicated question because it depends. The British strain of bovine spongiform encephalopathy produces the effect that of what the animal will become aggressive or agitated at first and then it loses coordination and

becomes unable to stand and eventually die or is put out. However there's there's there's a researcher here in Wisconsin where I live by the name of Richard Marsh who did some experience experiments a few years back involving transmissible mean can't sell philosophy which is a version of the disease that was popping up in in mink farms. And Marsh came to the conclusion that the mink were getting it from being fed downer cows in the United States. Downer cows are cows that just for one reason or another one day become unable to stem. And if that can happen for a variety of reasons. But but one reason could be some neurological disease and Marsh reached the conclusion that these means that were were dying in Wisconsin were getting that transmissible Minke encephalopathy from being fed down or

dairy cows in Wisconsin. Saw the savior of a downer cow of course quite different from the behavior of getting agitated that you described. When Marsh went to the level of taking the transmissible mink encephalopathy and transmitting it back to cows and found that it did indeed produce the symptoms you'd expect to see in a typical downer cow. So it's so there isn't any one set of symptoms. If you're looking for the British strain of a sponge a pharmacy of bovine spongiform encephalopathy would be agitated behavior. And I'll say that there are different behaviors in humans. One of the ways they recognize the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in England is that is that the people who come down with that that develop somewhat different symptoms than from conventional indices. Well it is the only way to do a definitive diagnosis of BSE in the cow for example too. To do that. Post-mortem.

That's the only way to do a definitive diagnosis. They do have some tests now that are becoming fairly good at doing that diagnosing animals even in pre-clinical stages. But those tests are not 100 percent accurate. Try to get at least one more will go to Belgium. Number four. Hello. Yes a very short question. One it's a chance of getting this disease. Is it like winning the lottery or is it more prevalent to match. Right now in the United States I'd say it's you're talking about winning the lottery it's not a it's not a huge risk to any given individual. I mean I you know I always tell people that this is not a disease right now that should cause you to change your eating habits for example because the risk to an individual is not that high the risk right now is to society at large. If we don't do something to something more to prevent the disease from emerging here and that that is a significant risk I think you're right and to follow for someone else right here.

Line 1. Hello. And oh yes go ahead. Did you discuss cannibalism. Are people eating people such as the Qumran Papa New Guinea where considerable incidence has occurred. We haven't discussed that but that's really a fascinating story and we talk about that in our book Mad Cow USA. Is that one of the first really good pieces of research about this class of disease this was was done by a guy named Carlson guy who went to Papa New Guinea and found out that that that is a disease called Kuru had spread epidemic proport levels in in this class a stone age cannibals who were in the practice of consuming their relatives as part of sort of the funeral services. And that's really kind of a fascinating story in the lead. We go into detail on that in our book before we run out of time I should just mention that we recently put our book online so that people can

download the entire book from our website. So if people want to check that out. The place to go is our website which is w w w dot TR watch stop o r g. How does cannibalism occur in the United States among people cannibalism. Well among Jeffrey Dahmer it did it did that. Oh well the other thing of course is is that through medicine and things like heart transplants and and organ transplants and brought blood transfusions they are basically engaged in the form of high tech cannibalism. That's one of the concerns about concerns that scientists have raised is that some of these medical procedures run the risk of transmitting the disease cause that's what did happen with less human growth hormone. We I'm going to have to jump in here because we're the end of the time we're going to have to stop. I do want to mention one more time that are very interested in reading some more on the subject you can look for the book which our guest has coauthored titled Mad Cow USA is published by common courage press and as he just mentioned

also they have it on their website PR watch which is that again the Duchess PR watchdog orgy. That's correct. OK. Yes and public relations. And they this is the Center for Media and Democracy they publish this quarterly newsletter PR watch our guest Sheldon Rampton also co-author with John Stauber of these three books one of them being Mad Cow USA. Mr. Repton thank you very much for talking with us. Thank you.