Free Republic

Spanish vultures are hungry, even starving — and the regional government in Madrid plans to do something about it. EU laws aimed at halting the spread of mad cow disease require the countryside to be kept clear of dead livestock even if they died of natural causes. But Juan Carlos Atienza of the Spanish Ornithological Organization says the lack of animal corpses since the law was introduced in Spain in 2002 has hit certain vultures very hard. Esperanza Aguirre, president of Madrid's regional government, said Monday the capital aims to ease the vultures' hunger by allowing some dead animals to...

Enlarge ImagePotent protein. The normal version of a pathological prion protein (in green) is expressed in the cells that make up the olfactory system, fine-tuning the mouse's sense of smell.Credit: Claire Le Pichon and Matt Valley Talk about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Misfolded proteins known as prions cause mad cow disease and other fatal neurodegenerative illnesses. But in their properly folded form, the proteins may be important to survival, helping mice and other animals keep their sniffing skills sharp, new research shows. Prions get the bad reputation--and the lion's share of research attention--but interest in the normal form...

Mad Cow Rules Hit Sperm Banks' Patrons By Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 13, 2008; Page A01 When Julie Peterson decided to have a baby on her own two years ago, she picked a tall, blond, blue-eyed Danish engineer as a sperm donor to match her own Scandinavian heritage. But when she went back to the sperm bank to use the same donor to have another child, she was stunned to discover that the federal government had made it impossible. "I just cried," said Peterson, 43, who lives in North Carolina. "I was in complete shock. I...

The words "war on terror" will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country's chief prosecutor said Dec. 27. Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless "death cult." The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language." London is not a battlefield, he said. "The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who...

We live in the age of the prion, says New York writer DT Max in his introduction to this neat little medical whodunit. The claim sounds worthy of a car advert. You are never alone with a prion. That sort of thing. In fact, the prion is a strange, non-living infectious agent whose behaviour was widely disputed until US medical researcher Stanley Prusiner confirmed its existence in a series of elegant experiments that won him a Nobel Prize for physiology in 1997. Now, most scientists accept prions are responsible for a range of modern curses: mad cow disease, the fatal...

The Humane Society of the U.S. has, for years, been trying to frighten people away from consuming meat, milk and eggs -- but its recent testimony before a congressional committee reached a new low when the HSUS president, Wayne Pacelle, made the unsupported claim that pigs could be harboring the infamous and deadly British ‘mad cow” disease. Swine veterinarians quickly pointed out that “mad cow,” or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, has never occurred naturally in swine. At the height of the British “mad cow” epidemic, both swine and cattle were exposed to the tissues from thousands of infected cattle and the...

Mad cow disease and other brain disorders stemming from prion proteins have long resisted cure. Now, in a test in mice, a prion disease caught early has been reversed. Prions—misfolded versions of a natural protein called PrP—trigger normal PrP to misfold in the same way. Over time, prion infection kills so many neurons that the brain becomes riddled with holes. In the new study, neurologist Giovanna R. Mallucci of the Institute of Neurology in London and her colleagues tested whether shutting off the prions' supply of PrP could alter the course of disease. They worked with genetically engineered mice that...

dozen calves that don't have prions - the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease. The research project is reported in the online journal Nature Biotechnology. Preliminary tests suggest that the brains of the genetically engineered calves are immune to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease). The scientists verified this by trying to infect post mortem brain tissue from two of the 20-month old calves with prions, but the tissue remained healthy. This follows a long process using donor cattle cells in which the gene known to trigger the production of prions was "switched off". The cells were...

Prion-infected mice survive longer A new method of treatment can appreciably slow down the progress of the fatal brain disease scrapie in mice. This has been established by researchers from the Universities of Munich and Bonn together with their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried. To do this they used an effect discovered by the US researchers Craig Mello and Andrew Fire, for which they were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine. Scrapie is a variant of the cattle disease BSE and the human equivalent Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. However, it will take years for the method to be...

Former President Bill Clinton gestures during remarks before the Center for American Progress, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006 at Georgetown University in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Scientists have long eyed an enigmatic protein called PrP as the culprit behind deadly prion diseases, including "mad cow" disease. Now they've identified one of its functions in healthy animals: helping certain stem cells in bone marrow divide and survive. It's not clear what the find means for the protein's behavior in the brain, but prion experts say that uncovering any function for PrP is a big step forward. PrP is found throughout the body, and it's especially abundant in the brain. In rare cases, PrP can misfold and clump together, potentially leading to fatal prion diseases. But scientists have...

The Agriculture Department said yesterday that it would scale back testing for mad cow disease by about 90 percent, saying the number of infected animals was far too low to justify the current level of surveillance. “It’s time that our surveillance efforts reflect what we now know is a very, very low level of B.S.E. in the United States,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said as he announced the new testing program for the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. After the disease was found in a Canadian-born dairy cow in Washington in December 2003, the department tested more than 759,000 animals over...

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Political news March 23, 2006, 2:36PM Meatpacker Sues Feds Over Mad Cow Test By LIBBY QUAID AP Food and Farm Writer © 2006 The Associated Press WASHINGTON — A Kansas meatpacker sued the government on Thursday for refusing to let the company test for mad cow disease in every animal it slaughters. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef says it has Japanese customers who want comprehensive testing. The Agriculture Department threatened criminal prosecution if Creekstone did the tests, according to the company's lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. [snip] It would cost about $20 per animal to...

The long lives that some former cannibals enjoy before succumbing to a brain-wasting disease suggest that many more humans will eventually die of mad cow disease, scientists said Thursday. But several experts in such illnesses, called prion diseases — which are blamed for killing New Guinea cannibals and British eaters of infected beef — disagreed with that frightening implication of the study, which is to be published Friday in The Lancet, a British medical journal. These experts praised the rigorous work the authors of the report did to confirm that kuru, a disease that once decimated highland tribes in New...

AP FOOD AND FARM WRITER WASHINGTON -- Two cases of mad cow disease in Texas and Alabama seem to have resulted from a mysterious strain that could appear spontaneously in cattle, researchers say. Government officials are trying to play down differences between the two U.S. cases and the mad cow epidemic that has led to the slaughter of thousands of cattle in Britain since the 1980s. It is precisely these differences that are complicating efforts to understand the brain-wasting disorder, known medically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE for short. "It's most important right now, till the science tells us...

ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- There are probably a few undetected cases of mad cow disease in the United States, but the total -- estimated at four to seven -- is "extraordinarily low," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns says. The calculation comes from new testing data released Friday. Testing is likely to be scaled back after a panel of independent scientists reviews the figures, Johanns said. "The data shows the prevalence of BSE in the United States is extraordinarily low," Johanns told reporters on a conference call. "In other words, we have an extremely healthy herd of cattle in our country." The...

Scientists have confirmed that prions, the mysterious proteins thought to cause chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, latch on tightly to certain minerals in soil and remain infectious. The discovery that prions stay deadly despite sticking to soil comes as a surprise, because while many proteins can bind to soil, that binding usually changes their shapes and activities. In a paper published in the journal PLoS Pathogens (April 14), scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggest that certain soil types serve as natural prion repositories in the wild. As animals regularly consume soil to meet their mineral needs, it's possible...

CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA — Federal officials have confirmed a new case of mad cow disease — the fifth in Canada since screening began three years ago. A six-year-old dairy cow from British Columbia tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday. The cow from a Fraser Valley farm was identified through the national BSE surveillance program when it began having trouble walking. “That’s how it caught the eye of the farmer and the vet,” food agency spokesman Alain Charette said Sunday. Officials say no part of the animal entered the human food or...

Research could lead to better understanding of wasting diseases By The Associated Press GREAT FALLS -- Scientists at McLaughlin Research Center have discovered a new way to study prions, the infectious agents that cause brain-wasting diseases, and hope the work could lead to a better understanding of who is more at risk to contract such diseases. Scientists infected stem cell cultures from fetal mouse brains with prions and found the infection could be detected within weeks. Injecting mice with the prions and waiting for infection to develop can take months and sometimes years. The tissue cultures allow the researchers to...

WASHINGTON - Investigators may never figure out where the Alabama cow with mad cow disease was born and raised, in part because the U.S. lacks a livestock tracking system the Bush administration promised two years ago. After the first case of mad cow disease in December 2003, the government pledged to get a nationwide program into place quickly so officials could track cows, pigs and chickens from their birth to the dinner table. Today, however, the system is a long way off. Alabama officials saw the need firsthand last week as they tried to discover where the infected cow came...

Former Gov Codey was pretty busy signing many items into NJ law before Corzine stepped up this week. One of the Amendments Codey signed into law is the Model School Nutrition Program. http://www.state.nj.us/agriculture/PolicyQA.pdf I became curious because it seems to be an initiative of the USDA. I always thought it was the FDA that dealt with foods and labeling. Anyway, the School Nutrition Policy is an effort of another initiative called Healthy People 2010. The Model School Nutrition Program is the first implementations of the Healthy People 2010 Project. The USDA, State and Local levels are presenting this as a...

A cow in Alberta has tested positive for mad cow disease, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has confirmed. Officials do not believe parts of the cow were processed for consumption. CFIA will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. ET. Federal agriculture inspectors sent what was termed a "suspicious sample" to a Winnipeg lab for further testing on the weekend. Canada's beef and dairy cattle breeding industry has been shut out of the United States since bovine spongiform encephalopathy was discovered in an Alberta cow in May 2003. A subsequent two-year ban on Canadian beef cost the industry an estimated...

The Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules today to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, but the rules were considerably less strict than those proposed last year but never adopted, and critics promptly denounced them as inadequate. The F.D.A. proposed banning from animal feed the brains and spinal cords of cows more than 30 months old. It also proposed banning the same parts of any animal not passed by inspectors as suitable for human food, any tallow that contained more than 0.15 percent protein and any meat contained in brain or spinal column that was separated from carcasses...

ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- The government is easing rules intended to prevent the spread of mad cow disease among people, allowing part of a cow's small intestine to be used as casing for some sausages. Rules in effect after discovery of the first U.S. case of mad cow disease in 2003 required the removal of the small intestine when a cow was slaughtered. The Agriculture Department and Food and Drug Administration cleared the way on Wednesday for a portion of the small intestine to be used as a casing for specialty sausage. The rules still prohibit use of the lower...

Three beef plants in Washington and five in Oregon were among 130 across the country cited for violating new safeguards to protect the public from mad-cow disease. In all cases, potentially contaminated meat was kept out of the food supply. But the consumer group Public Citizen, which obtained records on nearly 1,000 violations nationwide, said the pattern is disturbing. "These are instances where the inspectors caught something," said Tony Corbo, the group's legislative representative. "We don't know what didn't get caught." U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Lisa Picard said the records show that the inspection system is working to keep...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - For one who would like to see more Democrats in Washington, I spend a disturbing amount of time trying to save the party from itself. Polls show Democrats on the popular side of many big issues: healthcare, Social Security, the environment. But then they go out and lose it on the small stuff. Case in point is their recent tango with the mad-cow "threat." Mad-cow disease is a nonissue in the US. As far as we know, not one person has ever died from eating an American cow infected with mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). And it's...

Federal officials said today the second confirmed case of mad cow was a cow born and raised in Texas. The 12-year old cow was incinerated at a pet-food-supply plant in Waco, the US Department of Agriculture said. The plant identified the cow as a downer — a sick animal no longer able to walk — was destroyed before it could be used. The cow likely contracted the brainwasting disease from feed it ate before the ruminant-to ruminant feed ban implemented in 1997, according to the USDA. Such feed, which includes cattle parts, can spread the disease. Officials would not release...

Substantial changes in the nation's mad cow testing system were ordered yesterday after British tests on a cow slaughtered in November confirmed that it had the disease even though the American "gold standard" test said it did not. "The protocol we developed just a few years ago to conduct the tests might not be the best option today," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in making the announcement. "Science is ever evolving." At an afternoon news conference in Washington, Mr. Johanns described serious errors in the testing in the United States on the animal, the second one found with mad cow...

The Agriculture Department said today that tests conducted on an animal that died in November, suspected of having mad cow disease, had turned out positive, confirming the second case of the disease to be found in the United States in the last two years. The tests for the brain-wasting disease, clinically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, were conducted at a laboratory in Weybridge, England, after officials at the United States Department of Agriculture were not satisfied with the results of previous tests on the same cow. These test results could raise fears that foreign countries will shun American beef again,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what could be the second U.S. case of mad cow disease, an older beef animal tested positive for the deadly ailment but will undergo a last round of tests at a British laboratory to confirm the results, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said. The only U.S. confirmed case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was found in December 2003 in a Washington state dairy cow. That discovery halted billions of dollars worth of American beef exports and raised questions about the safety of the U.S. food supply. Johanns said the new suspect case involved...

Hormonal changes may actually alter the chemical balance in the brain and trigger some of the mood swings associated with a woman's monthly menstrual cycle, according to a new study. The study suggests that cells in a brain region called the hippocampus generate different types of receptors for the brain chemical GABA during various phases of the menstrual cycle. These changes may affect a woman's susceptibility to anxiety, depression, and seizures. Both estrogen and progesterone have effects on nerve cell activation, but the mechanism behind changes in seizure activity and increased anxiety are unknown, write the researchers. They say their...

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Washington, DC, Apr. 21 (UPI) -- Scientists involved with a new study released Thursday said it provides strong proof of the controversial theory that infectious proteins called prions cause mad cow disease and similar brain disorders in humans. Some experts find the data unconvincing, however, and one researcher recently presented findings he said robustly support a different hypothesis: these diseases are caused by a bacteria. "This is really the best and final proof for the prion hypothesis," Claudio Soto, a professor of neurology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and senior author of the...

OTTAWA - The United States has covered up cases of mad cow disease in the past eight years, a former U.S. agriculture inspector said Tuesday at a House of Commons committee. Leslie Friedlander repeated a claim he has made before that cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy surfaced in the U.S. long before the disease showed up in Canada, devastating this country's beef industry. Friedlander, who was fired from his job as head of inspections at a meat-packing plant in Philadelphia in 1995 after criticizing what he called unsafe practices, says he's willing to take a lie detector test to prove...

FEARS that cosmetic implants used in lips and cheeks could trigger vCJD, the human form of “mad cow” disease, have prompted the Government to launch an investigation. Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, said that experts were examining the possibility that tissue implants such as collagen could transmit blood-borne diseases such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease if contaminated. Although no evidence of such transmission has been discovered, the committee on microbiological safety of blood and tissues believes there might be a risk. Society’s obsession with high cheekbones and luscious lips have prompted thousands of Britons to resort to implants to...

A goat slaughtered in France in 2002 has tested positive for "mad cow" disease, French and EU officials said, announcing the first case in the world of an animal other than a bovine coming down with the fatal illness that can be transmitted to humans. The discovery of the disease -- known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows -- is a disturbing sign that it can cross over to other species used for human consumption. The presence of BSE in other animals had been viewed as theoretically possible but has never previously been detected. BSE has been linked...

TORONTO, Jan. 11 - Canadian officials said Tuesday that they had found a new case of mad cow disease, a report made more worrisome because the cow was born after feed restrictions intended to prevent the spread of the disease were put in place in 1997. It was the second infected cow from the western province of Alberta found in the two weeks since the Bush administration announced that it would soon allow imports of young Canadian cattle, for the first time since the initial case was found in May 2003. But in the other recent case, the cow was...

Subject: Cows, Constitution & Ten Commandments COWS: Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago,right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington. They also tracked her calves to their stalls ... but they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow. CONSTITUTION: They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart...

A possible new case of mad cow disease has been found in the United States, the Agriculture Department said yesterday. The agency said the brain of a cow tested positive three times on a rapid test for the presence of prions, the misfolded proteins that cause the disease. The department considers the rapid test inconclusive. The results await confirmation by more complex tests, and experts expect those to take four to seven days at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. A food safety expert who frequently criticizes the testing program said the results made it almost certain that...

MILWAUKEE (AP) Wisconsin deer hunters are donating the proceeds of this year's early deer hunt to food banks. Nearly four-thousand deer already were donated as of last week. The state's venison donation program takes deer killed outside the chronic wasting disease eradication zones to food pantries. Laurie Fike is coordinator of the Department of Natural Resources program. She says this year's deer donations could top ten-thousand after the state's nine-day gun season later this month. Fike says hunters typically donate about two-thirds of their kill. This year's spike also is attributed to the state's Earn-a-Buck program. In some areas, hunters...

PARIS A patient who was a frequent blood donor is the eighth confirmed case of the human form of mad cow disease in France, the Health Ministry has announced, setting off new concerns Friday about potential large-scale exposure to the mysterious illness. . Between 1993 and 2003, blood from the patient was used both for transfusions and to make medicines, which were given to thousands of patients, health officials said. All were at least potentially exposing them to mad cow disease, whose route of transmission is still poorly understood, scientists say.

British researchers have found a second person who became infected with the human version of mad cow disease as the result of a contaminated blood transfusion. Reporting in the journal Lancet, the researchers said they had found the malformed proteins, or prions, that cause the disease in an unidentified person who died this year of unrelated causes. The discovery of a second transfusion-associated prion infection, experts said, suggests that the risk of mad cow disease to the population is higher than they had realized, because it appears to confirm that eating infected beef is not the only way of spreading...

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease. The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the "protein-only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, a cousin of DNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. The concept was introduced in 1982 by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco,...

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease. The findings, being reported on Friday in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the so-called "protein only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. The concept was introduced in 1982 by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurology professor at the University of California in San Francisco,...

Unnecessary regulations are making blood banks run dry. If you walked into a blood donation center before the HIV crisis, you would have been asked 15 quick questions, then either accepted as a donor or not. Today those questions have burgeoned to almost 50, and the list continues to grow. The extra caution stems from a colossal error that blood bank officials made two decades ago, when they ignored the early warning signs of HIV and failed to implement appropriate screening and cleaning procedures. As a result, America’s blood supply became contaminated and 20,000 people were infected with the deadly...

The Agriculture Department's new testing plan for mad cow disease, which calls for testing up to 220,000 cows by the end of 2005, is seriously flawed and will result in "questionable estimates" of the prevalence of the disease in the nation's cattle, according to a draft report by the department's inspector general. The harshly critical draft, released yesterday by Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who has long been a critic of the department, said the sampling that began June 1 was not random "because participation in the program is voluntary." In addition, it said, the department has fallen...

WASHINGTON (AP) - An initial test of one animal has failed to rule out mad cow disease, but people who eat U.S. beef should not be alarmed because the animal never entered the food chain, agriculture officials say. The Agriculture Department said the result was "inconclusive" for the brain-wasting disease. The carcass was being sent to the USDA National Veterinary Laboratory in Ames, Iowa; results were expected in four days to seven days. "No matter how the confirmatory testing comes back, USDA remains confident in the safety of the U.S. beef supply," John Clifford, deputy administrator of USDA veterinary services,...

Unknown cattle disease detected in Britain 1 hour, 49 minutes ago LONDON (AFP) - British scientists have detected a previously unknown brain condition which caused paralysis and death in a young cow, officials said Tuesday in a potential new blow to an industry badly hit by mad cow disease. An investigation had been launched after a white material was found on the brain of a heifer which died after suffering paralysis for around five or six days, Britain's Department for Environment and Rural Affairs said. The animals had been tested for known bovine diseases but none had been detected, a...

Meat Was Safe, USDA Says Agriculture Department officials acknowledged yesterday that the agency quietly and improperly allowed millions of pounds of Canadian "processed" beef into the United States, despite an often invoked ban against importing that type of meat. "Clearly the process and our failure to announce some of these actions was flawed," said W. Ron DeHaven, the USDA's chief veterinary officer. He and other top officials said, however, that the decision to allow in selected Canadian processed beef was "scientifically sound" and that the meat was safe. A ban on Canadian beef was put in place last May after...

<p>Washington, DC, May. 11 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties, United Press International has learned.</p>

It’s difficult to keep track of president’s fibs, distortions and flat-out lies, Molly Ivins says. AUSTIN, Texas -- Naturally, when I heard President Bush is now claiming to be in the forefront of the fight against corporate crime, I thought it was an April Fools' joke. But no, there it is in print -- he made a big speech about it in Houston, of all places, not far from the Enron building. “We had to confront corporate crimes that cost people their jobs and their savings,” he said. “So we passed strong corporate reforms and made it very clear, we...