How Mad Cow Disease Can Escape U.S. Beef Detection – Dr. Lawrence Broxmeyer

Nov. 1, 2010 - PRLog -- Transmissible spongioform enchephalopathies (TSE's), include BSE or "mad cow disease", Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans, and scrapie in sheep. They remain a mystery, their cause hotly debated.

The fact is that through present methods, it is not easy to detect Mad cow disease. This bubbled over when an October 25th, 2010 probe appeared in The Huffington Post, revealing that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) waited almost 2 week before reporting a case of Mad cow, and only then after being pressured by a press release on the matter by the American advocacy group Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (RCALF USA). Our USDA was then quick to reassure that because of APHIS  (its Animal and Health Inspection Service) the risk from trade of beef or cattle from Canada was negligible.

The real problem behind this chain of events surfaced when both the CFIA and the FDA admitted that there is currently no way to test live animals for Mad cow.  Because Mad cow is currently thought to be caused by a misfolded protein, without genes, testing can only be done when the animal is dead.  

Such testing for mad cow in Canada is now voluntary, and data there shows testing on the decline in cattle U.S. cattle exports.  The USDA currently permits Canadian cattle born after March 1, 1999 into the U.S. without mandatory BSE (mad cow) testing. Since the cow discovered to have the disease was alive and had been born after March 1, 1999, it would have been eligible to be imported into the U.S.. So on the same day as Canadian Food Inspection was challenged, an Australian livestock group began questioning the safety of either U.S. or Canadian beef imports.

Lead researcher Lawrence Broxmeyer MD, who has appeared in The Journal of Infectious Diseases,  isn't satisfied with either the current theory for mad cow disease, or the dangerous wait until the death of a cow to determine whether it has it.  "Current mad cow diagnosis", said Broxmeyer, "lies solely in the detection of late appearing 'Prions', a title given by its discover to geneless misfolded proteins that unlike any infective agent ever known, infect without having RNA or DNA.”

Besides the out-of-the-box thinking that geneless misfolded proteins could become infectious merely by misfolding - critics immediately countered that laboratory preparations of prions could in reality contain other things, such as bacteria or viruses. Furthermore, the rigors of prion purification itself, might have killed mad cow’s causative virus or bacteria. Therefore, even if samples appeared to infect animals,” said Broxmeyer, “it was impossible to prove that prions were causative and not just the end result of an infectious process.”

"Furthermore",  Dr. Broxmeyer  asserted, "Lasmezas's study showed that 55% of mice injected with samples of mad cow from cattle had no detectable prions. Still, incredibly, prions, are held as existing mad cow dogma, and Heino Dringer, who did pioneer work on their nature, candidly predicts "it will turn out that the prion concept is wrong." Many animals that die of Mad cow never show evidence of misfolded proteins, and Dr. Frank Bastian, of Tulane, an authority, thinks the disorder is caused by the bacterial DNA he isolated in this diseases. The problem being that prions do not have DNA.”

"Then" added Lawence Broxmeyer MD, "Roels and Walravens isolated bovine tuberculosis from the brains of cows with mad cow. Moreover, epidemiologic maps of the origins and peak incidence of mad cow disease in the UK, suggestively match those of England's areas of highest bovine tuberculosis, the Southwest. And  in that Southwest, the very cradle of British Mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans,  occurred an exponential increase in bovine tuberculosis just prior to its mad cow outbreaks. In the meantime Harley's study showed pathology identical to "mad cow" from systemic tuberculosis in cattle, causing an encephalitis indistinguishable from Mad cow disease."

"In addition to all of this" said Lawrence Broxmeyer,  prions have been described as amyloid, itself historically linked to tuberculosis.”

Once the most prevalent infectious disease of cattle in the US, bovine TB caused more losses among US farm animals in the early part of this century than all other infectious diseases combined. The situation had become so grave in hogs and cattle that by 1917, the Cooperative State-Federal Tuberculosis Eradication Program, administered by APHIS and the USDA had to be administered. Control of TB in cattle was a large part of the very reason for APHIS’s birth.

At present tuberculosis in cattle still causes worldwide annual losses to agriculture of $3 billion dollars. In his Nobel Prize address of 1901 Von Behring stated "As you know, tuberculosis in cattle is one of the most damaging infectious diseases to affect agriculture".

"Today", concluded  Lawrence Broxmeyer, "the greatest hindrance to early detection for Mad cow lies in the very theory it has become captive to: that it is not from an infectious disease. There are many diagnostic tests for cow tuberculosis, most of which are not being used. Besides the archaic TB skin test, we have sophisticated mycobacterial blood PCR’s and tuberculoprotein assays as well as a host of other early detection methods.
APHIS’s  very existence came about because of tuberculosis in Cattle and swine. We really need to rethink our approach towards how we look for mad cow disease.”

Additional information on Mad cow and Jakob Cruzfeldt can be obtained from, Lawrence Broxmeyer MD’s on-going research can be found at
http://drbroxmeyer.netfirms.com/
http://drbroxmeyer.netfirms.com/MadCow.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15325025