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> 狂牛病・遺伝子組み換え１０ > 127.html
★阿修羅♪
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(回答先: 倒牛病はウイスコンシン州だけで年間2万頭も死んでいるという話です 投稿者 すみちゃん 日時 2003 年 11 月 06 日 16:44:04)
”Farm Sanctuary News”（http://www.farmsanctuary.org/newsletter/mad_cow.htm）からの転載です。（2年前のものですが）
これを読むと米国では極めて甘いウシの検査体制のなかで、”Downed cow”の問題が放置されていることが分かります。
さて、すみちゃん、もし情報を掴んでおられたらお答え頂けませんか。
・いちばん気になりますのが人の発症ですが、疑わしい症例の報告はありますか？
・倒牛病（これはすみちゃんの訳語ですか？）の発症原因について、 どのように考えられているのでしょうか？
・ウィスコンシン州政府や連邦政府は全く何の対策も採ってないのでしょうか？
「これまでアルツハイマーとされてきた、人の症例の数パーセントは狂牛病の可能性がある」という専門家もいるようですが、倒牛病についても別の病気と診断されている可能性がありますね。
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（以下http://www.farmsanctuary.org/newsletter/mad_cow.htmからの転載）
Farm Sanctuary News, Summer 2001
Hear No Evil, See No Evil:Inadequacy of U.S. Surveillance for Mad Cow Disease
by Michael Greger, M.D.
A March 2001 nationwide Gallup poll found that 37% of Americans see mad cow disease as a "major threat" to the health and safety of America. They have reason to be concerned. U.S. safeguards against this deadly disease have been lacking in three major areas. First, the 1997 ban on feeding animal tissues to livestock still contains major loopholes which allow cow blood to be fed to calves, for example, and pigs and chickens who have eaten cattle tissue to be fed back to cows. Europe has forbidden feeding any animals to livestock; the United States should do the same. Second, the ban hasn't been properly enforced. An FDA survey released this year found that 20% of feed mills and rendering plants were in violation of the feed ban even years after it supposedly went 3nto effect. Third, there is inadequate testing of U.S. herds. It is irresponsible to assert that we have no mad cow disease in the United States. There have been no reported cases as of yet, but this may be because we're not looking hard enough.
Neuropathologist Pierluigi Gambetti heads the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University. "If you don't look, you won't find," says Dr. Gambetti, "unless we test more, we will never know if we have it here. If they can do it in Europe, one would think they could do it here." He is referring to the fact that every week in Europe they test ten times as many cattle than we have tested in a decade.
Over the last ten years 12,000 cattle have been tested for the disease in the United States, but that's out of the 350 million slaughtered over that time. The U.S. is presently testing only 1 out of every 18,000 cows slaughtered, whereas countries like Switzerland test 1 out of every 60 cows. Countries like Ireland test more than twice as many cows in one night as the U.S. tests in an entire year. France has one fifth of the number of cows but they're inspecting 36,000 cows a week. If the U.S. has as high an incidence of mad cow disease as France, for example, the current USDA testing program would not detect it.
Germany is testing 20,000 cattle a week compared to our 50 a week. Germany also once confidently declared themselves BSE free. But when they actually started looking intently, they found over 30 cases within two months. The USDA promises to try to increase its testing to 5,000 cattle a year. This is inadequate; Europe has already tested a million cattle for the disease. You can't find what you're not looking hard enough for.
We're also using a slower, more expensive, more ambiguous test than is used throughout Europe. The immunohistochemistry test used predominantly in the U.S. depends on the quality of the brain tissue obtained and requires accurate interpretation by a trained technician. The rapid testing techniques in Europe which take hours instead of days--allowing a cow to be tested before she enters the food supply--do not depend on tissue preservation and are less subjective
The testing in the United States has concentrated on so-called "downer" cattle, an industry term describing tens of thousands of cows which collapse for unknown reasons every year and are too sick to stand back up. This is because of the work of Dr. Richard Marsh, former Chairman of the Department of Veterinary Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which showed that there seemed to be a rare strain of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (the technical term for mad cow disease) in the United States which even preceded the outbreak in Britain. This was based largely on evidence that outbreaks of mink spongiform encephalopathy that wiped out a few U.S. fur farms"were linked to the minks eating the remains of downer cattle. Dr. Marsh believed that the form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States manifested itself as more of a "downer" cow disease than a "mad" cow disease.
Many scientists believe that cows got BSE after being fed sheep infected with a sheep spongiform encephalopathy called scrapie. To test Marsh's theory that the U.S. has a native strain of BSE which manifests with different symptoms, American cattle were inoculated with infected tissue from American sheep infected with scrapie. In England, presumably scrapie-infected cows go mad, twitching and kicking into a near rabid frenzy. But in the U.S., scrapie-infected cows in this experiment instead became lethargic and staggered to their deaths like downer cows do, supporting the belief in a form of BSE native to the United States.
Despite this evidence, if downer cows can be kept alive long enough, they can be used directly for human consumption in the United States without being first tested for mad cow disease. If the animal dies before it can be killed in the slaughterhouse, the carcass is melted down in a process called rendering into products like animal feed or pet food. Downed animal protection legislation might help restrict the use of downed animals for human consumption by ensuring the cows are humanely euthanized instead of oftentimes literally dragged to market.
In contrast, in Europe all "fallen stock" are tested for mad cow disease. For example, in Switzerland, some 14,000 cows were identified and tested last year as "high risk/fallen" out of a total of about 800,000 slaughtered. By comparison, the U.S. identified and tested only about 2,000 downers--out of a total 36 million slaughtered here. If the United States tested the same proportion of cows that the Swiss do, we would be testing 630,000 cows per year. Also, the lesions found in the suspected strain of mad cow disease in the United States are more subtle and may need even more rigorous testing than Europe.
If the U.S. government and the American cattle industry are somehow so sure that we don't have mad cow disease in this country, why don't they adequately test for it? As Dr. Gambetti says, "If you ignore it, it won't go away. If anything, it will increase."
How You Can Help
You can help by writing to your congressional representatives and urging them to cosponsor the Downed Animal Protection Act (H.R. 1421 & S. 267). Letters also need to be sent to the Food and Drug Administration to urge the FDA to grant our petition to ban the slaughter of downed animals. Check out our campaign web site at www.nodowners.org for a current list of cosponsors, addresses, and other campaign news and information
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