The use of the genetically engineered hormone rBGH not only increases the risk of cancer and other illnesses, but it intensifies the already unhealthy confinement of animals in industrial-scale dairy production. Increasingly, cows are viewed as "units of production" instead of sentient beings. They often spend their whole lives tethered to machines - even in some large-scale "organic" milk factory-farms which do not use rBGH. Some Florida dairy herds grew sick shortly after starting rBGH treatment. One farmer, Charles Knight, lost 75 percent of his herd due to the injections while Monsanto and company-funded researchers at the University of Florida withheld from him the information that the same thing was happening to other farmers and their herds. Knight says Monsanto and the university researchers blamed him for the high death rate.
Even in death - which, in general, comes earlier to rBGH-injected cows - the animals are seen as part of the machine, the "production process." In recent years the industry has taken to "rendering" animal carcasses, which means grinding up dead and often diseased cows into animal feed and other meat products. (Some ad agencies have added their own "spin" on the practice, calling it "recycling.") Approximately 40% of the "rendered" beef is used to make hamburgers. The rest is mixed into cow feed, along with sheep brains and other rendered animal parts.
Cows, like many animals, are by nature vegetarian. Turning cows into cannibals is gruesome enough. But now, with meat being derived from diseased rBGH-treated cows, each burger or bucket of feed contains an increased proportion of antibiotics, synthetic hormones, genetically engineered plants,(1) viruses, bacteria, pesticides, and other chemicals. The ratio intensifies each time around the cycle of death. Genetically engineered hormones compound the situation. rBGH-injected cows require more protein than normal. So they consume even more rendered meat in their feed, which concentrates the amounts of synthetic hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and other chemicals even further.
Mad Cow Disease
Just a short time after this practice became widespread, health officials began to notice a dramatic increase in the rate of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - "mad cow" disease - which is believed to be caused by "prions" found in diseased and waste animal body parts, offal and blood. A prion is a form of protein having the normal chemical composition but which is folded differently. When it comes into contact with normally constructed proteins it causes them to lapse into the deformed shape, triggering a chain reaction.(2) Prions cause infected cattle to literally develop holes in their brains, suffer seizures, fall down and die. Studies now indicate that mad cow disease is linked to the devastating Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, although this was at first strenuously denied by the pharmaceutical industry and the researchers they control who twisted every which way to protect the products of their corporate employers.
Prions are able to withstand severe heat such as pasteurization and even irradiation. There is no known way to defuse them. They may incubate for 30 years, and are passed to humans who eat meat from sick cows regardless of how well one cooks the meat. Unlike the eating of rendered meet from cows that died of Mad Cow disease or of drinking milk from cows injected with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, the relationship of CJD to consuming milk products from sick cows has not yet been established but should be seriously considered. The U.S. government maintains that no BSE-infected cattle have been discovered in the U.S. But, as Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn write, the disease may have appeared in the U.S. before the recent outbreak in England.
"Richard Marsh, a veterinary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, was raising the alarm about BSE in American cattle back in 1985. Marsh discovered an outbreak of spongiform encephalopathy at a mink farm in Wisconsin. The mink had been fed a protein supplement made from rendered cows that had supposedly died from 'downer cow syndrome.' Marsh believes the cows had actually succumbed to a previously undetected form of BSE," according to St. Clair and Cockburn.(3) Around 100,000 cows a year die from downer cow syndrome in the U.S. Most of these dead cows are rendered into protein supplements to feed other cattle. As Cockburn and St. Clair see it, "if this is true, the U.S. cattle population may already be infected with BSE and American meat consumers may have already contracted CJD."
New evidence suggests that Mad Cow Disease is triggered by a combination of factors, and not just prions alone. Prions normally bond with copper, and those molecules are carried to the brain, destroying free radicals ("free radicals," in biological terms, are not good. We'll deal with the ideology imbedded in language another time). But lacking copper, prions will bind with manganese, which is what causes them to fold improperly.
Certain environmental toxins, particularly organophosphate insecticides such as the widely used Malathion and Phosmet, which were derived from nerve gas in World War 2, introduce high levels of manganese (along with other toxins) into the environment. Organophosphate pesticides are, in the opinion of those challenging official non-explanations, critical factors in causing Mad Cow disease and CJD.
Nor are these illnesses anything new, although the extent is certainly unprecedented. "Manganese madness," whose symptoms mirror those of Mad Cow and CJD, is an irreversible fatal neuro-psychiatric degenerative syndrome that plagued manganese miners in the first half of the last century. But thus far official researchers have ignored the probability that these are the same diseases with the same causation, aggravated by the intense use of organophosphate pesticides reacting with prions from the meat of sick cows.
The year before the recent mad cow disease epidemic began in Britain, the governments of that country and Switzerland mandated Malathion and Phosmet skin treatments for all cattle, most of which were not injected with rBGH.(4) (Phosmet is widely used on more than 1.1 million acres of fruit orchards in the U.S. as well as in dog collars, and has been found in the dust in homes of pesticide applicators living close to orchard farms.) The next year mad cow disease literally terrorized Britain and Switz-erland. Organic farmer Mark Purdey did soil analyses on the areas near clusters of CJD in Britain and found high levels of manganese from crop spraying. Scientist David Brown, a neurobiologist at Cambridge University, concluded that Purdey's findings in the toxified environment was supported by Brown's research in the laboratory and confirmed the synergistic link.
Why do the FDA, corporate scientists and pharmaceutical companies refuse to examine this connection between genetically engineered hormones, prions, pesticides and Mad Cow disease? Does manganese from pesticides concentrate in rendered cattle feed as well? How do injections of rBGH impact on an animal's uptake of metals such as manganese or their susceptibility to organophosphate exposure? No laboratory studies on these synergistic effects have been done. Nor is Monsanto or Novartis, which first manufactured Malathion and which is the world's largest genetic engineering pharmaceutical company, particularly keen on funding research that might establish such a connection.(5)
All of this has severe environmental and economic as well as health consequences. Groundwater becomes even more polluted as mutated, drug-resistant viruses, fungus, and bacteria develop in response to the increased use of antibiotics and genetically engineered chemicals and, through waste run-off - often used as fertilizer - enter the water supply and soil.
Ever-greater quantities of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers and other toxic chemicals are applied to the land to kill the new strains of resistant germs, blights and diseases, further contaminating soil and water. These are manufactured by the very companies that produce rBGH and other genetically-engineered products, as are the antibiotics and tranquilizers sold to dairy farmers to combat the "side effects" of rBGH. For Monsanto, as with other corporations, the name of the game is profits, profits at any cost.:
