Carolize Jansen
There have been 176E069 cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) in the United Kingdom up to the end of last year. The consumption of BSE-infected meat is widely accepted as the cause of a strain of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD), a human brain condition. There have been sporadic outbreaks of avian influenza, or chicken flu, in the United States, Mexico and Hong Kong. The latest major food scandal was extensive dioxin poisoning in Belgium. In the past decades there has been a dramatic increase in cases of salmonella poisoning in the US, with two million to four million cases annually.
All these diseases have two things in common: they are transmitted to humans through the consumption of animals; and possibly transmitted to animals through what they eat – very often, others of their kind.
The days of bucolic farming with cows in the meadow and pigs in the hay are long gone. Farming is factory farming now, taken over by corporations and driven by a growing demand for meat. There is little time for niceties in an industry that depends on the slaughter of its resource, and slaughter is a messy business. It’s estimated that 50% of every carcass is inedible by humans. Each tonne of pork meat, for example, creates about 32 tonnes of waste.
What should be done with the bones, offal, feathers that are left when the meat has been removed? “Animal fats and proteins for ruminant diets are relatively new opportunities for the beef and dairy producer to recycle products that are generated as valuable by- products from their animals,” says Dr RE John, a director at the US’s National Renderers Association.
Rendering is the term applied to the use of animal products in feed for omnivores (pigs, poultry, ostriches) and also herbivores (ruminant animals, such as cattle and sheep), rendering them in practical terms cannibals. It’s such a common practice that the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has called it “the world’s largest recycling enterprise, employing tens of millions of people. It’s an enormously complex global materials-handling and manufacturing effort involving the movement of huge quantities of by- products throughout the world.”
After the much-publicised BSE affair, the UK government issued the following statement: “It is clear that most cases of BSE have been caused by the consumption of feed containing ruminant protein, in the form of mammalian meat and bonemeal.”
In the UK the use of bonemeal in feed was prohibited in 1988 – and BSE broke out in 1996. The ban was too little, too late: contaminated supplies were already in the system, and there was cross- contamination of feed with bonemeal used in other feeds for pigs and poultry. Since 1996 all mammalian protein in ruminant feed has been banned in the UK, as has the presence of bonemeal on premises where livestock feed is used, produced or stored.
The UK was worst hit by mad cow disease and there is still a ban on British beef in South Africa, but the disease is not endemic to the UK. Various animal rights organisations have suggested that CJD is widespread among Americans but misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s.
In 1997 the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) banned the use of certain mammalian protein in ruminant animals’ feed, a ruling that exempts the feeding of rendered pigs’ and horses’ blood, gelatin and milk to cattle – because BSE hasn’t yet been found in pigs and horses, according to the FDA. Blood products and gelatin which have, in controlled experiments, been shown to transmit BSE are still allowed in the European Union.
Mad cow disease is not the only disease linked to animals being fed animal products – in Belgium a deadly dioxin outbreak followed after recycled animal fat was incorporated into animal feed. More than 1E500 pig, 500 poultry and 400 cattle farms were suspected to be contaminated.
The FAO says Belgium’s dioxin poisoning episode was another clear warning that animal feeds can have a direct impact on the safety and quality of foods. At its Animal Feeding and Food Safety seminar held in February, animal by-products were called a “high-risk feed”. Yet the FAO recommends that feed ingredients for which any foodborne risk can be adequately controlled should not be banned from use. The risk of such feed, says the FAO, should be weighed against possible nutrient deficiencies or expensive alternative feeds, as well as the environmental risk that could result from the failure to recycle most of the carcass. This is in contrast to the view of the World Health Organisation: that no part or product of any animal which has shown signs of BSE should enter any food chain, human or animal.
ENDS