This is a public-interest archive. Personal data is pseudonymized and retained under GDPR Article 89.

Re: Contaminated bone meal

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

Just a couple comments on certain paragraphs in Kitt's posting from 5/14:

>The United States banned the import of beef products from the UK (as did
>Europe),

back in 1989, long before anything about BSE had hit the talk shows....

>... and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) instituted a surveillance
>program to monitor for any cases of BSE and CJD in the United States.

CDC may be monitoring for CJD in people, but it is my employer, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, that
monitors the U.S. cattle herd for BSE.  Our vets perform necropsies on the
brain of every bovine that displays suspicious CNS symptoms at slaughter.
We have examined more than 7,000 cattle brains and zero have displayed the
consipcuous vacuolation characteristic of BSE.

>From what I can tell from a review of CDC documentation (available at
>www.cdc.gov), no cases of CJD stemming directly from contaminated beef products
>have been reported here.  On report did say "several cases of CJD have been
>reported in Kentucky patients who consumed squirrel brains; however, a causal
>link has not been established."

Sounds about right.  There are several related diseases that can affect
various kinds of wildlife.  It appears that the BSE agent does not live in
muscle tissue but rather in brain, spinal cord, and certain organs.  If the
Kentucky squirrels had contracted a spongiform encephalopathy of some type,
eating their brains could be a life-threatening experience.

But these diseases are not infectious in the same sense that a cold or flu
is.  Cow B doesn't get BSE by brushing up against or sick Cow A or being
sneezed on by A.  Cow B gets BSE by eating protein-enhanced food made from
the remains of animals that themselves had BSE.

Squirrels are not meat eaters, so I can't clearly see how they could have
spread a spongiform encephalopathy-type disease to people *unless there is
some degree of spongiform encephalopathy resident in the Kentucky squirrel
population.*  This may, in fact, be the case.

>Based on this information, I would say that your risk of contracting CJD
from the
>bone meal or blood meal you use in your garden is negligable, particularly
if you
>take the ordinary precautions of wearing a breathing mask and gloves. These are
>precautions you should always take when spreading any sort of granulated
>products, whether organic or chemical.

Uh-oh.  Can't buy off on this part.  The "dust" that rises when you dump
bonemeal into a planting hole is plenty small enough to get through the
openings in a typical gardeners' dust mask.  (The BSE agent itself,
incorporated into that dust if the animals the meal was made from were
infected, is *microscopic.*)

I agree that getting exposed to the agent via skin contact with bonemeal is
not likely to be a problem if your skin has no cuts.  People working with
BSE cows in England have not been coming down with the new-variant CJD.

The real, and frightening part, is that bonemeal on your garden shop's
shelves is not labeled to show the country of origin of the constituent
products.  Think a minute:  if you were ordered by your government to kill
your entire herd, wouldn't you be trying desperately to figure out where you
could sell the meat and refuse parts to recover at least a tiny fraction of
your costs instead of taking a total loss?

Sure, it's illegal to export UK beef and beef products to the United States.
(My employer manages and enforces all those regulations.)  But I don't think
we can be sure that bonemeal or blood meal hasn't gotten out of the UK and
been sent *somewhere* in these many dark years for their cattle industry....

Several of the early victims of new-variant CJD in the U.K. were vegetarians
who used bonemeal in their gardens. 

--Janet


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, write to sqft-unsubscribe@listbot.com
Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index