MAD COW DISEASEThe Emerging Plague of the 21st Centuryby: Elder Lawrence Nelson
As I begin this special report I must warn you that you may never be the same about the food you eat or what you touch after you hear this tape. This Mad Cow disease is so ominous as to threaten the health of the entire world. Scientists, who have spent painstaking research of this emerging plague consider the coming loss of life to far exceed the Black Death or the bubonic plague which destroyed 25% of the entire population of Europe.
When Christ was asked by His disciples what signs would reveal the end of the world, Jesus answered there would be wars, famine, earthquakes and pestilence. Since Keep the Faith Audio Tape Ministry is dedicated to inform you of end-time events, this tape message should be considered as a special report of this alarming end-time pestilence.
The gravity of this situation demands heavenly wisdom and guidance. Please bow your heads with me in prayer. Dear Father, please commission Thy Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds concerning this dreaded Mad Cow disease. Help us to faithfully follow the inspired counsel as revealed by Thy last-day prophet. In Jesus' name we ask, Amen.
As we continue let us ever keep in mind the divine assurance promised to all who obey God. I am reading Psalm 91:1-7. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee." O what a God to fill our hearts with such trust and peace as we daily face the coming perils!
As you listen to this tape please keep in mind that what you hear I have gleaned from the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor of April, 2001, a monthly analysis of world conditions, a special report on Mad Cow disease.
The former Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Coop, states, "Your choice of diet can influence your long-term health prospects more than any other action that you might take." And the famous quotation delivered by Thomas Moffett in the 1600's is as accurate today as when first spoken. "Men dig their graves with their own teeth and die, more by those fatal instruments than the weapons of their enemies."
Donald S. McAlvany, editor of this international intelligence report recently made a trip to England to investigate this coming plague of Mad Cow disease. While there, he visited a clinic involved with this crisis. Here he was given a stern warning to avoid all beef, lamb, pork and other products from these animals such as milk, butter, cheese and other dairy products. The warning was not only for eating these products in England or Europe but for America and the world.
With such a warning its no wonder that as he drove past numerous steak houses in England he noticed that they were 90% empty. This clinic operator believed the government and the meat industry had been systematically covering up for years this Mad Cow crisis and that a growing number of English and European people were already infected with this deadly disease.
He also believed the same to be in America. The facts are alarming in global scope. This Mad Cow disease has already infected America's wildlife such as deer, elk and fish. 15% of the deer and elk in Colorado are already infected. It is true that Americans are dying from Mad Cow disease. Most such deaths are deceptively labeled today as Alzheimer's disease so no autopsy is required. Thus the charade that there is no Mad Cow deaths in America can be perpetuated.
There is also danger to the US blood supply. Anyone who lived in the United Kingdom or in Ireland from 1980 and on are now prohibited for life from donating blood in America. Since reports of Mad Cow disease are spreading to Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and beyond, the ban on blood donors may be extended to other European countries. This will also include US service men stationed in Europe.
The FDA (the Federal Department of Agriculture) is also considering banning blood from the thousands of hunters who took part in the fall 2000 hunting season. In the past three years three young hunters, who were exposed to Mad Cow disease, died of the disease shortly after. May I suggest you obtain a copy of the February 2001 Field and Stream magazine and read the article entitled, "Deadly Venison." Since 15 % of the deer and the elk in the Rocky Mountains are infected they probably contracted this disease from the domestic cattle and sheep and the disease is now in the soil and the streams being transferred by animal defecation and grazing. It has also spread to the fish in the so-called "whirling disease" in the trout which is the fish version of the Mad Cow disease.
It is very troubling that this disease is spreading to zoo animals. A whole farm of minks were wiped out by this disease and now poultry is a suspect. It is possible that you and your family may have already been unknowingly exposed. Certainly, after hearing the information that you will hear from this tape, you will make adjustments in your lifestyle. There are many facts which cannot be ignored; and the facts are deadly.
How did this disease originate? First, we must begin with a few definitions and then survey the history of this health menace beginning with the 1940's. The following are some of the new terminology that we must understand. Let's take the name of "prions." Scientists always thought that infectious disease could only be caused by bacteria. But not any more. The discovery of prions has changed all of this. Prions cause disease but they are not viruses, bacteria, fungi or parasites. They are simple proteins. Proteins by themselves were never thought to be infectious but prions cause Mad Cow disease. These strange proteins, called prions, enter cells and change normal proteins within the cells into prions just like themselves.
The normal cell proteins have all the same parts as the prions, specifically the same amino acid building blocks, but there is one vast difference – they fold differently. And what does that mean? As soon as a new protein is assembled by other proteins from amino acids within the cell it folds into a certain pattern. But prions are proteins which fold into a different, incorrect pattern. That little difference renders them deadly.
We will also need to recognize the meaning of the following terms – "bovine spongiform encephalopathy" (BSE). This is better known as Mad Cow disease. It is an infectious and incurable disease which slowly attacks the brain and the nervous system of cattle.
Now let's consider the term "scrapie" – the form of BSE which is found in sheep. The experts are divided on whether it is harmful to humans, but when the dead animals with scrapie are fed to cattle BSE is transmitted. The term comes from the fact that infected sheep will scrape their sides and heads on trees and fence posts and even on barbed wire.
Consider the disease called "Creutzfeldt-Jakob" disease. Drs. Creutzfeldt and Jakob were researchers in Berlin who in the early 1920's gave their names to a strange disease which occurred to 1:1,000,000 patients. Its utter rarity and the total lack of possible causation permitted the condition to be ignored for decades until kuru was discovered. By the late 1994 a handful of people in Britain had died from the same disease which by that same time had been named Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. This is the name for Mad Cow disease when it occurs in people.
We should also understand a little bit about Alzheimer's disease which is a non-spongiform disease. It figures strongly into the present discussion because there is clear evidence that many people, dying in America and elsewhere of this Mad Cow disease, are being misdiagnosed as the victims of Alzheimer's. There will be more on this later.
The name "kuru disease," once an epidemic in a certain tribe in New Guinea, was caused because people liked to eat other people. It was spread via cannibalism. It all began in the Fore tribe living in the jungles near Papua near southern New Guinea. That is where BSE, or CJD, the Mad Cow disease originated. It was an area unexplored by Westerners until the second half of the twentieth century. Scientists in the 1940's were puzzled over a strange disease in one tribe in New Guinea. The people there had a tribal ritual dating from the distant past in which they would eat their relatives when they died in order to acquire the mental and physical stamina they had while still alive. Women especially did this in order to increase their fertility – they thought it would help them to have more children.
Scientists found that many of the people in this tribe were dying of a mysterious brain disease which the nationals called "kuru" because it made its victims act very strange before they died. Kuru was killing up to 80% of the women in this tribe. No one knew when the disease first started because it occurred within families and mostly among women. Researchers initially thought that kuru was inherited genetically but it has since been established that kuru is infectious and was transmitted by eating the meat of those dead people. This practice, which continued for centuries, eventually produced a horrible, new disease.
And what are the symptoms like? Whether it be kuru, BSE or CJD the patients first show symptoms of mental changes such as problems with their coordination, recent memory loss and slurred speech. Sometimes obvious twitching of the muscles can be seen. The facial expressions become fixed and the person may stumble and fall over. Over the next few weeks the person becomes confused and unaware, unable to read or even to recognize close relatives. The disease is very similar to Alzheimer's yet the cause is very different. Now it has been discovered that BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep, kuru in New Guinea and CJD in the Western world all effect the same part of the brain. In fact, it is the same disease whether in animals or in man.
The western-form of kuru is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. It is a disease of the brain and it is always fatal. There is no remedy for it. Once a person contracts it, nothing can be done to remove the prions from his body. Here is an ominous fact about kuru. Researchers discovered that it could take as long as 30 years before a person became visibly ill. The disease bores into the brain and nervous system very slowly. But once established it rapidly causes dementia and death. No treatment works. Post mortems show the brain to be sponge-like and full of holes, hence the name "Spongiform." Thus the disease can work quietly, insidiously for years before any symptoms develop. In May 2000 a 50-year-old woman, an assistant principal at a high school in Denver, began to exhibit the symptoms of CJD. She went downhill quickly and died three months later in August. An autopsy confirmed CJD.
You might wonder how a cannibal disease from one little tribe in New Guinea could get to Europe and America. We are not eating dead people over here. But this is how it happened: The scientists who examined kuru in New Guinea in the 1940's brought tissue samples home to America and Britain for careful examination. Here they found no antibodies and no disease germs of any kind. There was no microscopic lens in the 1940's which could have identified the source of infection.
It is now believed that BSE went into the food chain beginning in Britain and America when these samples were disposed of. They were either flushed into the sewer system, tossed on garbage heaps, or washed down sink drains. What these researchers did not know was that there was an infective agent present and one that no heat normally used in laboratories for cleansing purposes could kill. Prions, which cause BSE and CJD, are not destroyed by anything less than 800 degrees Fahrenheit heat. This is far higher than the autoclaving of 212 degrees Fahrenheit or more. The only way their sinks, for instance, could be cleansed and cleaned would be to put them in a high-temperature oven for an hour.
In America these prions, from the samples, lay on the ground for a period of time until they were eaten by grazing animals. They then passed into the food chain. Trillions of prions spread on the ground waiting for some low-grazing animal to come munching toward them. In England it started with the sheep and in America with the sheep and the wild life.
In the 1970's it first appeared in the sheep herds of Britain. British sheepherders called it scrapie because the sick sheep had the strange habit of rubbing up against things. Rams and ewes who had never met a cannibal started exhibiting an odd itch to scrape their heads and sides against fences, even if those fences were barbed wire. The herders said that the sheep acted a little crazy. There were no antibody markers visible at any time during the incubation period so that veterinarians saw no indication of disease. Sick ewes freely gave their illness to their little baby lambs who carried the bug straight to human tables.
Science has not admitted that a sheep with scrapies can infect humans, yet we do know that scrapie-infected sheep can, when fed and eaten by cows, infect the cows. When the cow is eaten by people it infects the people. The reason it hasn't been made public is that those who have the facts chose to misinterpret them. There is an extremely important reason for this – it could bankrupt the beef industry.
Now listen carefully. Something was started in 1970 which, in the 21st century, will eventually destroy the US beef industry and kill millions of people in Europe, America and other nations which import beef from them. Here is what happened. In 1970 the US Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Health (NIH) collected thousands of scrapie-infected sheep in America to examine them and carefully isolated the diseased animals in pens in up-state New York.
Once again, they found no bacteria or virus responsible for the problem. Then, according to Howard Lyman, of the US Humane Society, an ex-cattle rancher who was well aware of what happened, the NIH sold the sick animals at low cost to farmers all across the United States who put them into their herds. It was probably done as a way to help pay for the expensive scrapie research which had been completed. But it was the death knell to the meat industry in America.
Now I hope you are listening. Eventually, as more sheep got scrapie and could no longer stand on their feet, they were then sold to rendering plants which rendered the carcasses and turned them into animal feed. Upon eating the prion-loaded animal feed more livestock contracted BSE. They in turn were made into more cattle, sheep, pig and chicken feed.
Did you ever hear of feeder animals? They are the animals you eat. In the US there is an enormous industry based on turning cow corpses into animal feed to be fed to feeder cattle. The diseased, dead animals are ground up into pellets and fed to livestock to fatten them faster. Because of the high protein content the pellets do this quite well.
Here is the procedure. Throughout the nation, whenever the cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens and turkeys die by disease they are sold to rendering plants. Six-year-old dairy cows and two-year-old layer chickens die prematurely old and worn out and are also sold. In recent years dead and diseased dogs and cats have been shipped from humane shelters to the same rendering plants. At the rendering plant the whole animal, including the intestines and the manure in it, is ground up and turned into high-protein pellets. These are then sold as animal feed to cattle, sheep, pig, chicken and turkey ranchers.
When the creatures reach a certain weight, they are then hauled to the slaughtering house processing plants, often housed in the same large facility. Then these animals are killed on fast assembly lines at the slaughterhouses which in many cases work too quickly to carry out the operation in a clean manner. The processing plants cut, wrap, package and freeze the meat. It is then shipped to grocery stores, fast-food restaurants and school lunch programs throughout the nation. Meat is also shipped overseas.
Carefully consider the implications of this. These feeder cattle are cattle raised on meat and soybeans. This turns cattle into cannibals. This practice is so solidly entrenched in America that you can actually trade commodity features on feeder animals. Thus one part of an important division of the powerful livestock industry is doomed to eventually destroy the rest of it. Unfortunately this will happen even if they wake up and stop the feeder animal business.
The problem is that the prions are now in the livestock and each mother is passing them on to her young at the time of birth. God foresaw this problem and spoke to us through His last-day prophet to warn us. "It will not be very long before we shall have to give up any animal food. (Are you paying attention?) Even milk will have to be discarded. Disease is accumulating rapidly. The curse of God is upon it because man has cursed it." Counsels on Diet and Foods p. 357. Now isn't that an interesting observation? The habits and practices of men have brought the earth into such a condition that some other food than animal food must be substituted for the human family.
In Britain, the delegated animal feeders were the sheep who died of scrapie. They were rendered into powder and put into animal feed. The British were just copying American frugality as they used their dead sheep to feed the living ones. No one seemed to be concerned about the fact that the sheep which had died of a mysterious disease were being fed to healthy sheep which did not deserve to die in the same way. So Britains happily ate their sheep little realizing that they too were eating cannibals. The curse that destroyed the people of Papua New Guinea was passing to them through the livestock shipments and to the whole world.
As the years past, British sheepherders continued losing more and more sheep to scrapie. But they kept cutting their losses with cash for the corpse. Trusting British beef farmers bought the high-protein certain-death feed for their cows for the next eighteen years. Because the United Kingdom had a much higher percentage of sheep than they had of cows. So every cow got a daily, heaping serving of "kibble" sheep and poor trusting Britons ate a lot of infected sheep too. The British like their mutton as well as their beef. The results are that for the first time outside of New Guinea humans began contracting prions in their brains.
It was not until 1974 that the top United Kingdom microbiologist researcher, Dr. Richard Lacey, and his US counterpart, Dr. Stanley Prusiner, set up their electron microscopes to study prion diseases. They discovered that these damaged proteins (the prions) were not only injuring the bodies of the sick animals but were passing into the chromosomes and becoming part of the DNA of these animals and their descendents. In 1985 British farmers noticed that an illness, suspiciously like scrapie turned up in a cow. It was a "hosting" diary cow who started kicking and developing an extreme case of the jitters and then fell over dead. Her brain was examined by post-mortem and found to be like swiss cheese in appearance and the disease was given the name "bovine spongiform encephalopathy." For the first time the disease in animals had been names.
Since a cow is a lot more valuable than a sheep, beef farmers demanded answers. At first, nobody connected spastic cows with a scrapie sheep of the 1970's and certainly not with New Guinea cannibals of the 1940's. But in 1986 a research professor of microbiology at Leeds University, consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Richard W. Lacey, announced that scrapie, BSE and CJD were the same thing and that this beef disease was now in the meat supply. In addition he not only said that it would not only kill humans but he warned that a wave of deaths would soon hit Britain. Lacey went still further and said that 100,000 people in Britain were already infected.
But that's not all, British livestock were already grazing in every country of the world and had entered the breeding stock of nearly every nation on the globe. The entire world has been eating imported British beef and lamb chops ever since the disease was solidly in place in the 1970's. In Britain, by late 1994, the disease had been identified in nearly 180,000 animals. And in just over half of all the cattle herds of Britain some scientists, including Lacey, have since stated that the only way to tackle the problem would be to destroy all herds which had cattle incubating the disease. But the problem is that the ground still continues to have prions in it.
Another sad picture concerns man's pets. The British government now reports that over 80 cats have died of Mad Cow disease because pet food also contains ground-up animals which have died of BSE. But the most tragic news finally came into the public press in the 1990's when two dairy farmers, who had tendered a herd of infected cattle, died of Mad Cow disease. The number of human cases in Great Britain is now ten times higher than the researchers had estimated.
Vicky Rimmer, a 15-year-old Welsh girl, developed the symptoms of CJD despite no family history of the disease or medical mishaps such as a faulty blood transfusion. She was also extremely young - think of it, just fifteen years old - considering the very long period it usually takes for symptoms to show. This means that the disease was most probably contracted from an external source more likely food. A doctor from CJD-surveillance unit was sent to Vicky's home and after examining the girl told the mother not to make her daughter's case public. According to the London Daily Mirror, of January 25, 1994, he told her that she should think of the economy and the Common Market.
In 1993, the World Health Organization, figures indicate a total of 250 suspected and 117 proven CJD deaths with the average age of the victim now being twenty-seven years. On December 22, 2000 on behalf of the World Heath Organization, Dr. Maura Ricketts issued a statement warning that exposure world-wide to BSE and CJD may have already occurred. The statement went on to say that the WHO is going to convene a major meeting of experts and officials from all regions to discuss this problem. It will be held in Geneva in the late spring of 2001.
I could go on with information to fill three or four more tapes but we must come to some conclusion. What about cooking the meat or milk? Will this kill the prions? The pasteurization of milk at 150 degrees makes the prion think that it's a sunny day. The cooking of meat at 212 degrees make him think that he is in a pleasant sauna. Raising the heat to frying in the 320 degree range might even make him blink but you must reduce the prion to total ash at 340 degrees centigrade (in our American Fahrenheit system that would be 800 degrees) to immobilize him and to take away his ability to replicate.
What about BSE and CJD spores? There is no solvent known to immobilize the Mad Cow spore. This kind of microbia tenacity is so far fetch that it frightens the medical community. If you should ask a doctor to do an autopsy on a patient who died of CJD he will flee, knowing that if he exposes his lab to the disease the lab will be closed down by the government officials. He cannot clean his sink without actually burning it up. The medical community has no other solution or cure for CJD. It is, very simply, fatal. There is no drug, no surgery, which can cure it.
More than just meat is infected. Since Mad Cow is in the meat it could be in the dairy products and eggs and foods such as mayonnaise. It's in the gelatin in candy or wrapped around a vitamin pill. It is in bloodmeal fertilizer, urea fertilizer and the manure clinging to the store-bought mushrooms. Animals derivatives are used in vaccines, pharmaceuticals like Premarin, glandular substances used in remedies such as melatonin. It is in pet food, gloves, film and plastics etc.
In this study you have learned a lot of facts. If you want to take the situation seriously you ought to decide right now to make some changes in your diet but you should be warned that some of the paid media in America have a different message for you. They are reporting everything is peace and safety. There is no danger – eat as you please. The meat is as disease-free as ever. Government and industry reports confirm there is no CJD in America, no diseased animals are now being fed to cows, and the US is totally sealed off from the problem in Europe. American meat is as disease free as it has ever been. O beloved, don't you believe it!
I beg you, don't over look the end-time counsel contained in the Spirit of Prophecy. There are scores of such statements. I will quote from a few taken from Counsels on Diet and Food p. 380-386. "Among those who are waiting for the coming of the Lord, meat eating will eventually be done away; flesh will cease to form a part of their diet….It is for their own good that the Lord counsels the remnant church to discard the use of flesh meats….The common use of the flesh of dead animals has had a deteriorating influence upon the morals, as well as the physical institution. Ill health in a variety of forms, if effects could be traced to the cause, would reveal the sure result of flesh eating. Flesh was never the best food; but its use is now doubly objectionable, since disease in animals is so rapidly increasing.
"Animals are becoming more and more diseased, and it will not be long before animal food will be discarded by many beside Seventh-day Adventists. Foods that are healthful and life sustaining are to be prepared, so that men and women will not need to eat meat. The light given me (she is not writing of her own feelings) is that it will not be very long before we shall have to give up using any animal food. Even milk will have to be discarded. Disease is accumulating rapidly. The curse of God is upon the earth, because man has cursed it. The habits and practices of men have brought the earth into such a condition that some other food than animal food must be substituted for the human family. We do not need flesh food at all. God can give us something else."
Again she states, "Could you know just the nature of the meat you eat, could you see the animals when living from which the flesh is taken when dead, you would turn with loathing from your flesh meats. The very animals whose flesh you eat, are frequently so diseased that, if left alone, they would die of themselves; but while the breath of life is in them, they are killed and brought to market. You take directly into your system humors and poisons of the worst kind, and yet you realize it not. …Many die of disease caused wholly by meat eating….The liability to take disease is increased tenfold by meat eating." Beloved, are you awake?
Let us pray, Loving Father, how we praise Thee for giving us such clear guidance in this end-time. May the power of God be manifested among us as the result of health reform among the remnant people. As we follow Thy counsel protect us from this last-day Mad Cow pestilence. In Jesus' name, we ask, Amen.
*** Here is where you may obtain more information on this subject. Vance Ferrell has an excellent book entitled Mad Cow Disease Can Kill You. It will tell you where it came from, why it is here, and why it will become an epidemic. This book not only includes the above report but also a very important list of nearly 400 products from cattle, sheep and pigs, an extensive list of scientific research references for this report and an analysis of Mad Cow disease in pigs, an analysis on how human waste (called "bio-solids" some of which undoubtedly is infected with CJD) is being used as a cheap fertilizer on farms across the country and information on how many organic products used by the natural food industry actually contain beef, dairy, lamb or pork products.
This book is only $4.50 plus $2.25 postage and handling. If this special report raised your concerns buy this book – you will need the list of 400 products made from cattle, sheep and pigs. You probably consume a lot of them. Write to Harvest Time Books, Box 300, Altamont, TN 37301 or call (931) 692-2777. Or if you prefer you can obtain the special report on Mad Cow disease from which this tape was made by calling 1-800-528-0559. The cost is only $3.00 per copy which contains twenty-four printed pages. Please, do not call or write to "Keep the Faith" for only the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor can send you this report.
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