FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, May 8, 2000
CONTACT: Jennifer Kelly or Amy Leska, EMS 202/463-6670
Public Health and Farming Groups Demand FDA Action To Protect Humans and Animals from Fatal Disease in U.S.
Washington, D.C.-- Public health advocates are demanding that the Food and Drug Administration close loopholes in animal feed regulations to prevent the spread of U.S. mad cow-type diseases -- now at epidemic levels in Western deer and elk -- that might infect people who eat meat.
In a letter sent today to the FDA, the Center for Food Safety (CFS), the Humane Farming Association and families of U.S. victims of the human version of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), are demanding new efforts to protect public health and food safety. The FDA was asked to respond to a legal petition filed in January 1999 that would change U.S. animal feed regulations to prevent the spread of U.S. mad cow-type diseases already occurring in deer, elk, sheep and humans, and suspected in pigs and cattle.
Under current FDA regulations, animals known to be infected with mad cow-type disease such as deer, elk and sheep, can be legally fed to pigs, chickens and pets, which in turn can be rendered and fed to cows. Billions of pounds of slaughterhouse waste in the form of rendered animal by-products are fed to U.S. livestock every year as fat and protein supplements, despite this practice being the known route of transmission of British mad cow disease.
A fatal "mad deer" disease called chronic wasting disease is occurring at epidemic levels in deer and elk in Western states and on game farms, CFS legal director Joseph Mendelson wrote in the letter to the FDA. This may already be claiming human lives as is suggested by the alarming appearance of unusually young victims of CJD.
Today at the first CJD Foundation conference in Miami, government researcher Byron W. Caughey, Ph.D., announced that in laboratory tests mad deer disease from deer can infect human brain tissue at a rate similar to British mad cow disease. In Britain, 56 people have died of human mad cow disease, the death toll is climbing and some scientists suspect it will claim hundreds of thousands of lives in the decades ahead. Caughey'sresearch on U.S. mad deer disese was conducted at the National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and has not yet been published.
The most recent suspected victim of U.S. mad deer disease is Jay Dee Whitlock II of Oklahoma, who died of CJD on April 7, 2000. Whitlock, 28, was an avid deer hunter and venison consumer.He is the second young hunter to die of CJD in the past year.
John Stauber, co-author of Mad Cow USA and a speaker at the CJD Foundation conference, said, "The announcement that U.S. mad deer disease can infect the human brain, and that it happens at a rate similar to British mad cow disease, is extremely disturbing. A deadly human dementia might be already spreading from deer and elk into hunters in Western states, and the policies of the FDA and other agencies are completely inadequate to protect public health."
For more information on this issue visit:
www.mad-cow.org
www.ems.org
(posted without permission)
