Re: USDA standards for organics

From: Walter Epp (for7gen@idiom.com)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2000 - 10:15:48 EDT


CAVM@aol.com wrote:
>Irradiation still seems safe enough.
Output of irradiation has been found to have 7 times the benzine content of
the input. Benzine is not safe. I've heard aflatoxins are also among the
radiolytic products. Studies of humans fed irradiated food were cut short
because of the incidence of polyploidy.
For more on this subject, check Public Citizen, www.citizen.org.

> It is unclear yet how
>the BSE in England transmitted itself to humans or got into the cattle in the
>first place.
> In the USA the restriction is on feeding ruminant tissue to
>ruminants and feeding mammal tissue to ruminants. ( I think I have that
>right) This does not restrict porcine tissue. Given these restrictions and
>the lack of any evidence of a problem at all, this seems more then adequate
>to safeguard the food supply.

No one know for sure what's going on in the US, so no definitive
conclusions can be made, but the assertion that there is no evidence of
any problem is not true.
There are about 100,000 "downer cows" in the US per year, ie they drop dead
of unknown reasons.
Mink fed US downer cows developed a BSE-like disease.
A chicken inoculated with BSE developed holes in the brain.
Pigs are susceptible to BSE.
In animals that die of BSE-like diseases, symptoms are slight and may not
be noticed until the late stages.
The incubation period for CJD in humans ranges from 25-50 years, so even if
everyone in the country had been infected with that or some other BSE-like
disease in the 1980s we might not know it.
CJD is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimers, so we don't know how many of the
millions of Americans labelled as Alzheimers actually have CJD or some
other BSE-like disease.

---
Walter Epp    for7gen@idiom.com

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