By Michael Greger, M.D. for

    Canada has been the number one supplier of live cattle to the United States.[1] In 2002 we imported 1.7 million head of cattle from Canada.[2] We also imported $2.4 billion worth of beef [3] — that’s over a billion pounds of Canadian beef in 2002.[4] According to the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, about 7 percent of beef consumed by Americans is from Canada.[5] And because of NAFTA, there is no mandatory country of origin labeling from Canada, so there is currently no way for American consumers to know for certain if the beef they are eating came from Canada or not.[6] This is unfortunately not the first time the United States has imported cattle and beef products from countries at risk.

    The United States General Accounting Office (GAO) is the investigative watchdog arm of Congress. In 2002, the GAO released their report on the weaknesses present in the U.S. defense against mad cow disease.[7] They noted that “the United States has imported about 1,000 cattle; about 23 million pounds of meat by-products; about 100 million pounds of beef; and about 24 million pounds of prepared beef products during the past 20 years from countries where BSE was later found.”[8] Furthermore, the report said that if the disease did enter the country, current safeguards might not be enough to detect it and keep it from spreading to other cattle or to the human food supply.[9] The report can be downloaded at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02183.pdf

    The discovery of a case of mad cow disease in Canada highlights how ineffective current safeguards are in North America. The explosive spread of mad cow disease in Europe has been blamed on the cannibalistic practice of feeding slaughterhouse waste to livestock.[10] Both Canada[11] and the United States[12] banned the feeding of the muscles and bones of most animals to cows and sheep back in 1997, but unlike Europe left gaping loopholes in the law. For example, blood is currently exempted from the Canadian[13] and the U.S.[14] feed bans. You can still feed calves cow’s blood collected at the slaughterhouse. In modern factory farming practice calves may be removed from their mothers immediately after birth, so the calves are fed milk replacer, which is often supplemented with protein rich cow serum.[15] Weaned calves and young pigs have cattle blood sprayed directly on their feed to save money on feed costs.[16] Michael Hansen with the Consumer’s Union reports that cows won’t eat feed composed of more than ten percent blood, evidently because of the taste.[17] Chickens, on the other hand, reportedly will eat feed composed of up to thirty-five percent blood.[18]

    The reason why the American Red Cross continues to restrict blood donations from those who lived in Europe[19] is because of mounting evidence that indeed blood may be infectious.[20] In fact, the mad cow outbreak in Japan has been tentatively tied to milk replacer.[21] Yet cow blood is still allowed to be fed to livestock in this country.

To Continue This Article, see Beef Supply-Mad Cow Page 2