How Can It Kill Thee? Let Me Count The Ways…

Back in the good old days, about eight Star Wars movies ago, life was simple. People ate meat and dairy products, they got heart disease and cancer, and they died. No one really understood all the intricacies of high-density lipoproteins and Omega-3 fatty acids in this process, but that didn't matter. Hey, life was simple and life was good. Life was short.

Today things are much more complicated. Today we spend half of our gross national product on exotic, biological research in level-5 isolation laboratories. We have genetically-engineered vegetables, new patented plants and animals, and we know all there is to know about the 3 natural and 52,126 artificial substances in our favorite foods.

The other half of our gross national product goes to studying everything we do and reporting on it with endless quantities of data. That data is fed into high-end scaleable vector processing system supercomputers, and what they spit back out is immediately routed by satellite and fiber optics to the four corners of our oval earth. A scientist in Tanzania can assess epidemiological data on the impact of corned beef consumption by left-handed people on Wednesdays in Ohio even before the sandwich wrappers hit the trashcans.

With all of these modern innovations, we now have all the knowledge we need to develop the perfect diets for our own health and the health of our loved ones. We pump out boxed dinners by the billion with promising names like "Healthy-Choice" and "Heart-Smart." Even our pets can eat "Science Diet."

So is life even better? Nah. People still eat meat and dairy products, get heart disease and cancer, and die. Life is still short.

One thing has changed, though. It's not just heart disease and cancer anymore, Toto. Our research and information skills have given us a much better idea of all the creative little ways that meat injures and kills us every day. What fun! Here are just a few of the things we've learned.

• Exotic Diseases— People have known that infected meat is dangerous ever since the 14th century, when Tatar armies invented the first biological weapon by catapulting comrades who died of bubonic plague into the city of Kaffa. But now we have the specifics. Now we can chronicle with deadly accuracy each outbreak of Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria monocytogenes, not to mention our favorite little germ with the catchy name: Escherichia coli O157:H7. Of course, all of those seem mild compared to the brain-destroying prion protein that causes the spongioform encephalopathies "mad cow disease" in bovines and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in the humans who eat them. Meat is now routinely sold with warning labels, and the government recently recommended warnings on chickens' eggs as well. Heck somebody even came up with a warning label for bear meat which, like "pork," presents a danger of trichinosis if the meat is cooked rare.
  
• Exotic Toxins— Since toxins tend to accumulate in meat, these crises seem to flare up from time to time. For years the European Union and the US have argued over the EU's ban on the import and sale of meat products treated with growth hormones. Just recently another worldwide political crisis broke out when it was discovered that farm animals in Belgium had been given feed contaminated with highly toxic dioxin. (Even if these substances never kill anyone directly, the arguing over them may lead to World War III!) In another recent incident 480,000 pounds of chicken nuggets were recalled by an Indiana company because people were having violent allergic reactions after eating them. The offensive ingredient? Dairy products!
  
• Exotic Jobs— The meat industry is a dangerous place. In 1996, 154 Americans were killed working in livestock production, 73 in commercial hunting, fishing and trapping, and 29 in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. That same year 122,100 Americans were injured or became ill working at these same jobs.
  
• The Truly Exotic— You want even more examples of the dangers of meat? We've got 'em! How about the 13 people who have been gored to death since Pamplona's "running of the bulls" became an international spectacle in 1926? How about the urban equivalent when, in just the past few months cows have rampaged in downtown Darwin, Australia and Atlanta, Georgia? ("traffic couldn't moove") Then there's the infamous story of the shoot-out that ensued when residents of Beaver, Oklahoma argued over ownership of "cow chips." (Apparently they were valuable as fuel.) Finally, there is the recent recommendation by a microbiologist at Kansas State University that electric bug-zappers and food should be kept apart because while they are killing insects, the zappers can spread bacteria or viruses up to six feet away.
  

  Okay, you say, bug zappers may be dangerous, but this isn't meat-eating, per se.
  

  Well, maybe not, but bug zapping is certainly in the same spirit. (Anyway, nobody's going to serve a vegan meal within six feet of one of those things.) I still say it's safer to be vegetarian—just like it's always been.
  

Assorted Weird Diseases Part II—The Dumb Things We Do

Some people believe that the dinosaurs, proud inhabitants of this earth for 165 million years, were finally driven to extinction not by meteorites or floods, but by the spread of some contagious disease. A tiny bacterium and his buddies bringing down the mighty T-Rex? Well, I don't know if that happened or not. But I would give you odds that when the human race finally hangs up its Reeboks it won't be because of nuclear weapons, global warming, or even Jerry Springer. No, the biggest threats to our species, by far, are all microscopic.

Of course, biological threats have been around forever, and will always be with us. The real question is how we are managing them. Unfortunately, not very well. And in that respect, nothing is speeding the journey to our eventual rendezvous with microorgasmic disaster faster than our animal agriculture and animal research practices. Just look at some of the dumb things we do:

• We raise billions of farm animals under conditions of horrible confinement and stress, to make sure that diseases spread as easily and rapidly as possible. (Remember how sick you got last winter when you were on the elevator with that guy who had TB? Same thing.)
  
• We use huge quantities of antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals, creating a perfect environment for the development of antibiotic-resistant organisms. (Roughly half of the 25,000 tons of antibiotics produced in the United States each year are used on farm animals.)
  
• We take new antibiotics that are in development and use them on farm animals, to make sure that antibiotic resistance keeps up with antibiotic development. (Example: Since July of this year every intensively-raised chicken in the UK has been fed an antibiotic growth promoter that is cross-resistant to a new, vitally-important medical drug on trial in British hospitals.)
  
• We do medical research on animals, creating the perfect opportunity for cross-species transmission of disease. (Example: The vast majority, if not all, of our existing lines of stem cells were cultured with mouse cells. This will present a real problem if they are ever used in human treatment.)
  
• We intentionally feed diseased animals to other animals…
  
• …and to ourselves! (The next time you're at a fancy cocktail party remember that "Foie gras" is liver from geese with the painful disease hepatic lipidosis.)
  
• We have slaughterhouse and food inspection procedures that we know will allow a certain number of diseased and contaminated animals to pass into the food supply, because it's just too expensive to test every carcass.
  
• We blindly accept the fact that millions of people get food poisoning from eating meat (and other foods contaminated by meat) every year. (My meat-eating friends are getting sick all the time.)
  
• We transplant animal organs into humans ("xenotransplantation"), creating the risk that we might contract diseases from these animals in the process. (When asked if this could cause an outbreak of new infectious disease, Phil Nogouchi, M.D., a pathologist and director of the FDA's division of cellular and gene therapies said frankly, "We don't know.")
  
• We create genetically modified organisms using viruses and bacteria (precisely because they have the ability to break down barriers between species), and introduce these organisms into the environment.
  
• And if all of this isn't enough, last summer some Bozo stole three research pigs from a lab at the University of Florida and had them ground into sausage for human consumption. (Mmmmm… doesn't that sound tasty?!)
  

  
   

  Of course the dumbness doesn't stop there. We see it around us all the time. On the evening news the other day I saw a doctor interviewed about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and the possibility of contracting it from eating cows infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy ("Mad Cow" disease). The doctor agreed that this is a serious problem that we should all be worried about. There was a somber moment in the studio, until the commentator asked: "Doctor, do you eat beef?"
  

  "Oh yes!" the doctor answered, and there were smiles all around. I guess as long as a doctor is still eating meat nobody has to be worried about anything, much less think for him/herself.
  

  Speaking of mad cows and humans, a recent article that appeared on WebMD downplayed the risks of Mad Cow disease in the United States, citing the effectiveness of the FDA's feed separation rule to prevent the spread of the disease by banning the feeding of cows to cows. (It is widely believed that cows become infected through eating feed containing infected bone meal.) The article noted with approval the FDA's finding that "about 90%" of the animal rendering plants inspected are in compliance with the rule.
  

  Hmmm…. Doesn't that mean that "about 10%" of the inspected plants are out of compliance? Isn't that a problem?
  

  In September Japan reported its first case of Mad Cow disease. By the time it was discovered, the cow in question, a five-year-old Holstein milk cow (name apparently withheld pending notification of kin), had already been "processed" into the week's batch of meat and bone meal. ("Hey guys, this cow we're grinding up looks kind of funny. Why don't we test her for Mad Cow disease?" "Good idea, Yokomo. Let's eat some hamburgers while we're waiting for the test results.")
  

  Humans have been around, in one form or another, for only a few million years. It's looking like we'll be extinct long before we reach the longevity of the dinosaurs.
  

  They had walnut-sized brains. We aren't that smart.

Assorted Weird Diseases Part I—There’s Plenty More to Fear than Fear Itself

The other morning I woke up to the radio, and before I even had my eyes open I was hearing the saga of Dawn Becerra. Wow, what an eye-opening story! It seems that poor Dawn was vacationing in Mexico a few years ago when she made the mistake of eating a "pork" taco. It made her sick for 3 weeks. But that was just the beginning of Dawn's woes. Sometime later she began suffering seizures and more illness, and eventually the doctors at the Mayo Clinic found that a worm from the taco had made its way into her skull and was happily chewing away on brain tissue. The doctors eventually removed the worm (it was already dead—probably from years of eating fatty foods) in a 6-hour operation, and fortunately Dawn is okay today.

Think she's given up eating "pork"?

Just a few years ago things like brain-eating worms crawling out of tacos would have been seen only in Japanese (no, make that Mexican) horror movies. Today, though, it doesn't seem so strange. Just look at some of the assorted weird diseases that have been in the news lately.

• E. coli Contamination—E. coli, the bacteria found in animal excrement, has been big news ever since four people died and another 700 got sick from eating at the now-infamous Jack-In-The-Box restaurant chain. (New corporate slogan: "We're cookin' the sh*t out of our burgers.")
  In the years since then major outbreaks, meat recalls, and other newsworthy E. coli disasters have come around just about every hour. My own personal favorite was the "Cornstock" party, where guests got sick after some hearty partying (they apparently consumed a steer, a hog, and an ostrich along the way!) in a farmer's field in Illinois. Embarrassed party organizers swore that the field was cleaned of manure in advance of the event, but they probably couldn't say the same for the steer, hog and ostrich.
  
• Mad Cow Disease—Let me see if I've got this straight… There's this renegade protein running around that even modern sterilization procedures can't destroy. Everyone in Europe is terrified of it, but here in the Colonies we've been a bit slow to catch on. Anyway, it turns cows' brains to mush, and will do the same thing to people if they eat the cows. Since nearly everyone eats cows, and since this disease can take years to manifest itself, this is an accident waiting to happen. We could wake up tomorrow and find that the people left alive on earth are a few vegetarians. (We'd all be very rich and enjoy the last laugh, but heck, we'd probably get bored.) Is that pretty much it?
  
• Foot-and-Mouth Disease—Nobody seems to understand this disease, but it too appears to be driving the Europeans loony—causing them to kill all their farm animals and light large fires with them. This, in turn, causes major depression to spread among us animal-rights types. This may be the most frustrating and distressing disease of all.
  

  I could go on. In addition to the above, people are getting sick every day from Pfiesteria piscicida streptococcus, giardia, salmonella, Listeria Monocytogenes, Campylobacter jejuni, chlamydia and even toxic algae. And there seem to be new things that could be turned into Japanese horror movies appearing all the time.
  

  What all these assorted weird diseases have in common, of course, is that they are all intrinsically linked to the raising and eating of animals. So, does anyone ever suggest that vegetarianism is an answer to the problem? No, that would be too easy. Instead, we promote irradiation, quarantine the boots of people who have been traipsing around the European countryside, and generally do a lot of worrying. And of course the most common advice given by our medical community is to "make sure your meat is well-cooked."
  

  Well-cooked meat? That may be a partial answer, but it seems ironic that, as I write this, well-done meats have just joined cigarettes, asbestos, DDT and arsenic on the federal government's official list of substances suspected of causing cancer.
  

  Would you rather be afflicted by assorted weird diseases or by good old-fashioned cancer? It's a heck of a choice for meat-eaters.
  

  
   

  [Next time, in exciting Part II, we'll look at some of the dumb things we humans do to make sure new assorted weird diseases keep coming, and get shared by everyone!]