- Note: This article fails to note that several young US
deer hunters have recently died from CJD - the human equivalent of Mad
Cow Disease, alarming experts who fear that the Chronic Wasting Disease
epidemic in deer and elk could be spreading into the large population of
deer hunters, eaters of venison, and the consumers of nutritional supplements
(a 3 billion dollar industry) made from elk antlers. For more information
on chronic wasting disease see <www.mad-cow.org
-
-
- Cure Or Curse?
-
- By Hal Herring http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=10173
Western Roundup
12-18-00
-
-
-
- As Chronic Wasting Disease appears again, questions arise
about the velvet antler trade
-
- June is velveting season on the elk ranches of the United
States and Canada. Bulls have to be treated with care - the soft, heavy
antler tissue is easily damaged, and a good bull may be carrying as much
as 40 pounds.
-
- At the going rate of $70 per pound, nobody can afford
a free-for-all in the velveting area. According to instructions on an elk
farm Web site, www.wapiti.net, cut-up pieces of sterile inner tube work
best as tourniquets, and a double-edged saw is the best tool for cutting
off the antlers. Don't forget to "turn antler bottom up to contain
blood" and "treat just like a meat byproduct," freezing
as soon as possible, "at a 15-degree angle to conserve all blood."
-
- The sale of velvet antler from domestic elk in North
America is estimated by its proponents to be a $3 billion industry. Korea
is still the primary destination for most velvet products, but promoters
have created a demand in the U.S. alternative medicine and nutritional
supplement market.
-
- Beginning next month, most of the 4,300 General Nutrition
Centers will be carrying elk-velvet capsules made by Natraflex, a company
based in Castle Rock, Colo.
-
- "I eat velvet every day," says Natraflex founder
Lloyd Riddle. Riddle is an enthusiastic user of his own product, and has
endorsements from athletes, such as professional powerlifter Ron Madison
and ultra-marathoner Richard Huff.
-
- Velvet is marketed in North America as a remedy for those
suffering from arthritis, sexual dysfunction, and joint ailments of all
types, and as a supplement for bodybuilders and extreme athletes.
-
- Elk velvet antler, pumped tight with blood and pulsing
with hormones, is the most regenerative mammal tissue known, capable of
growing over half an inch in one day. According to Dr. George Bubenick,
an anatomist at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada, the density
of nerve receptors in velvet approaches that of the human cornea, making
it one of the most sensitive tissues in existence. It is no wonder that
traditional Oriental medicine holds the material in such high regard, or
that aging Western athletes would want to check it out.
-
- But for the past several years, the domestic elk industry
has been battling a malady called Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in its
herds, and a new outbreak has affected six elk ranches in Saskatchewan.
Chronic Wasting Disease belongs to a group of brain diseases known as transmissable
spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs, a group that includes the so-called
"mad cow disease" that destroyed the British beef industry in
the early 1990s. Also among the TSEs are scrapie, a disease that has killed
sheep for centuries in Europe, and has been recognized in the U.S. for
the past 50 years, and Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD), which causes dementia
followed by rapid death in human beings.
-
- During the mad cow disaster in England, a new form of
CJD began to appear, afflicting younger people than the traditional disease.
-
- Scientists called the new disease "variant CJD"
because it leaves a distinctly different pattern of destruction in the
brain, a "signature" that can be recognized when brain tissue
from a victim is examined.
-
- Variant CJD has killed at least 80 people so far in Europe,
and it is linked to the consumption of British beef products that were
contaminated with the mad cow infection.
-
- The disease crossed what scientists call "the species
barrier" from the infected cattle, to infect some proportion of the
millions of people who ate it before anyone realized that such a leap was
possible.
-
- As with all TSEs, no one knows the incubation for variant
CJD. It cannot be predicted whether the threat to human beings in Europe
is over, or just beginning.
-
- There is no TSE researcher working today who will discount
the possibility that Chronic Wasting Disease could produce variant CJD
in humans, especially if humans are consuming the brains, blood or nerve
tissue of infected animals.
-
- No federal agencies regulate the velvet trade. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture does not monitor the harvest or the handling
of the product, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not follow
how it is consumed.
-
- Regulation is voluntary
-
- In 1999, South Dakota had 300 head of elk under quarantine
for Chronic Wasting Disease. One herd, tested after all of the animals
were destroyed, showed an infection rate of 30 percent. Yet, says South
Dakota State Veterinarian Dr. Sam Holland, there was nothing to prevent
the owners of those animals from selling their velvet.
-
- "We do apprise the owners of the implications of
selling velvet while under quarantine," he said, "but we cannot
stop them from doing so, because there is no evidence that CWD is present
in velvet, or can be passed to humans."
-
- Holland says that in his experience, elk ranchers in
South Dakota have all acted on the side of caution. "One producer
who had infected elk burned his whole stockpile - thousands of pounds -
of velvet. He didn't have to. He wanted to do the right thing."
-
- In Montana, where two herds have been destroyed for Chronic
Wasting Disease, Karen Cooper of the Montana Department of Livestock says
the department "does not regulate any animal byproduct and therefore
does not have any information (about) which farms sell at what time."
-
- Even where regulations are in place, such as Canada,
there is no way to test animals for Chronic Wasting Disease until the animals
are dead.
-
- At the end of November, 1,500 head of elk from the six
infected ranches in Saskatchewan were destroyed. What happened to the velvet
that was harvested from those animals in June 2000?
-
- "The animals were not under any kind of quarantine
then, so it went into the market," says Dr. George Luterbach, chief
veterinarian of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
-
- But Ian Thorleifson of the Canadian Cervid Council says
that "partly by luck and partly by design, we are not aware of any
velvet that was sold from elk infected now that were not perceived to be
infected in June."
-
- In this country, the elk-ranching industry has contributed
over $200,000 to wasting disease research, much of the study seeking a
test that can determine infection in live animals. Some of the money has
gone to Dr. Mary Jo Schmeer, at the USDA facilities in Ames, Iowa, who
has been searching for the wasting disease agent in blood samples of infected
deer and elk.
-
- "We have detected the agent in blood," she
says. "I wouldn't want to be taking any products that contain blood
in concentrated form."
-
- In England, she says, "Researchers established the
transmission of BSE (mad cow) to a sheep, from a transfusion of less than
a cupful of blood." Schmeer says she has a backlog of over a thousand
blood samples from deer and elk, and has no idea when, or if, a reliable
test will be discovered.
-
- Dr. Byron Caughey and Dr. Bruce Chesebro work at Rocky
Mountain Laboratories, a research facility of the National Institute of
Health, in Hamilton, Mont. Both men have spent a large part of their lives
working on transmissable spongiform encephalopathy diseases, and both have
just returned from an international TSE conference in Europe.
-
- Caughey has recently completed an experiment to obtain
what he calls "an initial glimpse" of how susceptible to CWD
infection humans and traditional livestock might be. "Early results
show the possibility of susceptibility to infection," he says. But
Caughey is not impressed by the threat of transmission through infected
blood.
-
- "Evidence says that a blood-borne transmission is
possible, but it would be extremely rare," he says. "But if you
are talking about a nerve-borne infection, the potential risk is many orders
- maybe millionfold - greater."
-
- How big a danger?
-
- "Playing with fire" is how Bruce Chesebro describes
the current trade in velvet. "Everybody talks about how scrapie has
been present in sheep for hundreds of years and has never been known to
pass to people," he says. "And in England, everybody was hoping
that BSE (mad cow disease) would be like scrapie, and pose no threat to
humans, but that bubble burst when the variant CJD cases started showing
up in young people in 1996. So you've got one TSE that passes to people,
and one that doesn't. Will CWD be like scrapie, or like BSE? Nobody knows."
-
- Also, he adds, "People like to say that natural
transmission of TSEs has always been rare. But with velvet, we're not talking
about natural transmission - you're grinding it up, putting it in capsules,
and eating it regularly. That's what I'd call experimental use. It's basically
the same thing we do in the lab with mice."
-
- Elk ranchers, velvet promoters, and industry spokespersons,
however, want it to be clear that no human being, as far as can be known,
has ever contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease from a Chronic Wasting
Disease-infected animal.
-
- Thorleifson, of the Canadian Cervid Council, says, "No
information is available to suggest that CWD is infective to humans. It
is true that Canadian elk producers are concerned regarding the possibility
of any negative effect resulting from consumption of an imperfect elk product.
That is the justification for the slaughter of over 1,500 Canadian farmed
elk, in spite of the fact that only 16 elk from those herds have been found
positive for CWD."
-
- Thorleifson adds: "There must be some risk of transmission,
but we feel that risk is extremely low."
-
- Steve Wolcott, a Colorado elk producer and chairman of
animal health for the North American Elk Breeders Association, also believes
that the low numbers of infected animals, and the history of the disease
so far, suggest that the risk to humans is minimal.
-
- "We are talking about maybe 13 herds of infected
elk," he said, "and six or seven under quarantine now, out of
hundreds of herds. Compared to the sheep industry, we are bending over
backwards to solve this problem, but because we are a small industry we
get attacked from all sides."
-
- He points out that Chronic Wasting Disease has existed
in the wild, affecting 1 percent of the elk, and 18 percent of the mule
deer in a small but expanding portion of Colorado and Wyoming, and of the
thousands of people who hunt there, none have apparently died of variant
Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease.
-
- In Castle Rock, Colo., Natraflex president and founder
Lloyd Riddle isn't worried. For one thing, he says, he knows where his
velvet is coming from.
-
- "I certainly don't buy from pools. I buy directly
from ranches that I know have the strictest standards, so I always know
the source."
-
- Riddle adds that of the millions of people eating velvet,
"Nobody's out there tipping over. It's just not a problem, and I'd
hate to see it represented as one."
-
- On the Natraflex Web site, a browser can purchase the
new book by California nutritionist Betty Kamen, titled The Remarkable
Healing Power of Velvet Antler.
-
- On her Web site promoting the book, Kamen does not mention
TSE diseases but does discuss the question, "Is it safe to use an
antler supplement?" Her conclusion? "The question I feel compelled
to ask myself is this: is it safe not to use an antler supplement?"
-
-
-
- Hal Herring is a free-lance writer in Corvalis, Montana.
-
- You can contact ...
-
- Natraflex Brands, 888/283-3539; Canadian Food Inspection
Agency, 204/983-2624; Canadian Cervid Council, 780/460-9424; The Food and
Drug Administration: 888/723-3663 or 888/463-6332; Steve Wolcott, North
American Elk Breeders Association, 970/527-4586.
-
- Organic Consumers Association - <http://www.purefood.orgHome
6101 Cliff Estate Rd., Little Marais, MN 55614, <../aboutus.htmabout
us Activist or Media Inquiries: (218) 226-4164, Fax: (218) 226-4157 If
you support this web site, <../donation.htmsend a tax-deductible donation
to OCA
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|