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Deadly Feasts

Richard Rhodes

The 'Prion' controversy and the food we eat

(CNN) -- This is the transcript from a recent moderated chat with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes. His most recent work is "Deadly Feasts - The 'Prion' Controversy and the Public's Health". His coverage of the health risks associated with the food supply in the United States may leave many thinking twice before biting into that burger!

QUESTION: What kind of prevention tactics should the FDA employ to safeguard our food?

RICHARD RHODES: They need to do what they've already done by enforcing the current ban and carefully inspect animals coming to slaughter. They need to consider banning all animal protein being fed to animals.

QUESTION: What other foods should we be wary of eating?

RHODES: The U.S. meat supply is probably safe. There is no evidence of mad cow disease in American cattle. There is no increase in the number of CJD cases in humans. Those are good signs that we're OK for now.

QUESTION: Richard, anything we eat is potentially dangerous ... and don't you think that it is impossible to oversee the handling of all foods?

RHODES: I don't agree that anything we eat is potentially dangerous. But obviously inspections and all the existing rules and regulations need to be enforced. I think for other foods we need to begin using food irradiation to pasteurize food, vegetables and meats because we won't be able to control all aspects of our food supply since it is now a world-wide food supply. Unfortunately, pasteurization doesn't weed out mad cow disease. Adding inspectors doesn't solve the problem either. We're going to have to solve the problem with technology, just as we protected our milk supply years ago by using pasteurization.

QUESTION: How serious are problems with chickens? Should we just cook them well, or not eat them at all?

RHODES: Some samplings indicate that up to 50 percent of our poultry is contaminated with salmonella. I don't think we should all be turned into surgical technicians in our home kitchens to avoid getting sick with the meat we buy in the store. That's why I think food irradiation is a good way to protect food supply in the store. For mad cow disease we have to depend on prevention.

QUESTION: Are there any benefits to the irradiation of foods, and do you recommend that irradiation be used extensively?

RHODES: About 9,000 Americans die a year from food poisoning and hundreds of thousands are made seriously ill. Almost all of those deaths and illnesses could be prevented with food irradiation -- which kills the disease organisms. Irradiation has been around for more than 50 years. It is a mature technology used widely around the world. It's endorsed by the World Health Organization and many other professional health organizations. There's no danger to food; the radioactivity doesn't get into the food, it just kills the germs on the food. I think the short answer is it's a safe technology that could save thousands of lives.

QUESTION: Mr Rhodes, how much danger in America are we from Kuru, mad cow disease or scrapie? Also, I'm a very big fan. Thank you!

RHODES: Thanks for being a fan ... Kuru was a disease confined to a tribe of cannibals in New Guinea, so unless someone decided to eat one of those tribal members -- there is no danger. Kuru is almost gone. I interviewed a woman who had just come down with Kuru in 1996, so she had incubated the disease since 1969, which was the last cannibal feast in that tribe. Scrapie is a disease associated with sheep, and it has never been shown to be transmittable to humans. The British government believed that mad cow disease spread to cattle from sheep. That's why they told their people not to worry about eating beef. But in fact, there's no evidence that mad cow disease started as scrapie. The brain damage is different in sheep and cattle, but identical in cattle and humans.

QUESTION: What the heck is Prion?

RHODES: The scientists who have been investigating the TSE's aren't sure what causes the disease, whether it's a virus or something else. Dr. Stanley Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year for researching and identifying an abnormal protein as a potential cause for the disease -- and he called that protein a Prion. Dr. Prusiner believes the protein is infectious -- which would be a new kind of disease organism. The Nobel committee agreed with him. But, in fact, he's never proven that the Prion can spread the infection, so there are other researchers in the field who don't think he really deserves the Nobel Prize and who believe that eventually a virus will be found.

QUESTION: Mr. Rhodes, are vegetarians at risk for scrapie-type diseases? I refer to additives like bone meal.

RHODES: You're not a vegetarian is you eat bone meal, as it comes from animals. Organic foods are usually fertilized with animal manure instead of chemicals. The scrapie agent could pass through an animal which is fed the material and still be active in their manure. The British government advised farmers not to use bone meal without using a mask and gloves. Clearly, there is some degree of risk in Europe and in England. Since mad cow disease has never been identified in the U.S., I think we can feel confident we're not at risk unless the bone meal was imported from England.

QUESTION: Mr. Rhodes, are we seriously suppose to chuck our eating habits? Think about our forefathers who didn't even refrigerate food carefully!

RHODES: Our forefathers didn't produce 40 billion pounds of slaughter house waste a year in the U.S. alone. Nor did they cook it, dry it, turn it into meat and bone meal and feed it back to their cattle. The deadly strain of e. coli, which has raised great concern recently, is a brand new mutation never before seen. The point is, changing technology and the evolution of disease organisms changes the conditions under which our food is prepared. You need to talk to some of the parents of children who have been paralyzed or have died because they encountered e.coli-contaminated meat or mad cow disease. This is a very serious matter.

QUESTION: How many people actually died of mad cow disease?

RHODES: So far, 24. There was a time, however, when only one cow had died of mad cow disease ... and now the number is in the hundreds of thousands. Epidemics start in a few cases and then spread to many many other people. The British scientists don't know how many people will ultimately died. They estimated a low of a few hundred to a high of several thousand. The only previous human epidemic occurred in the tribe in New Guinea.

At the height of their epidemic they were losing one percent of their population per year. One percent of the British population would be half a million people! The problem is no one knows at this point how many people have been infected. We'll have to wait and see.

QUESTION: With some 270 million people to feed in the U.S., do you think affordable, reliable and 'healthy' food production methods can be a viable objective?

RHODES: I think they better be. This, again, is where the solution that our government has proposed, which is basically more inspection, is a bad solution. Inspection hasn't worked in the past. There's no reason to think that more of it will work any better. We need new technologies. Just as it was more practical to pasteurize milk rather than try to clean up all the farms in America. So, I think it's more practical to use food irradiation -- rather than try to clean up all the farms in the world.

QUESTION: Mr Rhodes, have there been advancements in containing or arresting "Prion," since it is a protein and there isn't any way of eradicating it? Any new research?

RHODES: No. These are still 100 percent fatal diseases which can't be identified until the victims start to show symptoms. Prevention is the only way to protect ourselves.

QUESTION: Is the risk of mad cow disease in Europe influenced by the quality of the cut of meat one eats? When I've been in Europe, I get the impression Europeans think they are safe as long as they buy top-grade meat.

RHODES: That was my experience when I visited England also. People thought if they bought the so-called better cuts, they would be OK. There is no distinction, as far as the disease is concerned, between steak and flank. Anyone who ate beef in England from 1985 until today may have been exposed to this disease.

QUESTION: Mr. Rhodes, do most of the burger joints test their meat since the scare that Burger King had?

RHODES: There are concerned about staying in business, and I think they do everything they can do. But, you can't test every surface of every animal. Until they develop technologies for killing the germs, there are always going to be risks. If we're talking about e. coli -- it's a normal part of their systems, and it just happens to be fatal to humans. That's why I think irradiating, killing the germs on the surface of the tissue, is an important health step.

QUESTION: Given the "known" risks, what do you consider the incurred costs versus the realized benefits?

RHODES: Where the TSE diseases are concerned, I think the FDA ban on recycling ruminance protein is probably about right economically. So far, the risk in North America is low. If an American version of mad cow disease turned up in our animals, then we should certainly take the next step -- which the British have taken -- to ban the feeding of animal protein to animals. That would leave us with a considerable problem of how to dispose of 40 million pounds of animal waste a year. That would be a monumental environmental problem.

QUESTION: Mr Rhodes, are you a vegetarian?

RHODES: My family eats fish and pasta, fruits and vegetables. We haven't had beef for years

QUESTION: How safe are our pesticides?

RHODES: To the best of my knowledge, we don't need to be concerned about the way we protect our food supply from insects. I spent a good deal of time with farmers, and I know they're as concerned about their own health as they are about the people eating the food they grow. Also, they don't like to spend a penny more than they have to, so I'm sure they don't overuse these expensive chemicals. I think it's easy to be diverted into worries about pesticides and forget the very serious health question of dangerous microorganisms in our food. As much as 60 percent of our food supply is contaminated with salmonella I think that's a much more serious problem than trace residual of pesticide.

QUESTION: Is there a difference between eating beef and poultry? Are you safer eating chicken, or pigs for that matter?

RHODES: In this country, there's more health risk from contaminated poultry than from beef or pork. That's because salmonella is now endemic in poultry. If we're talking about mad cow disease, the only one of the food animals that has shown this disease is cattle. Chickens and pigs do not have a natural form of the disease. Pigs have been shown in the lab to be capable of being infected with mad cow disease, but no cases have been identified at the slaughter house.

QUESTION: What kind of prevention tactics should the FDA employ to safeguard our food?

RHODES: One important step that needs to happen, I believe, is the use of irradiation to kill salmonella and e.coli in packaged meats before they're sent to the supermarkets. This technology can also be used to prolong the shelf lives, and to improve the quality of fruits and veggies by killing molds and other surface contamination. The World Health Organization recommends it. The American Medical Association recommends it. It's a safe technology that other countries -- like Israel -- for example, use. We should start using it just as 80 years ago we instituted the pasteurization of milk to prevent the deaths of thousands of babies every summer from diarrhea cause by contaminated milk. Our government, Al Gore in particular, has resisted encouraging the use of food irradiation from some misguided belief that this technology has anything to do with nuclear power or nuclear weapons. It's just a good way to pasteurize meat as we pasteurize milk. And with thousands of deaths every year from food poisoning, it's long overdue. There are one or two crackpot organizations that raise loud public protests whenever this is offered to food organizations. It has been legal for many years for food and vegetables. Consumers need to ask for it. Companies are afraid to bring it out because they think it will not be accepted.

QUESTION: Is it true that if nations around the world converted to a mostly vegetarian diet, we could feed the entire population of the world twice over? And, do you foresee a time when most of us will have to convert to a vegetarian diet for safety reasons ... or just as a matter of economy?

RHODES: Good question . There is more than enough vegetable protein in the world to feed us all. Animals aren't very efficient processors of food.

I think the long-term implications of the emergence of new kinds of food-borne disease probably is that we will move away from a diet where meat predominates. We'll certainly, if we are to believe medical science, be healthy as a consequence. I live very happily on fish and pasta and other vegetable foods. And, of course, so do whole nations around the world. And, I have to add, if people are concerned about the treatment of animals ... about wearing fur coats and the killing of baby seals and animals in labs ... they might want to think about the millions and millions of animals that are slaughtered each year for human food. It is surely a moral question, though we don't like to think about it.

QUESTION: I would like to know from Richard Rhodes what he thinks of apple juice and the possible bacteria issue. My children drink a lot of it.

RHODES: I think this question refers to the contamination of unpasteurized apple cider with e.coli -- which has occurred several times in the last several years in the U.S . The e.coli is a new strain, recently mutated, that seems to be becoming endemic in our cattle. When cattle graze in orchards, their manure contaminates the apples and unless the cider is pasteurized it could potentially kill the children who drink the cider. As long as the apple juice is pasteurized it should be completely safe. But raw apple cider can no long be considered completely safe. So goodbye, cider!

QUESTION: Mr: Rhodes: What exactly does e.coli do to the body?

RHODES: The e.coli we are talking about, a particular strain called O157.h7, is the normal bacteria that lives in the intestines of mammals. This new strain, however, evidently has picked up a gene from some other organism that makes a poison. There is some evidence that the gene came from the Sigella organism. So, this new kind of e.coli makes a toxin which selectively damages the kidneys, particularly of children and the elderly. It's a very serious problem because there's no way of telling if cattle is carrying the disease from of e.coli - it doesn't make them sick. It's almost impossible to prevent fecal contamination of meat in a slaughter house. It's equally impossible to test every surface of every piece of meat. So, meat producers are doing what they can, but this is a situation where irradiation would really protect us better then the system we have in place. Once a piece of meat is packaged in plastic, it can be irradiated and all bacteria inside the package can be irradiated.

QUESTION: Is there any way to determine if food has been irradiated without having a label?

RHODES: The good new is irradiation doesn't cause anything to happen to the meat that would allow you to identify it. That means it's a safe technology. The reason it's labeled is because anti-nuclear groups made a big cry, claiming it was a dangerous technology so they convinced officials to put label on irradiated food. It's as safe as pasteurization. The end result is safer and gives us better quality food.

QUESTION: How do you feel about the increased importation of fruits and vegetables into the U.S. from other countries who have less oversight ...and is washing thoroughly always enough?

RHODES: Foods imported from other countries are not necessarily any less safe or risky than foods grown in the U.S. We like to believe they are safer because it makes us feel better. The truth is, however, the risk is probably about equal from any source. That's why I think we need to use technology -- in addition to inspection. Then, wherever the food comes from we can be reasonably confident that it's safe to eat.

QUESTION: Mr. Rhodes, most of us in the U.S. are carnivores. And frankly a pasta and fish diet would last us about three days -- then we would go on a burger rampage. What do we do to protect ourselves beside nuking our food?

RHODES: To each his own, but, I'd rather use technology to protect my food than risk death or serious illness to be a macho honcho, period. End of debate!

QUESTION: Thank you Mr. Rhodes! We appreciate your time tonight!



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