Mad Fish Disease

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Antibiotics aren’t the only dangerous thing agribusiness feeds to farm animals. We used to feed cow brains to pigs and chickens until last year, when Obama’s FDA banned the feeding of cow brains to most other farm animals. Though it should have been a “no-brainer,” it took 12 years to take that step, and still doesn’t go as far as Europe, which bans the feeding of all cow parts to all farmed animals, including fish.

Last summer, a group of neurologists raised the concern that by feeding cow brains to farmed fish, the consumption of farmed fish may provide a means of transmission of infectious prions from mad cows to humans.

That was in June. It was all just theoretical, though, until July. Researchers in Greece fed infected mad cow brains to fish to see what would happen. And although the fish appeared fine, you could see the disease building up in their systems. The neurodegeneration and abnormal deposition in the brains of fish challenged with prion, especially BSE—mad cow disease—raises concerns about the potential risk to public health. The prospect of farmed fish being contaminated with infectious prions, or developing their own prion disease, is alarming.

This is just for farmed fish, though. Wild fish don’t tend to eat cows.

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• Food and Drug Administration. Cattle materials prohibited in animal food or feed to prevent the transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Docket 589.2001, (April 25, 2008).
• R.P. Friedland, R.B. Petersen, & R. Rubenstein. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and aquaculture. J Alzheimers Dis, 17(2):277-279, 2009.
• E. Salta, C. Panagiotidis, K. Teliousis, S. Petrakis, E. Elftheriadis, F. Arapoglou, N. Grigoriadis, A. Nicolaou, E. Kaldrymidou, G. Krey, & T. Sklaviadis. Evaluation of the possible transmission of BSE and scrapie to gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata). PLoS One, 4(7):e6175, 2009.

• brain health
• factory farming practices
• FDA
• feed additives
• fish
• mad cow disease
• meat
• prion disease
• seafood