Prayer Need: Could Cattle Mutilations Be Linked To A Silent 'Mad Cow' Plague?

By Michael H. Brown

First story

FA while back we reported on the mystery of "cattle mutilations," the cases in which cows have been found strangely dead, with blood and specific body parts often missing. Through the years, conspiracy buffs have speculated that the cause of such mutilations -- which have occurred in 15 states during the 1970s alone, and dozens of times in states like Colorado -- were the work of everything from satanic cults to secret military operatives or even "aliens."

As we reported, a small group of researchers in Las Vegas known as the National Institute for Discovery Science (which lists former astronaut Edgar Mitchell on its board) has issued a study asserting a link between such mutilations and outbreaks of what are known as "prions," proteins that may cause a range of neurological "wasting" diseases. When such wasting disease hits deer, outbreaks are often accompanied or preceded by strange cattle mutilations. Because the missing body parts are surgically removed, and because the organs are tissues where prions may collect (some argue it's not just the brain and spinal column), the speculation is that the government, particularly the military, may be quietly monitoring for the spread of prion disease: in other words, a silent plague.

This is all especially relevant because besides afflicting deer (especially in states like Colorado), prions are the suspected agents behind mad-cow disease. In fact, the concern has been that the prions may be spreading from deer to grazing beef herds and that it may be much more widespread than what we have been led to believe. We must caution that such theorizing involves great speculation, and that the situation may be simply what the government portrays: that so far there is only one verifiable case of "mad cow" in the U.S., and that it didn't even originate here, that it was imported from Canada.

We can pray that something so limited is the case. The small institute wonders if a "subclinical" type of brain-wasting disease is already fairly pervasive. Subclinical means that the afflicted animals do not show overt symptoms, or are simply called "downer" cows, animals that lose their ability to stand upright because of age or what was thought to be conventional sickness. Each year about 200,000 cattle that are too sick to walk are slaughtered. The U.S. Agriculture Department last week banned the further processing of such meat. The fact is that animals can harbor these infectious agents without displaying detectable sickness. Tests already have shown that the disease can spread from mink to cattle that then display the "downer cow" syndrome, and that many diseased animals may be rendered into feed.

Have any of these "downer" cows actually been subclinical cases of "mad cow"? And if so, could they have spread it to humans? Perhaps this is all far out. Perhaps not. We submit it for your discernment. The researchers further point out that when the disease infects humans, it is known as kuru or Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Are some cases of Alzheimer's really the human form of mad cow? When a scientist from Yale University analyzed the brains from 46 Alzheimer's patients, she found that six (or 13 percent) were actually Creutzfeld-Jakob cases. If extrapolated, this would mean 200,000 to 400,000 cases a year. Could this be part of the scenario of graduated events about which we have so often written?

It's certainly something that should be taken to prayer, for since 1979 there has been a twenty-fold increase in "Alzheimer's."

"[The data] show a dramatic increase in Alzheimer deaths after 1979 in the United States coincident with the spread of chronic-wasting disease throughout the wildlife population," notes the team, which implies that someone has been surreptitiously monitoring the spread through the mysterious sampling of cattle in western states.

January 2004

'Mad Cow' Linked To Region Of Canada That Was Focus Of Strange 'Mutilations'

Second story

So-called "cattle mutilations" -- those mysterious instances in which animals are found with parts of their bodies missing, or even devoid of all blood -- have occurred precisely in the parts of Canada now considered to be the epicenter of both wildlife brain-wasting disease and the first publicly-declared cases of mad-cow disease in North America.

Researchers point out that since 1994, there have been at least 18 cases of unexplained animal mutilations in the remote province of Saskatchewan -- which is also where forty cases of chronic-wasting syndrome, a disease that may be linked to "mad cow," have been documented.

Moreover, it is believed the infected Holstein that recently made headlines in the state of Washington came from a dairy farm in the Canadian province of Alberta. That was also where Canada witnessed its own first case of mad cow last year. The diseased cow originated on a farm in Baldwinton, Saskatchewan -- the province that forms Alberta's eastern border and also has been the epicenter of Canadian cattle mutilations (at left the circles indicate mutilations and the stars outbreaks of chronic wasting in wildlife such as deer and elk). The wasting syndrome has hit west and north of Saskatoon, focusing on a town called North Battlefield.

Since the 1970s -- when such brain-wasting diseases were first reported among wildlife in places like Colorado -- there have been parallel reports of cattle found dead in the strange, gruesome, and yet surgical manner near those very same vicinities. Often the tongues, eyes, reproductive organs, or other tissues have been cleanly taken -- indicating to some that it may be the result of a clandestine monitoring operation. It is believed that the infectious agent -- perhaps nucleic acids attached to "prions" -- may accumulate in certain mammalian issues. Spreading in wildlife and cattle, such an agent would pose a plague threat.

For years, everything from satanic cults to aliens have been blamed for the well-documented mutilations -- so widespread that they once even drew the ire of Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm, who publicly declared the occurrences an "outrage" that could not be blamed on normal predators. Similar cases have been reported in at least a dozen U.S. states. Farmers and ranchers have found cows and bulls dead and in some instances missing much of their body weight, with signs of the surgical removal. Blood is gone from the animal, though there is no evidence of human or animal tracks and not a drop of blood at the actual scene, mystifying investigators.

The question posed by some is whether the brain-wasting disease, known as "transmissible spongiform encephalopathy," or TSE, escaped from a laboratory or rose naturally -- and whether the government is now trying to monitor its spread without alarming the public. "We hypothesize that the animal mutilations reported in northwestern Saskatchewan in the past several years may have been a covert TSE sampling operation by perpetrators who knew that TSE was spreading from farmed elk and deer in Saskatchewan to wild deer and thence to cattle," notes the National Institute for Discovery Science in Nevada -- another state that has witnessed the strange mutilations.

January 2004