Due to uncertainty concerning the existence of Mad Cow disease in the USA, High Times no longer recommends the use of bone meal as a soil amendment, as it is often made from material at highest risk of carrying the infectious agent which causes CJD in humans.

According to Tom Pringle, Ph.D., "Bone meal is a higher risk material than blood meal. Cases of CJD have often associated with gardens and farms. . . You put this bone meal around the roses, you get the aerosol in your eyes, your nose, cuts on your hand, inhale it. The problem with the bone meal is it's made out of spinal cord. They can pay to have it hauled off or they're going to grind it up and make a gardening supplement. The eyes are a direct pipeline to the brain, a prime route of infection experimentally."

Carleton Gajdusek, who discovered in 1957 that "kuru" (CJD) in New Guinea was transmitted through cannibalistic practices, and whose work forms the foundation upon which today's TSE research is based, has no doubt of the extreme hazards of bone meal. In Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague, a shocking account of the worldwide spread of TSEs, Gajdusek tells Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes, "'It's made from downer cattle [those most likely to be infected with Mad Cow disease]. Ground extremely fine. The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose.' The Nobel-laureate virologist who knows more than anyone else in the world about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy looked at me meaningfully: 'Do you use bone meal on your roses?' I told him I did. He nodded. 'I wouldn't if I were you.'"

Oprah Has a Cow

The possibility that Mad Cows might be stumbling around the American ranch was first brought to the American mainstream by the Oprah Winfrey Show and guest Howard Lyman of the Humane Society of the United States, a former cattle rancher turned vegetarian. After Oprah swore off hamburgers on national television, meat consumption plummeted and the Texas Cattleman's Association stupidly amplified the issue by immediately suing Winfrey. Oprah won the suit and subsequent appeal, brought under Texas' "veggie libel law," which makes it illegal to slander a food product. "Long live free speech," she said upon news of the Feb. 1998 verdict. "This has been one of my most painful experiences, but it has made me a stronger person. . . I refuse to be muzzled."

Transcript:

Oprah's report on Mad Cow Disease
April 15th, 1996

Oprah: You said this disease cold make Aids look like the common cold?

Howard: Absolutely.

Oprah: That's an extreme statement you know?

Howard: Absolutely, and what we're looking at right now is we're following exactly the same path that they followed in England. Ten years of dealing with it as public relations rather than doing something substantial about it. 100,000 cows per year in the United States are fine at night, dead in the morning. The majority of those cows are rounded up, ground up, fed back to other cows. If only one of them has Mad Cow Disease, has the potential to effect thousands. Remember today, the United States, 14% of all cows by volume are ground up, turned into feed, and fed back to other animals.

Oprah: But cows are herbivores, they shouldn't be eating other cows.

Howard: That's exactly right, and what we should be doing is exactly what nature says, we should have them eating grass not other cows. We've not only turned them into carnivores, we've turned them into cannibals.

Oprah: Now see, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me just ask you this right now Howard. How do you know the cows are ground up and fed back to the other cows?

Howard: Oh, I've seen it. These are USDA statistics, they're not something we're making up.

Oprah: Now doesn't that concern you all a little bit, right here, hearing that?

Audience: Yeah!