The U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center, commonly called the Natick laboratories, may have a way of saving the meat from cows diagnosed with mad cow disease. Rather than making meat safe for consumption, the system could be used to decontaminate dead cattle that need to be disposed of.

According to a biochemist at the lab, high-pressure systems currently used to decontaminate food for military meals used in the field, could potentially rid meat of prions, the proteins that could cause mad cow disease.

Patrick Dunne, senior feeding directorate at the Natick labs, said the lab has been funding research at the University of Delaware and Oregon State University that focuses on eliminating bacteria such as E-coli.

The procedure to rid meats and food of bacteria, he explained, works by pumping water into a vessel containing packaged food. Pressure of some 100,000 pounds per square inch (ten times more pressure than the deepest ocean trench) is applied.

The system has yet to be tested on meats from animals infected with mad cow disease, said Dunne, but it may be able to render the meat harmless.

“The benefit of high pressure,” explained Dunne, “is anything you can put into a flexible container, you can pretty much destroy the bacteria and keep a fresh character to the food. At high temperature and high pressure it has  the potential to deactivate the prions.”

Dunne said that there may be one drawback to the system in that the pressure treatment generates enough heat to cook the meat, making it less appealing to shoppers. Additionally, he said, the risk of humans catching mad cow disease (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is virtually nil from eating beef and not the organs.

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