Woo Hoo!!! The Emu shall RIIIIIISE again!!!!
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Mad Cow Disease in Washington State
by Smyler 33 Replies latest social current
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Mulan
Maybe it will at least help bring the cost of beef down a bit. It's gotten almost prohibitively expensive lately.
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ball.
If people panic and stop buying beef it may defalte the price, although I do not think there will be too much impact from the list of other countries who have already banned US beef as the US only exports 10% of its beef, the rest is consumed internally. Here in Britain, most people carried on consuming beef, and the number of people affected by the human form of BSE, CJD remains extremely low.
However, my question is will the US government now remove this advice from it's web site:
"To reduce any risk of acquiring vCJD from food, travelers to Europe or other areas with indigenous cases of BSE may consider either avoiding beef and beef products altogether or selecting beef or beef products, such as solid pieces of muscle meat"
and will I stop getting looks of horror from American collegues when I order beef like I'm just about to willfully contract HIV for example.
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foreword
The Canadians not closing the borders to US beef is another fine example of how the Canadians will always kiss ass to the American business community. The US didn't give a damn about the financial implications to our Canadian farmers, and now, because we do not want to ruffle their feathers we'll wait for further lab results....
Is this what Mr Martin, our newly sworn in American puppet, means when he wishes to fix Can / US relations because we didn't go to war with them.
Mr. Martin, you're just another spineless politician.....put a ban on US beef you coward.
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Black Sheep
From the BSE Apostates.
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darkuncle29
The cow was actually slaughtered a few miles from where I live-Moses Lake, WA.
The cow was sent to slaughter because it was sick.
The deer hunters amongst us should be familiar with Cronic Wasteing Disease-CWD. That is the designation of a similiar disease in deer and elk. Also caused by a prion or misshapen protein/enzyme. IT is found in the brain,nerve, and marrow of infected animals.
There is so much more going on here.
Anybody feel like chicken tonight?
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Cowboy
The cow was slaughtered not because she was sick, but because she was injured. She had given birth and was unable to get up afterward. This is usually because of a pinched nerve or a skeletal injury (such as a broken pelvis or hip). These aren't things that would cause any reason for concern about the safety of meat obtained from this animal. The cow was tested because she was unable to walk, for whatever reason.
That said, as a beef producer myself, I don't think any "downer" (unable to walk) cattle should be allowed in the food chain, and very soon, I expect laws to be passed to that effect. They have usually been stressed, which doesn't make the meat harmful, but gives it an undesirable dark color.
Prions have only been found in the brains and upper spinal cords of affected cattle. Those parts are not allowed by law to be used in any sort of food products, for either humans or animals.
CB
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ThiChi
This is just more "Junk Science"
BSE Scare Mostly Mania: Mad Cow Is a Bovine Disease; the Link to Humans Is Unproven
by Steven Milloy
May 27, 2003
Steven Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com, is an adjunct scholar at the Washington D.C.-based Cato Institute.
Mad cow disease was diagnosed in a Canadian cow this week, setting off a new round of predictable but groundless panic.
The U.S. government promptly banned imports of Canadian beef and cattle. Investors dumped the stock of beef-related companies, notably McDonald's, which lost US$1.5-billion in market value.
And, of course, what health scare would be complete without media hype?
Front-page coverage in The New York Times, for example, reported that eating meat from diseased cattle has allegedly caused more than 100 human deaths in Europe since 1994 and "raised questions about the health benefits of eating beef for many consumers around the world."
There's no question that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called "mad cow," is a highly infectious, neurological disease in cattle. But the notion that people can contract a human form of the disease by eating beef from infected cows is more bun than burger.
The first epidemic of mad cow broke out among cattle in the United Kingdom in 1986. Beginning in 1994, human cases of a supposedly novel brain disease, called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD), began appearing in the U.K.
Though laboratory testing seemed to indicate BSE and nvCJD were similar, no one could determine with certainty whether and how BSE was related to nvCJD. There were no geographic areas in the U.K. with a significantly higher incidence of people with nvCJD and there were no cases of nvCJD among "high-risk" groups such as farmers, slaughterhouse workers or butchers.
When researchers considered the possibility that nvCJD was caused by consumption of beef from BSE-infected cattle, no correlations could be established between nvCJD and any specific meat or dairy product because consumption was so widespread. Moreover, no one could establish whether any of the nvCJD cases ever consumed beef from diseased cattle.
Researchers nevertheless became fixated on the idea consumption of infected beef was the culprit behind nvCJD after it was discovered that 1980s slaughterhouse practices and meat preparation inadvertently might have allowed diseased tissue to be mixed into a variety of packaged meat products such as hot dogs, sausages, beef patties and luncheon meats.
Mad cow mania was on.
But the infected beef theory doesn't explain why nvCJD tended to occur in young people -- most cases have occurred among 15- to 25-year olds. It doesn't offer the slightest clue as to why only about 130 nvCJD cases have occurred in a British population of 60 million exposed to potentially contaminated beef products.
Some have suggested that a kind of "epidemiological Russian roulette" is at work, where consumption of infected beef results in rare and randomly distributed cases of nvCJD. The Russian roulette explanation is not a scientific one, however, and not one on which public alarm or public policy should be based.
Despite its gaping holes, the infected beef theory has mutated into orthodoxy among many in the medical and public health community that few have been brave enough to challenge.
One U.K. public health expert, George A. Venters, did manage to have an article published in the British Medical Journal in October, 2001, titled, "New variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease: the epidemic that never was."
Venters maintains the infected beef theory is wrong and that nvCJD might not even be a new disease. He challenged the biological plausibility of BSE causing nvCJD, since no direct evidence exists that the vehicle of BSE infection -- a special protein called a prion -- is infectious to humans. Nor is there direct evidence that BSE prions survive cooking, digestion and the human immune system.
Venters points out that the clinical features and pathology of nvCJD are similar to kuru, a prion disease found in Papua New Guinea and spread by cannibalism. The differences in pathology between kuru and nvCJD, Venters says, may be more of degree than kind since nvCJD patients tend to live longer because they get better medical care.
If nvCJD is not a novel disease, it can't be tied back to BSE-infected meat from the 1986 mad cow epidemic.
After discussing the numerous deficiencies in the BSE-nvCJD hypothesis, Venters observed, "The evidence that has been amassed is directed toward confirming the [BSE-nvCJD] hypothesis rather than testing it. Salient contrary information has either been played down or ignored."
BSE-infected cattle should be isolated and destroyed to ensure there is no further spread of mad cow disease among the animals. There is no dispute about that. But nvCJD is a rare and apparently random disease of uncertain origin. There is no justification for even the slightest concern about the safety of Canadian beef.
This article originally appeared in The National Post on May 27, 2003.
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liquidsky
I don't eat beef so I'm not worried.
I went grocery shopping last night and there was no chicken or ground turkey left on the shelves.
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Black Sheep
BTW ThiChi, even Kuru has it's apostates. Not all of the available facts fit the Kuru theory.
e.g. http://control.netbenefit.com/users/www.verymadcow.co.uk/index.php?f=data_home&a=6