Does anyone care?
 

At first, a few years ago, the experts at the USDA said Mad Cow disease would never appear in the US.

They made sure they would never find a case by only testing one out of every 12,000 cows. Well, against all the odds, they found a mad cow. "Shit!" they thought, "we better fix this public relations disaster fast!"

They blamed Canada, changed a few rules, said they were increasing testing tenfold (didn't bother to mention that it means they would still only be testing one out of every 1,200 cows) and told the public that US beef is safe. They prohibited small organic cattle ranchers from doing their own tests of each and every cow and labelling their beef as "mad cow free." Wouldn't look good to the public to have some expensive shrink-wrapped packages of beef clearly labelled as "mad cow free" while other less expensive packages sat there unlabelled in the display case.

Well, it took a year and a half, but they just found a second infected cow. Confirmed. Not just an initial screenig test.

They still claim the US beef supply is safe. They are scrambling to find a way to claim this is an anomaly.

They are liars. The US beef supply is not safe.

I've ranted about this topic in previous threads. I apologize if my continued ranting is annoying. Thing is, I LOVE beef. I MISS beef. I stopped eating beef when they found the first mad cow and I read how little testing is done. Sure, the change in rules was a good first step. But we need to follow Europe's lead, and test at least 1 out of every 3 cows. This 1 out of 1,200 shit has got to stop. Japan tests 100% of the cows they eat. We could test 100% of our beef for only $.25 to $.50 per pound more. Would you be willing to spend that to be sure your beef is Mad Cow free?

I love beef. I miss beef. I want the officials who have been charged with ensuring that our beef supply is safe to do thier jobs so I can eat beef again.

Do any of you care? In previous threads, only one or two Dwellars have cared.

I care, glatt. But maybe I am not fully informed. I thought if you bought ground sirloin you were ok--that only "ground beef" (not specified) was dangerous?

Oh, and I would spend an exta .25-.50 cents a pound to be sure the meat was not mad.

In theory, yes. In reality, the meat processing plants are so messy, everything gets all cross-contaminated.

Buy the ground beef that is packaged at the grocery store - not pre-packaged brand name - and you'll get only beef ground at the store that day, which is less likely to be contaminated.

More expensive grinds (round, sirloin) come from the back of the cow where there is less spinal cord and brain to comtaminate.

No more sweetbreads. :(

But I don't have the time to worry about this one, the odds of getting run over in the parking lot are far far greater than a serious problem from CJS. I feel I have to budget my finite worry resources, and this one doesn't make the cut. It's important, but there are more clear and present dangers to occupy me. I guess I'm piggybacking on your worry, glatt.

Since we are missing thousands of infected cows with our inspections being so poor, there must be hundreds of thousands of cases of CJ in human consumers, then, yes?

Any stats on all of these drooling, dying carnivores?

Just to clarify, glatt, the correct statistic without the typo was 1 in 1,200 cows, right?

I understand that it's currently 1 in 1,200. It was 1 in 12,000 when the first sick cow from Canada was found. After they found the first cow two years ago, they increased the testing tenfold as part of the campaign to re-assure the public that they were on top of things.

Well, several million old people with memory loss and dementia are diagnosed with alzheimers. It's very possible that a large portion of them actually have cj disease and were mis-diagnosed. The two diseases are very similar.

I'm sorry, but that's a horribly flawed and uninformed thing to say.

You have no idea whether CJ and Alzheimers are similar from a medical standpoint.

It infects one in a million people worldwide, yearly, making it extreme rare. There are three types, "sporadic", "hereditary", and "acquired".

Sporadic accounts for 85+% of cases, people with no risk factors, and nobody knows how they get the disease.

Hereditary is exactly as it sounds, 10% of cases are hereditary.

Acquired accounts for less than 1%, and is when the person is exposed to infected brain matter or nervous system material. So 1% of 1/1,000,000 of cases are from infected cows and other contaminants (bad surgery procedure, etc).

Boy, am I ever scared.

So, if 1% of 1,000,000 cases are from angry bovines, this would seem to indicate that perhaps there isn't exactly a torrent of diseased beef being foisted upon unsuspecting American consumers.

well.. the way I figure it.. since this practice of feeding cows to other cows has been going on for quite a while. there's really no point in freaking out about it now.. odds are we have all contracted it.. I mean. the greedy sons of beeyotches who have been valueing dollars over any sort of respect for themselves, the customer or thier product.. are bound to have some sort of 'karmic' backlash... looks like it's going to be us dying and going mad in droves.. eat the damn beef.. it's already too late.

No, but I do from a NPR standpoint. A few years ago my Dad died of Alzheimers complications in July. The next thankgiving weekend I got caught in a traffic jam outside of NYC. While I was changing my prerecorded music the NYC NPR radio station came on. I listened for a bit because they were talking about Alzheimers. They said they had been trying to autopsy as many Alzheimer cases as possible but the number was still in the low hundreds which isn't much of a sample for a study. Even so, they found something like 10 or 12 % really had Mad Cow.

I won't try to convince anyone because I don't know who I was listening to or what they're credentials were but it caused me to wonder. I rarely eat beef. :eyebrow:

They were using the chicken house cleanings for feed. IOW chicken shit.

Ok...I am NOT gonna read this thread any more! I've tried being a vegetarian and it didn't take. You guys are not going to ruin meat for me!!! I remain, as always, blissfully ignorant.

Thank you.

Hmmm.... bison farm fantasy rears ugly head again. Self-contained organic operation, absurd pricing, bbq, yummy.