Quote:
Originally Posted by Nirvana
Most cattle slaughtered are 24 months old and under it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to have BSE. The disease has at least a 5-7 year incubation. That's why more are not tested. They only test OLD and sick appearing animals and most OLD and sick animals are in fertilizer.
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You edited your post, so I'll respond to it. I believe every word of this. Can't argue with it at all. It's true. But notice that you said "most" and not "all." Dairy cows are typically slaughtered at much older ages, and they are often turned into hamburger and fed to people. And while it's true that the animals that they test are mostly old and sick, just because an animal is old or sick doesn't mean it gets tested. They don't do enough testing for that to happen. And while sick downer cows don't enter the human food supply, old dairy cows that can still stand up often enter the human food supply.
Nirvana, I'm what you would call a customer. I love beef. And I'm telling you that I don't eat beef any more because there are too many loopholes for BSE to make it into the human food supply. I was pleased that the rules changed in 1997 to make things safer, and odds are that any beef I eat will be just fine. But there is no guarantee. This newly discovered cow is proof that a BSE contaminated cow can still make it into the human food supply. If this dairy cow wasn't quite so far gone that it was a downer cow, it would have been slaughtered and ground into hamburger. Fortunately that didn't happen. The farmer didn't decide to send it off to the rendering facility until after it got sick. But if he decided just a month earlier, when symptoms hadn't shown up yet, then that cow would be in somebody's stomach.
It's been 15 years since the laws changed, and BSE shouldn't be showing up any more. I really want to know how old that most recent cow was. If it was 16 years old, then everything is cool. But if it was 3 years old, then we have a problem, and we need to identify how it got infected so it won't happen again.