What's mildly irritating you today?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Nirvana

I am a beef producer

Well there you go. You have a bit of a bias here on this issue. I'm just a beef consumer (or in this case, not a consumer any more) who knows how to read.

I really have little interest in having this discussion again, because it's history at this point. Beef producers used to grind up downer cows and feed them to healthy cows as standard practice, but after the mad cow scare, that practice was banned. Now that NEW rules have been in effect for maybe a decade, it's very unlikely for cows now to have the disease. And the beef supply is probably safe by now, because any infected cows have been eaten. I'm still going to wait a while before I start eating it again. Griff's comment about the dairy cows is a good point.

Originally Posted by Nirvana

Neither BSE among cattle, nor the new human variant of CJD, have been found in the United States.

This is simply false. You yourself have stated that there were cases of BSE infected cows in the USA, and that those cows came from outside the country. I remember two cow cases specifically. Maybe they are talking about full blown BSE cases. Pretty deceptive if they are making a distinction between an infected cow and a full blown disease. It reads like a Beef Council publicity memo.

The test rate was 1 cow tested for every 12,000 cows that were allowed to pass through the system untested. It was at that test rate that the first infected cow was found in the US. There was mild public outcry, so the government increased the testing (tenfold!) all the way up to a staggering 1 in 1,200. Then another infected cow was found in the US. After a few years of no more hits, the testing rate has dropped back down to a lower (unknown to me) number.

Where are all the numbers of infected humans in the US? That's the only legitimate point the pro-beef lobby has. There really aren't any cases. But it's interesting that the human variant of mad cow disease has almost the same symptoms as Alzheimers. And reported Alzheimers cases have increased astronomically in the last few decades. It would be very easy for misdiagnosed vCDJ cases to remain hidden within the population of reported Alzheimers cases.

In a small study at Yale led by Manuelidis in 1989, researchers discovered that 13 percent of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's had CJD.

"The conclusion people might draw is that CJD is underdiagnosed and clinically can't be discriminated that easily from Alzheimer's disease," Manuelidis said.

CJD is not to be confused with vCJD, but it points to the common occurance of misdiagnosing dementia cases. With 4 million Alzheimers cases in this country, even a tiny percentage of misdiagnosed vCJD would add up to a lot of cases.

I don't feel much like arguing about mad cow now, especially in this thread, because with each passing day, the beef supply gets safer, and years have passed since there were BIG problems with the beef supply. It's basically safe now. But you couldn't say that 5-10 years ago because the rules were different and the testing rate was too low to have any validity.