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Mad Cow Anyone?
Eating meat is obviously riskier than it used to be, and it's getter
worse. Some of these diseases take years to incubate, such as the recent
vaccine dangers.
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U.S.
government prevents meat packer testing for mad cow disease
31 May 2007 - news-medical.net
In what is being seen by many as a curious and in
some ways surprising move, the U.S. government is trying to prevent a
Kansas meat packer from testing all of their animals for Mad Cow
disease.
The company, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, are keen to test all of
their own animals for the presence of Mad Cow disease - bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - a progressive neurological disorder
of cattle that results from infection by an unconventional
transmissible agent.
Under current regulations, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
tests less than one percent of all slaughtered cows for the disease;
the meat from affected animals is fatal to humans if it is eaten.
BSE first appeared in Europe in 1986 and caused a major epidemic in
cattle; more than 183,000 cases of BSE were confirmed in the UK alone
in more than 35,000 herds through to the end of November 2003.
The epidemic in the UK peaked in January 1993 at almost 1,000 new
cases per week and experts believe the outbreak may have been the
result of feeding sheep meat-and-bone meal which contained scrapie, to
cattle.
Experts in the UK agree that the evidence suggests that the outbreak
was exacerbated by the feeding of rendered bovine meat-and-bone meal
to young calves.
By 2004, 157 people acquired and died of a disease with similar
neurological symptoms subsequently called vCJD, or (new) variant
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
It is estimated that 400,000 cattle infected with BSE entered the
human food chain in the 1980s in Britain and although the BSE epidemic
was eventually brought under control by culling all suspect cattle
populations, people are still being diagnosed with vCJD each year.
This is because the disease can have a long incubation period and
it can be decades before symptoms appear.
As a result the full extent of the human vCJD outbreak is still not
clear.
To date, there have only been three cases of Mad Cow disease in the
United States, and the USDA who regulate the test, say widespread
testing could lead to false positives that could potentially harm the
meat industry.
If the company do test all of their own animals for the presence of
BSE, Creekstone Farms will have a huge advantage over the bigger meat
packers, who apparently have not considered such a move.
Even though a federal judge has ruled in favour of Creekstone, the
USDA has said it will appeal, which means in effect that the meat
packer will not be able start to tests until the appeals process is
exhausted.
In a report in 2005 the consumer group Public Citizen found more than
800 Mad Cow safety violations at U.S. meat packing plants, 460 of
which occurred because slaughter plants had inadequate systems for
dealing with BSE in their food safety plans.
Of those 460 violations, 60 percent apparently had plans that did not
even mention Mad Cow disease. |
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Messages From Earth |
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A synopsis of the first 5 hours in the series Planet Earth.
Read more
On the dark side of human nature.. [PDF]
Reasons
Logical Explanations
© Red Pill Press
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