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Just got done watching somebody from the Government Accountability Office (isn't that an oxymoron?) talking about Mad Cow.
Apparently:
1. The FDA doesn't test for it (not to mention they'd probably let it slide if they got enough kick-backs).
2. The USDA only tests suspected cattle, which accounts for a microscopic percentage - they don't even test a statistically significant random sample.
3. There's a company that wants to sell beef to Japan, and is willing to test every single head of cattle on their own dime, but the US government won't allow them.
4. There is no CDC reporting requirement for deaths from CJD. Just because you die from it, doesn't mean that it gets reported and shows up in the official statistics.
5. It has up to a 30 year incubation period.
I think we're fucked.
I find if I allow the cow to express it's anger in it's own way, just let it vent and get it out of it's system, and provide only positve avtice listening the cow calms down.
After it has calmed down I can help it figure out a productive way aound the problem while still keeping a healthy boundry between us.
Works like a charm. Mad Cow is overrated.
customerjon @gmail.com is where information happens.
this is one of the areas that is horribly underfunded by the government. i'm all for personal responsibility, but it's hard to be personally responsible when you dont know what the f is going on:
the fda and the usda are horribly underfunded, which makes regulation and oversight of companies very hard to do. in turn, it's virtually impossible to know what goes into your food, or the actual quality and cleanliness of your food. for example, many supplement companies (vitamins, creatine, etc.) are able to either make false claims about their product (ex: they claim a vitamin contains a certain percent of a certain nutrient, when in actuality it contains none of that nutrient), or able to add stuff to your product w/o you knowing (ex:adding testosterone to creatine in order for you to maximize your gains) while the customer has actually no idea what is in their food. there are some pretty good, non-biased sites (the industry sites are crap) which rates this stuff, but in actuality, the government isn't doing it's job to protect us, the citizens. these kinds of things occur not only with supplement companies, but also with agriculture companies, etc. i'm all for looking out for myself and personal responsibility, but i need the info to be able to look out for myself
Bah, funding is not the only issue here. Japan tests 100% of all slaughtered cattle, before any processing. No infected beef makes its way into the food chain. The cost of beef in Japan is crazy high, but the Japanese population has huge confidence in the quality of the beef because of the well publicized testing process.
The government should simply make it a requirement: 100% of all beef tested. Period. The costs will be picked up by the cattle producers/abbatoirs/processors/etc., and then passed onto the consumer.
However the reality is that we in NA are simply not willing to pay that kind of $ of beef. We're willing to keep the price of beef low and practice protectionist economics at the risk of ending up like Britain (culling millions and millions of livestock back in 2000? and with more and more cases of CJV showing up). This is analagous to Californian strawberries. We have illegal immigrants pick them because no one is willing to pay 3-4X the current market price for strawberries, which would allow the producer to pay higher ages and attract local labour.
AP
This will make a great horror movie. Imagine most of America gone mad with mad cow. Only the Vegetarians are left to survive. We can call it "Dawn of the Fed" or "Lettuce entertain you.
"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."
I don't think even the vegetarians are safe.
I was a veggie for about 5 years -- they put beef scrapings into so much food nowadays it's hard not to get a little beef every now & then.