� Games & Gamers | Main | Predictions for 2004 �
December 30, 2003
Don't Have A Cow, Man
So we found one mad cow from Canada and people are going berserk.
Listening to To The Point yesterday helped clarify a few things for me. The big gaping loophole in the current FDA rules has to do with the allowable uses of cow-brains and spinal cords, the primary location of BSE prions. The current language says that such stuff from ruminants cannot be fed to ruminants.
Yes cows eat cows, and that's not bovine porno. You can grind up cow parts down to 'protien' and add this to cow feed. Take note that 'corn fed' cows don't grow as meaty as 'cow fed' cows, although your corporate cowmonger will refer to the 'high-protein diet'. Also, cow blood products are fed to calves as milk substitutes. You can draw off the plasma, dry it and add it to some kind of powdered milk mix that baby cows suck until the cows come home.
Note the word 'ruminant'. Legally, that means cows and sheep, but not horses or other mammals that are ground up for feed. So what often happens, if you stretch your imagination a bit, is that cows are ground up to feed pigs and those pigs are ground up to feed cows. So it's possible following the current rules that a bad cow with mad cow can still get to another cow even though the law says cows can't eat the known vector parts.
What was not made entirely clear but should be is that while we process 30 million head of cattle on an annual basis, we have only found 1 American mad cow in the past ten years we have been looking. Furthermore, when the Brits had upwards of 70,000 documented cases of BSE, less than 200 people died of the mutated human CJD in contradiction to severe predictions like this one.
I for one find it remarkable that within a week all the cow parts from one cow can be identified through the food chain. It means we are greatly capable, and that somebody somewhere has a hell of a database. Among those somebodies must be the CDC. I don't happen to have any death-by-freak-accident stats, but this matter is significantly less dangerous than the flu. So don't let the excitable folks get the best of you.
Posted by mbowen at December 30, 2003 09:02 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.visioncircle.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1274
Comments
You may well be right on the level of risk, but the figures I've seen say that 35,000,000 cows were slaughtered in the US last year, and of those 22,000 were tested for BSE. I don't claim to be a statistician, but my guess is that there are probably quite a few more BSE infected cows floating around out there than the one they found.
Posted by: Marc Ramsey at December 30, 2003 09:42 PM
I don't know, I think I may stick with Oprah till the USDA/Beef Industry comes clean. Really comes clean. It's naive to think that there's only one BSE cow in the entirety of the US. Hell, there is a great chance that one or more of the other cows from that one alleged Canadian herd may be infected.
If we follow the same rules/restrictions imposed on the Canadians by us after their first BSE case, America's beef industry will suffer severely in no time flat.
Posted by: ronn at December 30, 2003 10:45 PM
Consumer action will tell. We know where the loopholes are, it will probably take a bit less to close them than we think. Still, I can't see how it would take much to assure US consumers that USDA Prime is anything but.
Posted by: Cobb at December 30, 2003 11:53 PM