posted on December 30, 2003 05:11:15 PM new
Fenix, I'm not a vegetarian (no land animals), but headed that way.
You're all right... everyone should decide on their own and nobody should panic over this, BUT they key thing with my concern is asymptomatic cows. How many, that have shown no signs of the disease, been processed without anyone knowing about it? Don't you think it's a possibility that the meat industry will do anything to convince people their meat is fine, whether it is or not? They've already convinced the majority that all the crap they inject is just peachy for consumers, when in fact it's only peachy for their pocketbooks.
When you talk about deaths and sickness from meat, you're talking short term. I'm not. I'm talking about long term effects on your immune system and general health. All cancers can't be blamed on bad genes and pollution, etc., etc.
posted on December 30, 2003 06:06:34 PM newThey did locate it, it came from Canada... what a surprise...
Another thing we can thank the socailists up north for....
When the Mad Cow Disease was discovered in Canada earlier this year I believe they found that the cow originated in the US. It was never put into the food chain for human consumption but the one in WA State was.
First reports last week said the mad cow was 4 yrs old and then they changed it to 6 1/2 yrs a couple of days later? They also said it was missing its ear tag.
Cattle go back and forth across the border all the time and this has been a huge wake up call for both countries and for all consumers. I buy meat on both sides of the border and I didn't realize that "downer" cattle were used for our food.
One report said that it would cost approximately $30 CAN (about $23 US) to test each cow and that's a small cost to save this industry and reassure everyone that they are safe guarding the public.
posted on December 30, 2003 06:41:21 PM new
And Mrs. Oleary's Cow just burned San Francisco to the ground. One Cow. One Town. That's the way it should be.
posted on December 31, 2003 12:03:27 PM new
Can people really be silly enough not to learn from history that both companies and governments do not care anything at all for individual people?
They care about their own survival and ability to make money and the only way they will be motivated to do anything is if the outcry for not taking precations is so great it effects them in the pocketbook or for their literal survival.
It has been demonstrated over and over again that these organizations will act similar to a teenager who is unable to imagine their own mortality taking incredible risks with their own survival for very little return.
They back themselves into positions from which they can not retreat and persist in supporting those positions long after they look foolish to the most dim witted observors.
It costs a dairy farmer about $1500 a year to feed his cattle soy meal instead of ground up cows in a cannibalistic scheme that is revolting to anyone with a sense of what is natural.
Is $1500 really such a huge amount of money in the overall budget of a huge dairy farm to make the risk of his animals being given a fatal disease and passing it on to his customers worth the amount? It is foolishness.
posted on December 31, 2003 12:25:11 PM new
Hasn't said cannibalistic scene been banned for five years now?
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
posted on December 31, 2003 12:29:34 PM new
Yes, they banned feeding bovine materials in the feed in 1997. I know they did in the U.S., other countries? I have no idea, but I'm sure they must have also
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posted on December 31, 2003 01:18:31 PM new Mad Cow Alerts Began Years Ago
Enforcement of Feed Ban Was Assailed as Inadequate in 2000
Guy Gugliotta and Christopher Lee/ Washington Post December 27, 2003
For more than three years, consumer groups, members of Congress and scientists have warned of the inadequacy or insufficiency of government efforts to prevent the spread of mad cow disease into the United States.
The General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, in 2000 criticized poor enforcement by federal inspectors of a ban on certain types of cattle feed believed to cause the spread of the disease. Sixteen months later it issued a second report making similar criticisms.
This year the Senate passed legislation banning the slaughter of disabled "downer" cattle, only to have the provision eliminated in a joint Senate-House version of the measure. The 41/2-year-old Washington state dairy cow -- the country's first known case of mad cow disease -- was slaughtered Dec. 9 as a downer animal.
Also this year, neurologist Stanley B. Prusiner, who won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on prions, the cell proteins that cause mad cow disease, warned Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman that the frequency and methods of testing cattle were inadequate to prevent the disease's spread to the United States.
Lisa A. Ferguson, senior staff veterinarian at the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, defended the agency's testing program, saying statistical studies showed that it was best to focus on animals with obvious health problems.
"We are testing animals for surveillance for animal health reasons to try to identify if the disease is present in the U.S.," Ferguson said in an interview. "The best way to do that is to focus on where we are most likely to find the disease if it is here."
W. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinarian at the Agriculture Department, said yesterday that federal officials are "looking at any necessary modifications" to the feed ban and had already planned to nearly double -- from 20,526 cattle in 2003 to 38,000 in 2004 -- the number of animals to be tested before slaughter. DeHaven also said the USDA is "well on the road" to developing a system to trace cattle from the slaughterhouse back to their birth farms.
"I hope this is a wake-up call," said Nancy Donley, president of the consumer advocacy group Safe Tables Our Priority. "The government has to plan and enforce preventive measures to make sure that these problems don't recur."
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the brain malady known as mad cow disease, usually afflicts cattle that have eaten contaminated bone and protein meal made from the remains of other infected ruminants. Health authorities have linked a similar human disorder to the consumption of contaminated beef.
Although the Washington cow is thus far the only reported U.S. case, organizations and individuals for years have called for stronger measures to prevent the spread of the disease.
Chief among these criticisms is the Food and Drug Administration's enforcement of a 1997 ban against processing the remains of cows and other ruminants into feed that is, in turn, fed back to cows. This cannibalism is generally believed to the prime avenue for transmission of the disease.
Three years after the ban, the GAO in September 2000 found that 18 percent of the nation's rendering plants and feed mills were unaware that the ban existed. Twenty-eight percent of the firms that were making the prohibited feed failed to label it as unfit for ruminants, and 6 percent did not keep proper records of their customers' names and addresses.
The FDA did not contest the study, and it promised to improve performance. Sixteen months later, however, the GAO issued a second report concluding that the FDA "has not acted promptly" to enforce the ban, having sent only two warning letters between 1997 and April 2001. The GAO said some violators had not been reinspected for more than two years.
In recent days, the FDA has acknowledged that the early years of enforcement were flawed but said compliance has reached 99 percent. Several critics of the government's performance have noted that mad cow disease incubates for several years, and that the Washington animal was probably afflicted before rigorous inspections took hold.
George M. Gray, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health who conducted an analysis for the government showing that the risk of mad cow disease in the United States was low, said the feed ban is the crucial bulwark against the disease.
"It's the main thing that prevents the spread," Gray said yesterday. "Clearly, people were not following the rules, because this animal became infected during the period that the feed ban was in place. And that's a cause for concern. At the same time, I don't think there's any reason for widespread alarm about risks to human health or animal health."
Another longtime area of contention is the slaughter of downer animals. Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii) this year sponsored legislation to prohibit the practice, noting in a Nov. 5 floor speech that mad cow disease "routinely is not correctly distinguished from many other diseases and conditions that show similar symptoms."
Noting that Japan tests each of the 1.3 million beef cattle it slaughters every year, he urged U.S. officials "to address and reduce the real risks associated with BSE and similar diseases in the U.S. It is prudent for the United States to be proactive in preventing BSE and other animal diseases from entering our food chain."
Earlier this year Prusiner, the Nobel Prize winner, met with Veneman to warn that the department needed to increase vigilance, according to an associate. The meeting was first reported this week by the New York Times. Although the department has tested about 20,000 animals for each of the last two years and plans to test 38,000 in 2004, the number of animals tested before 2002 was only a few thousand per year.
Scott D. McKinlay, president of Prusiner's firm, InPro Biotechnology, said testing remains the best way to keep infected animals from the dinner table.
"Most health professionals understand bacteria and viruses," McKinlay said. "But prions are different. The disease doesn't spread by air or through microbes in water," he said, and many cases of mad cow disease develop "spontaneously" in an animal and have nothing to do with what it eats.
Spontaneous cases are good in a way, McKinlay noted, because a whole herd may not be infected because of its diet, but they are also bad, because more individual animals -- not just older cattle or the obviously sick -- may be infected: "Testing animals is the only fail-safe way to catch the disease."
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
Also, see [ulr=http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Mad-Cow-FDA-Enforcement27dec03.htm]FDA Blasted Over Past Enforcement of Feed Ban[/url]
posted on December 31, 2003 01:51:34 PM new
Not only is it effectivly voluntary and unenforced it has loop holes you can drive a truck through. You can grind up a cow and feed it to a pig and then grind up that pig and feed it to a cow. It completely ignores the nature of how prions are transmitted despite their saying they use the best science. It ignores the well known fact this crap transmites right across species barriors. Instead they use lawyer talk to define what can and can't be done instead of reality. That sort of legalistic crap kills you.
posted on December 31, 2003 01:52:48 PM new
There was a ban in 97, but did it address the BARNS FULL of feed already stored around the country? Lots of farms, heavily invested in that feed, probably continued to feed it.
___________________________________
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
-- P. J. ORourke (Holidays in hell, 1989)
posted on December 31, 2003 01:56:27 PM new
Another thing I'm wondering about that I haven't heard addressed. That sick Holstein was a DAIRY cow. Dairy cattle aren't sent to slaughter for meat normally, unless they're not productive for some reason. Then they're slaughtered, like that one, for processed meat, rather than cut beef....Is anyone investigating MILK from these animals? Presumably, when she was incubating this disease, she was still a productive milk cow.
___________________________________
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
-- P. J. ORourke (Holidays in hell, 1989)
posted on December 31, 2003 02:30:25 PM new
Good question profe. I wonder about the dairy products that came from that one.
It was in Eastern WA, so the dairy stuff would *probably* go to local stores over there. We have dairy farms on this side of the mountains in Western WA, so I don't think they would come here. Most likely local, not sure...
But, since this was a dairy cow, the milk butter cheese etc have been going out to the public for????? how long?? This whole thing doesn't sound very good
And, about the downer cows being banned, I have to agree with some of the ranchers. They call cows 'downer' when they are sick (like the one that had MCD) or when they have broken a leg.. when they break a leg, they are healthy, and it IS a waste of 8-900 lbs of meat if they do this total ban on these cows. dunno
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posted on December 31, 2003 02:51:36 PM new
WELL - they just announced on our news program that we can no longer carry fast food burgers across the border when we are going to and from Windsor and Detroit.
Typical political tactic to do something cheap and stupid instead of anything that would cost a campaign contributor money.
Yeah it has been the influx of McBurgers all along fueling this terror.
posted on December 31, 2003 10:02:10 PM newIt was in Eastern WA, so the dairy stuff would *probably* go to local stores over there. We have dairy farms on this side of the mountains in Western WA, so I don't think they would come here. Most likely local, not sure...
Maybe, Near, maybe not. In many states, dairymen belong to a statewide cooperative. Milk gets picked up in tank trucks at the farm, and from there goes to a central facility, where it's mixed with everyone else's product, pasteurized, homogenized, skimmed to consistent butter fat levels, and readied to be resold to the various large producers. Many large grocery concerns, ie; Safeway, have their own packing and production facilities for cream, yoghurt, cheese, etc, and buy their bulk milk from the co-ops. Milk from a Safeway in Albuquerque may contain a mixture of milks from several states...almost like beef. Smaller independent dairies also buy their bulk product from the same cooperatives....Scary.
___________________________________
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
-- P. J. ORourke (Holidays in hell, 1989)
posted on January 1, 2004 06:15:52 AM new
Since asymptomatic cows can have the disease for a number of years, all cows should be tested and the results should be known before meat and dairy products can be distributed. Testing only 20,000 cows out of 33 million per year slaughtered is insane.
posted on January 1, 2004 08:58:35 AM new
profe, I didn't know that. That is interesting
You know that is the one thing I really did want was a dairy cow? The 'head' farmer said no. He told me it would be way too much work. I think that was the only thing he was right about after I did learn all that is involved in dairy cows!
Helen, I will miss ground beef! No one round here likes that ground turkey or chicken.... well, actually no one has tried them, including me!
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Pretty scary stuff. But for folks who prefer to look on the bright side, there was this reassuring headline on the front page of the Seattle Times: "Mad-cow disease hits state; feds say beef 'absolutely safe.'" And the feds wouldn't lie to us, would they?
posted on January 1, 2004 10:39:13 AM new
Absolutely Helen! Can you imagine if they only tested 1 out of 1000 blood donations for AIDS? Would you be willing to take that risk with tainted blood? Fenix said I was irresponsible for saying meat products should be banned until all meat can be tested. I think it's the other way around - I think the meat industry is irresponsible for NOT doing this.
posted on January 1, 2004 11:04:29 AM new
I see the odds; pretty small.
They are also trying to track down 10,000 lbs of meat in connection with this "mad cow"
posted on January 1, 2004 11:17:59 AM newAre We Eating SICK COWS???
How stupid are you people? The government put in place a system to detect problems like this to help safegaurd our food supply. It appears to me that it is working. They found a problem and now are taking the steps to correct it. What if the system wasn't in place. We wouldn't even know about the trouble and people would be dying left and right. So far, I haven't heard of one single death related to this cow. I say, good job in finding this and taking the steps needed.
posted on January 1, 2004 11:18:54 AM new
The odds are small as far as we know based on an embarrassingly imcomplete investigation. That's the problem. Since only 20,000 cows were tested, how do you know that there is only one cow in the total group of over 30 million?
posted on January 1, 2004 11:31:39 AM new
The disease can go undetected for years, so how does ANYONE know they haven't come in contact with tainted meat? Can anyone help me to understand this part?
posted on January 1, 2004 11:48:38 AM new
Here, Linda from one of your favorite sources, The Wall Street Journal.
How's the mad cow story playing on the cover of the Wall Street Journal? Sounds pretty bad even there. Some quotes from the Friday, December 26, edition:
"The first U.S. case of mad-cow disease almost certainly was found by fluke.... The impact of one cow is so dramatic because she introduces a horrific and incurable disease to U.S. shores.... The appearance of one case of mad-cow disease in the U.S. almost certainly means that others will be discovered.... While the U.S. has been more aggressive at dealing with mad cow than most countries that have yet to discover it, it does far less than nations that have found the disease in their herds. Among other things, the U.S. has yet to require the testing of cattle before they are slaughtered or to even ban the consumption of material that harbors the disease, which is the brain and spinal cord. Such materials are often included in processed meats, including bologna, hot dogs, and sausages."
posted on January 1, 2004 12:49:15 PM new
Helen - I don't care who says what....that's not my point.
You're going hysterical, imo, by suggesting testing of every cow that is slaughtered in the US at a cost [per Kiara's source] of $23.00 per head. Maybe someone with a calculator that can do the numbers could take $23.00 and times it by the 36 million cows the US slaughtered last year. That's not counting the additional costs of storing all that beef somewhere for the few days it takes to complete the tests. We'd have to add that figure too to the total cost of testing. Plus the personnel to do so.
That's an unreasonable request, imo, when only 153 people WORLDWIDE have contracted this disease in the last 20+ years. And all but 10 of those were from the UK BEFORE we knew the cause of MCD.
Now we know. Now more safeguards have been put in place. Looks like we might need to find out if any violations of the 'feed' is occuring. If so...financial penalities for those doing so.
READ what the profe wrote....you're more likely to die from the handling of meat than you are from MCD.
posted on January 1, 2004 01:48:37 PM new
Linda, do you know for sure that there aren't other diseases that might stem from MCD? Do you know that the ones that died from this disease are the only ones that died from it? If it's related to scrapie and hoof & mouth, could it be possible this disease has been around for longer than people think? I hope you won't call me hysterical because I ask questions about possibilities, Linda.
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after I did learn all that is involved in dairy cows!
