Mad-cow scrutiny is scaled way back

[uppityperson]

Are they nuts? WHY? Thank you USDA for keeping us safe! :sarcasm:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003583249_madcow22m0.html

While Washington ranchers are raising a fuss over Canadian cattle and the danger of mad-cow disease, the region's only mad-cow testing lab is quietly preparing to close March 1.

The lab at Washington State University in Pullman opened after the nation's first mad-cow case spurred a flurry of new safeguards against the fatal, brain-wasting disease.But three years later, many of those measures are being dismantled. Others proposed after the infected dairy cow was discovered in Mabton, Yakima County, never materialized.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently scaled back mad-cow testing by more than 90 percent, leading to closure of the WSU lab and several others around the country. The agency has backed off plans for a mandatory animal-tracking system, which can help identify the source of an infection and other animals at risk, and now says the program will be voluntary.

Several of the unappetizing — and risky — practices that came to light in the wake of the initial mad-cow case are still allowed, including the use of cow blood as a food supplement for calves. And even the prohibition on slaughtering sickly cows, called downers, for human consumption has not been made permanent, though it is being enforced.

(clip)
Among those calling for tighter restrictions is the McDonald's Corp. The hamburger chain buys more beef than any other restaurant, the company pointed out in a letter commenting on the animal-feed proposal. Though McDonald's does everything it can to reduce the risk of mad-cow, "we feel that the force of federal regulation is important to ensure that the risk of exposure in the entire production system is as close to zero as possible," the letter says. "The exemptions in the current ban as well as in the newly proposed rule make this difficult, if not impossible."

[magellan]

1. Following the same predictable course it did in the UK

Tombstone mentality. It's covered up until a certain number of sick/dead incite enough people to scream about it.

[raccoon]

2. K&R. Let's get this one on greatest! nt

[raccoon]

3. Kick. We need one more vote, come on yall! nt

[raccoon]

4. "Though McDonald's does everything it can to reduce the risk of mad-cow,"

What does that mean? What can THEY do, even within their organization?

Ask their suppliers, "Umm...these cows weren't sick, were they?" :silly:

[Hekate]

15. McD's has a lot of clout with its suppliers bcs it's such a huge buyer

And consumers can have a lot of clout with McD's, particularly if they generate negative publicity. Several years ago I read that PETA worked out a deal with McD's regarding their egg suppliers. They buy 2 billion eggs a year, and that ain't chicken feed.

A later posting at the site http://www.peta.org/feat/paulmc/factsheet.html now disputes whether McDonalds made the agreed-upon changes, but you get the idea. McDonalds cares very much about its public image, and can be swayed.

McDonalds in turn may be able to sway the idiots in charge of our government, but who knows.

Hekate

http://www.peta.org/Living/at-fall2000/actup.html

Victory! McDonald's Gives Chickens a Break Today
PETA has announced a one-year moratorium on our
campaign against McDonald's following important steps taken
by the fast-food giant that will reduce the suffering of 5
million laying hens who produce eggs for McMuffins and
breakfast biscuits.

McDonald's announcement came after a heated 11-month international
PETA campaign and directly on the heels of our widely publicized plan to
distribute "Unhappy Meal" boxes filled with "bloodied" toy animals.

McDonald's has advised the producers of the nearly
2 billion eggs that it buys in the U.S. every year to
increase the size of chicken cages, phase out
debeaking and stop using forced-molting (starving
chickens in order to make them produce more eggs).

The decision is likely to cause a ripple effect within
the egg industry. "Essentially, McDonald's is
responding to social pressure," University of Georgia poultry science
professor Bruce Webster told the Wall Street Journal. "This is going to
place a moral imperative on other producers."

[w4rma]

18. So what? The suppliers are all prevented from testing their beef. (nt)

[Hekate]

23. My point is, McD's is a major corporation & if they choose to lean on the Bush admin...

...then BushCheney may listen to them. Gods know BushCheney won't listen to anybody else, but they do listen to their corporate cronies.

And McDonald's in turn will listen to consumers and advocate groups (like PETA) if they are sufficiently threatened with bad publicity.

So that's the route to change under the current regime. I'm not holding my breath, but stranger things have happened.

Hekate

[w4rma]

26. Interesting. (nt)

[raccoon]

31. Thanks, Hekate, for that info. nt

[kestrel91316]

5. They only had a PRETEND mad cow screening program anyway,

so scaling back is pretty irrelevant. They DO NOT want to know the true extent of the problem, so why test at all?

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=365745

BASE, the new form of BSE, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the amyloid depostion seen in Alzheimer's. Need I say more?

[stubtoe]

7. If you don't screen for it, you don't find it. If you don't find it,

you (USDA) don't have to report it. Voila, no BSE in the US. Once again the public health is being sacrificed for the sake of industry.

[kestrel91316]

19. Can't let a little matter like people's lives get in the way of the

Sacred Quarterly Profits(TM).

I thought these freaks were "pro-life". Things that make you go
"hmmmm".

[depakid]

11. I see an analogy with closing down FDA labs

in the face of increasing- and widespread incidents of food poisoning. This administration- and the people who support them, are dangerous.

I have no doubt whatsoever that we're going to see (if we haven;t already been seeing) a huge increase in BSE cases over the next decade. It'll be curious what the EPI curves will look like with the variants.

Personally, I won't touch beef- for a number of reasons, but ground beef in particular is a lottery that I doubt anyone ought to play.

[kestrel91316]

20. I haven't touched commercially ground meats in over a decade.

It started out with my concern about bacterial contaminants. Now it's more about BSE.

[raccoon]

32. I thought ground pork or ground turkey were safe? nt

[Bridget Burke]

35. There's no Mad Pig or Mad Turkey disease....

But any ground meat is an ideal culture for bacteria. So--cook thoroughly. Alton Brown grinds his own beef so he can have medium-rare burgers. Some higher-end burger places grind their own for the same reason.

The last ground beef I bought was from a decent store, ground that day. Still pink & fresh smelling out of the package. I made chili--so it was quite well done. But nausea followed.

Then, there's the cafeteria spaghetti with meat sauce that contained a tiny bone fragment, causing a tiny crack in a tooth. Commercial butchering/grinding can be a bit sloppy.

My inner carnivore thrives on the occasional medium rare steak. Any bacteria on the surface get burned up!

[kestrel91316]

37. If your only concern is BSE then, yes, they are safe. I also look

at the risk of bacterial food poisoning, such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli O157H7, and whatever new horrors they can come up with.

[MountainLaurel]

28. And the EPA libraries

People can't sue corporations for poisoning them if they don't know the poisons are there.

[mopinko]

6. usda stopped protect our meat supply a long time ago.

st ronnie was behind a move to defang usda. all meat packers used to have a usda inspector on site at all times. even those that were only secondary packers, ie- just cutting up already cleaned sides. now, the packers all have their own inspectors. they send cultures and samples to the usda, and they do nothing unless a bad culture is found.
if i thought this was the only thing that was handled this way, i would give up meat. sadly, the whole f'ing federal gov is like this now.

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. The Democrats need to jump on this.

If anything goes wrong, they'll be blamed because we've had enough red flags go up on this issue since Bush took office.

[anotherdrew]

9. these muthaf*ckers need to pay dearly for this

the government need to step in and FORCE these bastards under penalty of jail time

feeding cow to cow should be considered an attempted murder charge. and the FDA needs to be cleaned out to the last man, fire the whole fucking department and get new people in.

[Megahurtz]

10. Well, that's Another Way for

the ReThugliNazis to reduce the Population. :sarcasm:

[OnionPatch]

12. And they won't even allow ranchers to privately test!!

This is what blows my mind! You can have any deer you shoot while hunting tested for wasting disease (another prion disease similar to Mad Cow) and yet private ranchers cannot test their meat for the convenience and safety of their customers. That beef lobby must be very, very powerful. Meanwhile, my family eats only organic beef. The scary part is that I find so many people don't have a clue about this when they ask me why I won't eat hamburger. Then they go ahead and order that big burger anyway, as if I were just some overly-paranoid whacko. Too many people believe our government is actually protecting our food, when the reverse is actually what's happening. It's a disgrace and I hope our Dems will address this problem ASAP.

[nodehopper]

14. I am in the same situation

I will not eat beef. I won't even eat organic beef because of everything I am reading about the dismantling of the "organic" standard. I only eat beef when I am abroad. But people don't get it and don't care; if I try to explain, they say they don't want to hear about it and I am ruining their appetite. If it's someone I don't know well, they ask if I am vegetarian, and when I explain that I am not, I just won't eat beef, they get that "there, there, tinfoil crazy person" look.

It upsets me so much. I got my parents to only eat organic beef, if they must eat it at all, and I guess I reduce the amount of beef my boyfriend would eat otherwise, since I do most of the grocery shopping, and I will not buy it, but I can't control what he eats during the day at fast food places. And he just laughs off my concerns.

[uppityperson]

21. Yup, that does it for me. No more beef.

Why can't private ranchers test their own? I don't understand since that seems only a CYA thing. If you won't mandate testing, let people do it or suffer the possible liability. I don't understand but I sure got upset when I saw this. On a positive note, maybe now the USA could get a truly decent test going, if enough hell is raised.

[OnionPatch]

25. Check this out:

These stories were also in the news in separate articles, but Organic Consumers does a good job of putting this whole story together. You'll be :mad: when you read it. I know I was.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/testing031104.cfm

Edited to add this more recent article/update:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_2395.cfm

[doodadem]

22. Johne's Disease in Cattle

I've given out this info in several posts now.

We had to put our pet Brahma steer down last year because he had contracted Johne's (pronounced, "YOH-nees") Disease from our malicious, ignorant neighbor's trespassing cattle. Any knowledgeable vet in this area, Central Valley and lower Sierra Nevadas, will tell you it is rampant now in the dairy (which is HUGE here) and beef cattle here, but that people would be amazed to know how prevalent it is across the country.

Google it. Johne's has no vaccine, no cure, and it's always fatal. Like wasting disease in wild deer (which it is suspected is simply Johne's also), the animal gets thinner and thinner as the diarreah gets worse and worse. It's horrendous. Johne's is highly contagious, and can live in the ground for up to 5 years to infect other animals. It affects all ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats). Fortunately our little Pygmy goats have tested negative.

Here's the thing--like Mad Cow being linked to Alzheimer's, Johne's Disease is being linked to Crohn's Disease in humans. Anyone testing for it does so very quietly, and often just send the animals to market before or as soon as, they become symptomatic. Needless to say, I wouldn't touch beef with a 10 foot pole, but my husband still eats the occasional burger while out.

[TexasLawyer]

13. when corporations own the government

this is the kind of thing that happens.

[Hekate]

16. KnR. Hekate's sending this to her grown beef-eating children

again.

Hekate

[w4rma]

17. I am **NOT** eating beef until testing has been going on for at least 6 months. (nt)

[BadgerKid]

24. I smell an marketing venture

Beef will be marketed as "tested" or "prion-free" and sold at a higher cost.

[Bridget Burke]

36. Well, if the government would ALLOW testing....

That would be a fine way for ranchers to get better prices.

Japan used to buy beef from the USA, but stopped for fear of BSA. A US rancher wanted to test all his cattle to get back into this lucrative market, but the government stopped him.
www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/lawsuit060326.cfm

What happened to good old fashioned Capitalism?

[porkrind]

27. Business Plan: 1) don't look, so 2) won't find, so 3) will SELL!!!

As usual, it's all about $$$.

[goforit]

29. Yikes!!....It's all about the master plan... De-populate/or create an inept

society.

[Rainscents]

30. YUP!

Masters have plans and they want to eliminate us all!!!

[hatrack]

33. The same agency wants to allow China to sell us chicken

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to allow China, where 14 people have died of bird flu since 2003, to sell chicken to the United States. The agency is drafting a rule that would permit China to export cooked poultry to Americans, even though public health officials have been warning for several years about a potential avian influenza pandemic.

Food safety watchdog groups are alarmed, but U.S. poultry producers, who would be facing new competition, are generally keeping mum. Some believe that the proposed rule could be a bargaining chip to get the Chinese to drop a ban on U.S. beef imports that they imposed after a case of mad-cow disease in 2003.

The World Health Organization has said that chicken and other poultry are safe to eat when cooked at the proper temperatures. USDA spokesman Steven Cohen said that since the exported chicken would be cooked, there'd be no risk to public health.

"It does appear at this time there would be no objections" from USDA's Animal and Plant Health Services, he said.

EDIT

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/16665765.htm

[earth mom]

34. I'm so glad that my kid and I stopped eating beef awhile ago.

I don't trust the bastards in charge or who profit one iota! :grr: